Despite almost daily practice with shadow walking, Sen had come to a frustrating conclusion. It was never going to get better. It still jarred his senses every time he made the transition. He’d initially assumed that exposure would reduce the effect and, in some ways, he supposed it had. Knowing it was coming let him recover faster. He could close his eyes in the instant before he crossed over. In the end, though, the place always felt wrong. It was too bright, too disorienting, and too alien. That sensation of wrongness was only amplified by the fact that shadows were inconsistent. Shadow walking from and to the same place was never the same experience twice.
The landscape around him changed based on everything from where the sun was in the sky to how much cloud cover there was. It was a slightly better inside of buildings where light sources were a little more stable, but even there nothing could be considered certain. The only truly firm rule was that the darkness of the shadow was proportional to how bright its shape was in that in-between realm. That was helpful during the day when there was a lot of contrast. At night, it was almost blinding. Granted, that provided some benefits since it meant he could exit almost anywhere, but it also made navigation difficult. Of course, since it was always pitch-black inside of solid objects, it made figuring out when he was through something like a wall fairly easy. It went from him seeing nothing but uniform brightness to seeing varying degrees of brightness.
Staying in that other place wasn’t pleasant, and he had to stop himself from huffing out a breath of relief when he stepped back into the familiar darkness of night. He peered around cautiously. Even hiding and wrapped in shadow, this was in many ways the time when he was most likely to face immediate failure. Despite what his spiritual sense had told him, there was no way to be absolutely sure he wasn’t going to be spotted by someone. It seemed that the distraction on the far side of the compound was still compelling most people’s attention. Sen was very aware of the guards on top of the wall. Fortunately, the nearest building was quite close. He didn’t see any light coming from the windows, which he took to mean that it was either empty at this hour or anyone inside was asleep. That was good enough.
Bracing himself mentally, he slipped back into the other realm. Making sense of the bizarre shapes in the brightness was always a challenge, but he could use that same uniform brightness to tell when he’d moved from outside the building to inside. Once he was confident that he was inside, he stepped out of a shadow and into what he could only assume was some kind of storage area. A quick investigation revealed that the room was used to store heavy sacks of rice. Sen supposed that there was probably a similar room somewhere at the academy as well. He cautiously opened the door and glanced out into a narrow hallway. Not seeing any evidence of other human beings, he stole into the hallway and investigated the other room. Most of them were also filled with dried foodstuffs. Well, everyone has to eat, thought Sen.
He summoned a vial from a storage ring. Cycling for earth, he hollowed out a spot in a wall and formed the first link in what would, eventually, become a massive formation. He put the vial into the hollow and sealed it. There was no sign that anything had been done to the wall, but there was only an eggshell-thick wafer of stone on either side of the wall. When the formation was eventually triggered, the vial and the wafer of stone would shatter, letting the poison fill the room and the hallway. Knowing how potent the poison was, he didn’t set a trap for every room. Virtually any exposure would prove lethal for qi-condensing and formation foundation cultivators. Their deaths would be harsh but fast.
The next three buildings he visited were similar residence buildings. He didn’t waste time debating with himself. The faster he got the work done, the sooner he could move on to the more dangerous members of the sect. The work did get more perilous the closer he got to dawn. There were more people stirring and moving around. Still, he managed to avoid any direct encounters. When it became obvious that the sect was starting to come to life for the day, he found a dusty little space that no one was using and set up an obscuring formation. He wanted to sleep. There was a constant level of stress that Sen simply hadn’t accounted for in all of this. It made him feel mentally drained. The constant need to hide and keep himself cloaked in shadow added to that mental strain. Even so, he didn’t feel even close to safe enough to sleep. The best he could manage was a semi-sleep state, but it did seem to take the worst edges off his mental fatigue.
Something else he hadn’t counted on was the bits and pieces of conversation that his cultivation-enhanced hearing brought to him. He learned prosaic secrets about the outer sect disciples. He heard about their infatuations, their successes, their failures, and their jealousies. He heard about which inner disciplines and core members were harsh taskmasters. He heard rumors about the elders, most of which he suspected were just rumors. They had the fanciful air of the kinds of stories Sen had heard about himself while traveling over the years. Successes that were too clean. Adventures that were too absurd. People who were, frankly, too perfect to be actual people.
He listened as they talked about how this person was a sword genius and that person was unparalleled in unarmed combat. He heard much less about things not related to martial skills. While the sect did, apparently, teach people about talismans and alchemy, they weren’t well-respected fields of study. He heard people openly scoffing about divination. While Sen had no skill for it, Jing had a diviner who had helped position the prince to assume the throne. At the very least, Sen thought actively disdaining such pursuits was short-sighted.
Still, the conversations painted a picture of life in the Twisted Blade Sect that was not so different from the life lived at Sen’s own sect. Almost any of the conversations he heard could have been lifted from the lips of people at the academy. Trade out a name or two and he wouldn’t have known the difference. It made what he was doing feel even crueler, but he refused to let that feeling take root inside of him. No matter how normal these sect members might seem, they would be the first line against his own people. They would be fodder but willing fodder hurled bodily against his sect’s defenses and people. He couldn’t let empathy or compassion blind him to that reality. If he did, he could very well find himself butchering these outer disciples at the walls of the academy.
Mercy given here wasn’t real mercy. It would be cowardice. Little more than a pitiful attempt to assuage his feelings of guilt for what he was doing. Worse, it would be pointless. Not killing them now was no guarantee that they would live later. If he did spare them, it wouldn’t magically prevent them from participating in the sect war. No, he had to do what he came here to do. He meant to win this war before it started. He meant to send a message to every sect in the kingdom about the price of targeting him, his people, and his academy. That price was death on a grand scale. More death than even sects could stomach. He had to make it so terrible that the message only ever needed to be sent once. Leaning his head back against the wall, he waited. Darkness would come soon enough.