Unintended Cultivator

After a discussion about where it would be best to have the fight, should it come to a fight, Grandmother Lu decided that she’d rather it happened at the shop. When Sen asked her why, she shrugged and said it would put fewer people in danger. Nobody lived in the shop, while she had servants at the house. The argument came when Sen insisted that he stay at the shop, while Grandmother Lu returned to her home.

“Why in the world would I agree to something like that?”

“Two reasons. The first reason is that, if they send people to the house, you have a far better chance of protecting those people than they have of protecting themselves. I’m sure that Zhang Muchen and your other servants would put up a fight if they had to. Are any of them actually trained to fight? I mean trained like us.”

Grandmother Lu scowled. “No, they aren’t. I didn’t think it’d be necessary. More fool me.”

“The second reason is that if I have a better chance of defending myself if I’m here alone. If it’s just me, I don’t have to worry about accidentally injuring someone on my side. That means I can strike as hard as I need to with no second guessing.”

Grandmother Lu did not look happy about it, but Sen could tell that she was coming around on his way of thinking. While she’d gotten back much of her vitality, enough that she could wield those fans in a calm back room, it wasn’t the same thing as going up against other cultivators in a full-on fight. Of course, Sen didn’t know they’d send cultivators or how many there might be, but it seemed wise to assume that’s what would happen. He just hoped that Chen Aiguo was at the top of the pile of local cultivators. Again, Sen couldn’t know that was the case, but the man had been training the mayor’s son. That suggested that he was the best the mayor could find. As long as they didn’t send too many people at that level, Sen felt like he had a good chance of holding his own. Of course, there was the problem of keeping one or two of them alive. He needed to find out who sent them. Sen shrugged that thought away. That was definitely a problem for later.

He spent the rest of the day doing his best to stay out of the way. Although, he did take a little time out to eat the pineapple buns with that Bai girl. The buns were amazing. He decided that he’d need to get the recipe for Auntie Caihong. It was the exact kind of thing that she liked. When he mentioned something to Bai about needing to meet her mother so he could get the recipe, the girl had seemingly lost the ability to speak and ran off. Then, Grandmother Lu had glared at him. Sen just shrugged at her. It wasn’t like he knew what had sent the girl running.

When the day finally ran its course, Sen made a big show of being seen outside. All of the girls seemed to want to hang around and talk at him, but a combination of Grandmother Lu’s stern looks and the hour saw the girls safely off to their homes. Finally, Grandmother Lu announced that she needed to go home. Sen waved goodbye to her, then looked around the largely abandoned market. He assumed that someone was watching, so he wanted them to be absolutely sure he was still at the shop. Then, he stepped back inside, closed the door, and locked it. Sen was surprised by the change in how the shop felt. When there had been customers and all the employees inside, the shop radiated a strange kind of aliveness.

With just him left in the shop, it felt dead to Sen. It was as if someone had worked some terrible qi technique and ripped away the vital essence of the place. He wondered if all shops felt that way after they closed for the night. Part of him hoped that it wasn’t like that, mostly because it left him feeling a little depressed. It did, however, provide him a chance to set up a formation close to the exterior walls of the shop and activate it. It wouldn’t give him a lot of warning if or when someone broke in, but he didn’t really need a lot of warning. A few seconds for Sen was more than enough time to prepare himself.

With that precaution in place, Sen just wandered around the shop and looked at the things that Grandmother Lu sold every day. All of the goods were of excellent quality, confirming his initial assessment. Most of them were also of little use to him. In fact, they’d be of little use to anyone without a home. He did consider setting aside some of the fabrics to buy the next day. He wasn’t any kind of tailor, but Auntie Caihong had sat him down one afternoon and drilled the essentials of sewing into his head.

“You’re going to damage your clothes at some point,” she’d said. “You won’t always have the option of finding a shop to replace them. You need to know how to at least close a hole well enough that it can get you back to civilization.”

Eventually, the light grew dim enough that even close examination of the goods on the tables and shelves became pointless. Sen debated lighting a candle or a lantern but decided against it. Now that true dark was setting in over the town, he expected that things would happen sooner than later. He slipped into the back room where he’d spent much of the day, sat down on the floor, rested his jian across his knees, and began slowly extending his awareness through the walls of the shop. It wasn’t exactly like seeing or hearing. Master Feng had called it a spiritual sense, although the old cultivator wasn’t entirely sure why anyone called it that. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes the only answer Sen could get from his teachers was something along the lines of, that’s just how it is. The spiritual sense was one of those things.

What the sense provided him with was more like a limited map of the life and qi use in the area. He could feel where there was life nearby, which Sen considered a shoddy advantage at best. There was always life nearby. That meant that Sen had to filter out anything that wasn’t big enough to be a person to glean information from the sense. It took him a lot of mental effort to do that sifting, although Master Feng assured him that it was another of those skills that became easier over time. Sen might have written the whole thing off as useless if not for the qi awareness that came with it. While spirit beasts might actively use qi, most animals didn’t. So, if he sensed a life signature and qi use in the same place, the odds were good that he had a cultivator nearby. After nearly a quarter of an hour with nothing to show for his efforts, Sen took a different tack.

He put most of his attention into cultivating, and only devoted a small portion of his mental energy to keeping an eye on the surrounding area. He wasn’t anywhere near to back where he wanted to be in terms of his qi storage. The full day of passive cultivation had thickened up the misty presence of qi in his dantian at least. He found that he was glad that he’d switched over to active cultivation because it was another two hours before he finally sensed what he’d been looking for outside. There were five people moving in around the shop from the front and the back. Sen slowed his breathing and let himself fall into the calm, focused mindset that he had worked so hard to achieve with the jian. Once he achieved it, Sen stood and waited.

He had to give whoever was coming some credit. He never even heard them enter the front of the building. It was only when they tripped the alarm formation that he was certain. Still, he waited to act. He waited until he felt the formation trigger on the back of the building as well. Once he was certain that all five people were inside, he let a little air qi slip free and carry his voice to everyone in the building.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” he said, doing his best impersonation of Master Feng’s cold indifference when facing the sect members on the mountain. “If you run now, some of you might even survive.”

Every one of the living signatures in his awareness stopped moving. With all of them in relatively close proximity, he let his qi brush against theirs. Two early foundation formation stage cultivators and three qi condensing stage cultivators. It seemed that Chen Aiguo really had been at the top of the cultivator food chain in Orchard’s Reach. Armed with the information he needed, Sen reached out to one of his stronger affinities and blanketed the interior of the shop with impenetrable shadows. He could almost feel the other cultivators panic as they went completely blind in the already dark shop.

“Just give us the money, you bastard,” shouted one of the foundation formation cultivators. “That’s all we want.”

Sen found it a little ironic that he actually found moving through the shop in his qi-created shadows easier than doing it in the semi-darkness of natural light. With his shadows touching everything, he knew where everything was. That made it very easy for him to find one of the qi condensing cultivators. There was a little bubble around them where his shadows couldn’t reach. It felt like some kind of fire technique to Sen, not that it mattered. By the time they realized that he was close, his jian had already passed through their back and into their heart. Sen twisted the blade to ensure maximum damage. The only thing that left the shadows was his jian’s blade. With one person down, Sen engaged with them again.

“Tell me who sent you. Whoever tells me, I’ll let leave.”

“We’re not telling you anything. Now, give us the gold!” The same foundation formation cultivator yelled.

Sen wrote that one off as hopeless. He also decided that he needed to pick up the pace. The shadow technique was very effective, but he could feel it sapping his qi reserves at an alarming rate. The second qi condensing cultivator died as easily as the first. The third actually gave him a little trouble. Sen didn’t know if he made a noise or if the woman’s spiritual sense was a bit more finely tuned, but she was ready for him. He very nearly lost an ear to a slender, sharpened bolt of ice that shot past his head. That would have been bad enough, but she also yelled.

“He’s over here!”

Sighing, Sen stepped into the small area of control that the woman had managed to exert to escape the pure inky blackness of his shadows. The woman had a dagger in each hand. To her credit, she didn’t hesitate. To her misfortune, neither did Sen. Two quick flicks of his jian sent the daggers flying from her hands. Then he struck her across the side of the head. She went down in a limp heap. Reaching down, Sen seized the back of her robes and lifted the woman up off the ground. He moved so that he was directly in the path of the uncooperative foundation formation cultivator. He held the woman up in front of him like a literal human shield and jumped forward into the foundation formation cultivator’s sphere of influence. It was just a moment of hesitation, a brief instance of distraction from seeing the woman, but it was all the time Sen needed. He drove his jian up through the woman at an angle. It exploded through the woman’s chest and, using the other cultivator’s forward momentum against him, sank into the man’s throat. The man staggered back, trying to hold his damaged throat closed while he stared at Sen with confused, disbelieving eyes.

Sen jerked the jian from the woman’s body and let it drop to the floor. He didn’t need to be subtle anymore. He closed on the injured cultivator, batted away a hastily thrown punch, feinted with the jian, then kicked the man’s legs out from under him. The injured cultivator had barely hit the floor before Sen’s jian pinned him to it. With that, Sen let the shadow technique drop. The last cultivator had been trying to get to them, but she stopped cold when she saw the bodies. Sen could see her doing the math. They’d been in the shop for less than three minutes, and now she was the only one left.

“So,” said Sen, drawing his jian out of the corpse on the floor. “We should talk about who sent you.”