Sua Xing Xing did her best to stay composed as she left the Patriarch’s office. It was a struggle. Her hands were shaking and her heart refused to stop pounding. A year. She had stayed here for a year, more than a year, and grown increasingly despondent. It hadn’t all been terrible. She hadn’t been abused by anyone. No one had asked her to do anything she found remotely objectionable. She had even been allowed to join the sect when Lu Sen had finally given up on the fantasy that he could start anything but a sect. In truth, it had been exciting in a lot of ways. Her former sect was old, established, and set in its ways, as was the case for most sects. That made watching a sect get built from the literal ground up very educational.
Lu Sen had, oh so grudgingly, accepted people from other sects, and those new members had often tried to import their prior sect’s thinking about rank and privilege. Those attempts had been crushed ruthlessly. The assumption that cultivators with more advanced cultivation could simply order around those with lower cultivation was always the first casualty. The Patriarch made sure that those who served as teachers in the sect knew that it wasn’t to be tolerated. They generally did a good job of making that point to the new members, sometimes with painful corrections to behavior. When they failed, there was always the Cold Blade.
While her cultivation was higher than his, Sua Xing Xing shivered whenever she saw that man. He frightened her. Not that he was the only one. The Patriarch frightened her too, but that was different. Her fear of the patriarch was more objective. The man’s power simply dwarfed her own. There would never be a conflict between them because such a conflict between them would be utterly, hilariously pointless. He would crush her, probably while carrying on a conversation with someone and making some kind of shadow toy for his daughter. It was rational to hold a healthy fear of anyone who eclipsed you so thoroughly.
Her fear of Long Jia Wei was not rational. It was primal. All cultivators killed. It was inevitable and unavoidable. The timing was always in question, but the eventuality was as certain as sunrise. It would always come. She had killed, more than once, and it seemed very likely she would do so again in the not-too-distant future if the Patriarch was correct about the coming war. Still, she didn’t think of herself as a killer. She did it out of necessity, not preference. Long Jia Wei was a man who killed because that was what he was good at, and it didn’t bother him to do so. He was a killer if an extraordinarily disciplined one. When other means failed to get the point across that certain expectations were to be met for anyone who wished to remain in the sect, the Cold Blade went to have a conversation with those wayward students.
She had seen the end result of those conversations. She knew enough about inflicting pain and causing harm to know that he maximized pain while avoiding anything that would leave lasting harm. It was something she had realized required a particular kind of deftness, a natural if brutal subtlety. She didn’t possess it. If she had tried to do the things he had done, she would have killed someone or crippled them permanently. Of course, all of that skill only served to tell her that if he wanted someone dead, it would be simplicity itself for him to make it happen. The difference in their cultivation level would only matter if she saw him coming. She sincerely doubted that she would. That kind of skill paired with that kind of comfort with killing made him feel alien to her, which only fueled her irrational fear.
The only bright spot was that Long Jia Wei seemed utterly devoted to Lu Sen. It wasn’t blind fanaticism. She was almost certain about that. The man was too calm and too focused for something like that. Those kinds of fanatics were erratic as a rule. No, he had simply decided to throw his lot in with Lu Sen for better or for worse. Despite the way he unsettled her, she supposed every sect needed men like that. Her old sect no doubt had them. She simply hadn’t encountered them. The sect had been big enough that those individuals were likely identified early and tucked away both for specific training and to keep their identities shrouded. Her new sect was still small enough and new enough that she eventually encountered everyone. Still, she reasoned that as long as she didn’t do anything to cross the Patriarch, she should remain forever safe from Long Jia Wei’s specialized attention.
Then, there had been that revelation about the coming war. That had hurt her more than she expected. He’d very intentionally kept that information from her out of pure, unadulterated mistrust. It was only then that she’d grasped the full magnitude of her failure to win him over. There was an inner circle in the sect, and she most definitively was not part of it. To be fair, though, she wasn’t sure who was in it. He seemed to treat everyone in the sect with an almost native lack of faith. Except for that Bahn Huizhong elder who had shown up from out of nowhere. There had been a brief period of suspicion on Lu Sen’s part, but it had faded annoyingly fast. Now, it seemed like the two were always together. She’d seen them laughing together over something and was honest enough with herself to acknowledge that she’d been hideously jealous. Something that could easily become hate for Bahn Huizhong had been born in her heart at that moment.
She looked up and froze. It’s him, she thought. The seemingly innocuous old man who spent his time playing with Lu Sen’s daughter, a man who could end her life in a blink, was looking at her with an amused expression. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. It felt like her heart was going to explode. The nascent soul cultivator gave her a grandfatherly smile and held something out.
“Want one? Sen makes these wonderful pastries.”
She looked down and there was, indeed, a pastry in the man’s hand. Not sure what else to do, she grabbed it. He looked at her expectantly until she took a bite. She blinked in surprise. It was quite delicious. Had the Patriarch really made pastries? The whole situation felt surreal to her, which probably explained why she just let the man pluck the scroll out of her hand. He opened it, read it, and then nodded in apparent satisfaction.
“Ha! I knew he’d come to his senses. His brain works just fine when he lets it,” said Fate’s Razor, handing her back the scroll.
Then, he patted her on the head in a decidedly paternal way, put another pastry in her hand, and walked away whistling a little tune.
She stared at the pastry for a long time before she whispered, “What in the thousand hells just happened?”