Sen woke up, which surprised him a little. Watching part of the town’s stone wall simply disintegrate into a rain of fast-moving projectiles had left him with the cold certainty that he was about to die. Yet, he hadn’t. Of course, not dying and being healthy were two wildly different things in Sen’s experience. He was not feeling especially healthy. He’d been hurt even before flinging himself over the town wall and releasing that monstrous version of Heavens’ Rebuke. Now, he felt like death might come calling at any minute. He had the suspicion that having Auntie Caihong’s healing pill in his system at the time might have been the thing that made the difference. It would have kept working on him even when he was unconscious.

Letting out a soft groan, he opened his eyes and immediately tried to scramble back from the looming figure of Boulder’s Shadow. Every part of him protested that attempt at movement as every variety of pain registered in his mind. When that haze of misery cleared a little, Sen finally processed the fact that Boulder’s Shadow wasn’t looming so much as leaning against the remains of a tree trunk. Sen squinted a little at the tree. It looked like something had knocked the top half of the tree off. He turned his head a little to look at the ground around him and things became a little clearer. He had knocked the top half of the tree off by crashing through it on his way to the ground. No wonder I hurt so much, he thought.

Sen wanted to get worked up about the fact that Boulder’s Shadow was standing there. Sen figured that the spirit beast had probably been waiting around for Sen to wake up. The more pressing issue was why the spirit beast was waiting for him. After a quick assessment of his condition, though, it became clear that getting worked up would accomplish nothing. Unless Sen planned to burn more liquid qi, he’d be performing exactly zero techniques. The spirit beast didn’t even look at Sen when he spoke.

“You live. I wondered if you would.”

“Well, if you came to finish the job, it won’t take much,” Sen wheezed around the stabbing pains in his chest.

“After I spent the night scaring off my wayward brethren? No. I keep my word, little human. You escaped the walls. You will be allowed to leave.”

Feeling at least vaguely more reassured that he wouldn’t die in the next few minutes, Sen fished another healing pill out of his storage ring. It was probably a little soon for another one, but his injuries were severe. He expected that his body had long since burned away whatever potency had remained in that first pill when he’d pulled his impersonation of an arrow in flight. It took some effort and a few sips of water to choke the pill down. It took a real mental effort for Sen not to gulp the water. His terrible thirst, which had been occupying a space somewhere in the back of his mind surged to the front, followed closely by hunger. His body was using up resources like mad to keep him alive, which meant he had to do his part and provide more resources. He just couldn’t be stupid about it.

Once the healing pill reached his stomach, Sen spent a few minutes taking deep breaths. He’d been slowly tuning out the various pains in his body, but the pill set off an entirely new wave of pains as it encouraged his body to repair itself. Sen did the only thing he could other than breathing. He focused on cycling. He’d all but scoured his dantian clean of the normal environmental qi he was used to using. So, if he was going to be stuck somewhere for a while, he might as well do what he could to start refilling it. If nothing else, Sen thought it would help the healing process along if he had some available qi. He wasn’t wrong. His body or the pill siphoned away the qi almost as fast as he could gather it into his dantian. Sen winced when he felt bones snapping back into place, but he didn’t stop. After a while, Sen opened his eyes again and found Boulder’s Shadow still standing nearby.

“Are you still guarding me?” Sen asked.

“No. Most of my kind have fled from this place, knowing it was a foolish venture. I fear it will mean disaster.”

“If you knew it was foolish, why do it?”

“We must all bow to powers greater than ourselves, or face destruction. A lesson you should perhaps take to heart, little human.”

“What do you mean?” Sen asked, pushing himself up into a sitting position.

“Defiance is sometimes the right path, even the only path, as it was for you yesterday. Defiance was the only possible path to survival. Defiance done out of habit, or simply for its own sake, is a fool’s path.”

Sen felt the stirring of vague guilt deep down inside of him. He also felt the tingling edges of something in the spirit beast’s words, but he was too exhausted to delve into any of it. Instead, Sen focused on the part that mattered most to him at that moment.

“Why are you still here?”

“I wish to know something from you. You recognized what I once was virtually on sight. How? Did someone speak to you of my kind?”

Sen thought very hard about how he should answer that question. Boulder’s Shadow had, seemingly, kept his word, but Sen knew nothing about the spirit beast beyond that. He also knew nothing of ghost panther society, if they even had one. Talking about Falling Leaf could put her in danger or at least put her into a bad situation. Plus, if Sen wanted to get specific about it, several people had spoken to him about ghost panthers. He could simply say yes without lying.

“Yes,” said Sen, but didn’t elaborate.

Sen could see in the spirit beast’s eyes that it knew he was keeping things back. “Who spoke to you about us?”

“Feng Ming and Kho Jaw-Long.”

The spirit beast recoiled at those two names before glaring down at Sen and sniffing at the air. “You speak the truth, but this makes no sense! You are a cub. What business did you have with those old monsters?”

That question, at least, Sen was willing to answer. “They trained me.”

Boulder’s Shadow stared at Sen for so long that the young cultivator wondered if the spirit beast planned to kill him.

“Truly then, I have doomed us all,” said the ghost panther before vanishing into the trees.

Sen thought that the spirit beast was overestimating the danger. Uncle Kho almost never left the mountain, and the only way Master Feng could find out was if Sen told him. Sen thought that it would probably be best to keep this particular adventure to himself for a while. Yes, he’d wait to tell the tale until they could all look back and laugh and laugh at how foolish he’d been to walk into the trap. Sen decided that a hundred years ought to be long enough, then amended it to two hundred years, just to be on the safe side. With that decision made, he tried to figure out what he should do next. Somewhere between thinking about putting up his tent or some formation flags and actually doing it, exhaustion overwhelmed him again. When consciousness came back again, he heard a familiar voice.

“Is he dead?” asked a far too-hopeful Changpu.

“Don’t be dense,” said Wang Chao. “I can see him breathing.”

“Look at this place,” said Song Ling with a bit of awe in her voice. “What happened here?”

“He was clearly in some kind of fight,” said Wu Meng Yao. “I just can’t imagine with who.”

A deep frustration bubbled up inside of Sen. He’d put in a fair amount of effort to get away from the Soaring Skies sect members only for circumstance to throw him right back in their midst. He felt like the universe was toying with him somehow, he just couldn’t understand to what end. Did the universe want Sen to destroy whatever relationships this group of people had with each other? That seemed like the most likely outcome to Sen if he kept spending time with them. Sen braced himself mentally for what he knew would come next.

“You four are really loud,” complained Sen. “You can’t even let a man take a quiet nap in his crater.”