Book 7: Chapter 36: Meanwhile…

Book 7: Chapter 36: Meanwhile...

Ma Caihong had never bothered much with the little town at the bottom of the mountain. There had simply never been anything there to interest her. Plus, it was tedious to deal with mortals as a nascent soul cultivator. While she hadn’t been a great beauty in her youth, she had been fair enough to turn a few heads. The miracles of cultivation refined her modestly appealing appearance over the last several thousand years. Now, like most other nascent soul cultivators, she possessed an almost unearthly beauty that had a peculiar effect on the minds of many mortals. Simply walking among them was enough to start riots in some places. The people in Orchard’s Reach weren’t quite that bad, but they were close. Yet, since Sen had departed, she had found herself visiting that charming little shop owned by the woman who had helped him as a child. While she’d never admit it to Jaw-Long and most certainly wouldn’t admit it to Ming, she’d visited much more often than was necessary.

It was a disappointment on most visits. Sen did write, but it was sporadic. The delivery of scrolls and other missives was also notoriously unreliable, and that was taking into account the outrageous sums that she had learned Sen often paid to try to improve the odds that they arrived. At least the workers at the shop had stopped bursting into tears whenever they had to tell her that there were no parcels, letters, or scrolls for her. They seemed to have finally realized that she wasn’t going to strike them dead or burn the shop to the ground if they offered her bad news. She could be as petty as any other cultivator in the right circumstances, but there was a difference between being petty and being petty. Those mortal workers had literally no hand in how frequently or infrequently her wayward student chose to put brush to paper. She wasn’t going to punish them for something they couldn’t hope to control.

Yet, every once in a while, a letter did arrive. Most of them were frustratingly short and even more frustratingly short of details. They served more to say that he was still alive than impart any news. When he did mention some new minor miracle he had worked, there was never any of the salient information about how he had accomplished such a feat. If someone else were doing it, she’d think they were intentionally trying to make her angry. Yet, it was so quintessentially Sen to simply overlook the impossible as something that was, in terms he would use, kind of hard until he figured it out. When the improbable was an everyday occurrence, and the inexplicable rained down around you like the heavens were determined to make you a figure of myth, what was one more master-stroke of cultivation insight that would make you the darling of any sect? It was nothing, which was exactly how he treated it when those things happened. So, she was left to sigh, shake her head, and try to work on her own how he’d done something.

So infrequently it nearly qualified as a holiday, that young man would seemingly feel the pull of some kind of qausi-filial duty. He would write out long letters that provided detailed retellings of his recent, to him at any rate, adventures. It was with no small measure of excitement that she raced up the mountain with one such dispatch in hand, massive explosions of snow erupting in the wake of her footsteps. She had been greedy in her initial excitement and read through the beginning before making herself stop. Jaw-Long deserved to see it at the same time she did. She burst into the house and went directly to the library where she could sense her studious husband.

“Put that nonsense away,” she ordered, as she strode into the room.

Jaw-Long gave her that indulgent, loving smile that still made her heart beat a little faster.

“And why should I do that, dear heart?”

“Because I have a letter from Sen. A real letter,” she said, summoning the scroll from a storage ring.

She smirked as Jaw-Long carelessly thrust the book he’d been reading onto the nearest shelf.

“You have my complete attention.”

They stood together reading the letter. Sometimes, they shook their heads and laughed at some youthful folly. Other times, they shook their heads at just how much and how fast he’d grown into a frighteningly ruthless cultivator. A few times, they had to restrain one another from immediately setting out to use a rain of lightning or rivers of poison to explain to one fool or another exactly how not pleased they were with the way Sen had been treated. Not that such options were off the table. Far from it. They were just temporarily set aside for future consideration. There was a letter to finish reading if nothing else.

Then, they had gotten to the very end of the letter. Sen had explained in terse terms what had happened at the mortal village. She could almost feel his lingering fury over the events and the casual mistreatment of that child wafting up off the scroll from those characters. He went on to explain that he had taken the child in and reassured Jaw-Long that he was teaching her to read and write. Mostly, though, he just talked about the girl, Liu Ai. He described the things that made her smile or laugh. The kinds of foods she liked, and the things that made her scrunch up her face. When she saw that little girl’s inexpert, painstakingly written name signed at the bottom of the letter, Caihong felt like someone had reached out and seized her heart. She turned to give her husband a firm look.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

Mountain Stone looked like he had just taken a hard shot to the groin. Moon Behind Clouds went deathly white. Pines in Winter just swallowed hard before he rallied.

“Laughing River. It’s been some time. We all thought you were dead.”

“Well, I’m sure you hoped I was dead or at least gone for good,” said Laughing River in a cheerful tone before his voice lost any trace of kindness. “No. Such. Luck.”

“We did what we had to do,” said Moon Behind Clouds.

Laughing River gave her a look of infinite pity. “Are you under the false impression that this is a trial? Do you imagine defending yourself well enough will mean I spare you? This isn’t a trial, lover. You are all guilty. This, my boon companions, my dearest, most trusted old friends, is the execution.”

Mountain Stone surged to his feet. “You old fool. Do you really think you can take all three of us?”

Laughing River looked up at the towering fox and shook his head. “You always were stupid.”

All it took was a momentary effort and the illusion that he had kept them all trapped in for the last two hours vanished. Where there had been the common room of an inn filled with boisterous locals and buxom girls handing out drinks and food, there were now only two dozen hooded figures, blades in hand. While most people would have considered the armed figures the greatest threat in the room, the three foxes at the table with Laughing River stared at him in terrified awe. They were all masters of illusion in their own right. They had thought themselves beyond the reach of such trickery. In one act, Laughing River had shown them how laughably inconsequential their skills were in the face of his power. He slowly stood and regarded the three of them with cold eyes.

“I just came to say goodbye. It’s what you do when old friends are dying,” he said before he looked at one of the hooded figures. “Kill them.”

It was a fight, but not a very long one. One of the hooded figures came over to Laughing River when the grisly work was done.

“What now?” they asked.

“We’re going to the old stomping grounds of a recent acquaintance of mine. A place called Emperor’s Bay. We have some extended kin there who require a bit of reeducation.”