Sen had been right about what to expect. As soon as he stopped speaking, questions started pelting him like hail. Of course, he couldn’t really understand any of the questions because the Soaring Skies sect members were talking over each other, each one getting louder as they tried to be the one who got their question answered first. After a while, they weren’t even really directing questions at Sen, just yelling at each other to be quiet. Sen let the noise wash over him without really paying attention to any of it. If they wanted to yell at each other, that was their business. Sen lifted an arm and draped it across his face. At that, the sect members fell silent.

“Well?” demanded Wu Meng Yao.

“Well, what?” asked Sen, not even bothering to move his arm.

“What happened here?”

Sen found it surprisingly difficult to keep a straight face when he said, “Rule one, Wu Meng Yao.”

“What?!” she all but shrieked at him. “You’re not going to explain any of this?”

“I wasn’t planning on it. As you can see, I’m very tired. And injured. Clearly in no shape to answer questions.”

The silence that followed that pronouncement was so profound that Sen actually moved his arm back out of the way so he could take a look around. Changpu looked like he wanted to throttle answers out of Sen and would enjoy doing it. Wang Chao had wandered away and was looking back and forth between Sen and the broken tree. Then, the young man’s eyes traced upwards toward the sky. Sen sighed. That one was quick. Wu Meng Yao looked thunderstruck, as though she just couldn’t comprehend the words that Sen had just spoken. Of them all, only Song Ling seemed to get the joke. She bit her lip and looked away.

Sen continued. “Wait until you see what’s down the road. When I won’t explain that, this will seem trivial.”

“What’s down the road?” asked Changpu.

Sen just shrugged. “See for yourselves.”

Much to Sen’s disappointment, they did not go see for themselves right away. Instead, they went back to asking him questions that he ignored. Realizing that they weren’t going to let him sleep if he just stayed in the crater, he pushed himself up. A lot of things still hurt. He checked inside himself. He was still almost out of the misty, environmental qi he depended on for most activities. It seemed his healing had snatched most of it away. He also discovered that the healing pill he’d taken earlier had also been used up. He considered taking another, but he recognized that for the pure laziness it was. He had a finite supply of the pills crafted by Auntie Caihong. He was keeping those for emergencies since he trusted her skills more than his own.

He wasn’t in an emergency anymore. Using up one of those pills when he could very well make an elixir for himself was foolish. Making an elixir was less expensive since he could actually replace the ingredients without going all the way to the mountain. Sen also had the feeling that showing off one of those pills in front of sect members might be a bad idea. He knew that resources like pills were limited in sects, and he didn’t want to tempt the sect members into foolish decisions while he was injured. So, as Sen ignored all of them, he built a small fire and got out his elixir pot. The sect members seemed excited when they saw the pot, and then confused as Sen started dropping in medicinal plants and alchemical agents. He did it by feel, judging what he needed by what he felt was still wrong with his body.

While Changpu and Song Ling lost interest pretty quickly, Wang Chao was watching every one of Sen’s movements with an intensity that Sen found off-putting. Wu Meng Yao was also studying him, but it was more of an academic interest. More information for her to report, thought Sen. Every time he saw that look on her face, the more certain he became that he must never, ever get anywhere near the Soaring Skies compound. As the elixir got closer to being done, all of the sect members became interested again. The elixir was soaking up qi from their surroundings with a little gentle guidance from Sen. When it was ready, Sen filtered the elixir through a cheesecloth into two small bottles. One he stored immediately after he stoppered it. He took a few minutes to clean up. Then, he picked the other bottle up.

Wang Chao hurried over. “Wait! Do you have any idea what something like that is worth?”

Sen poured the elixir down his throat to the horrified expressions of the sect members and said, “Yes. About an hour of my time.”

The elixir didn’t hit him as hard as the pills did. It had been custom-made for his exact current condition, while the pills had not. It also had a lot more qi in it, so it wasn’t pulling as hard on the finite store of qi in Sen’s dantian. Even if it was less powerful than Auntie Caihong’s pill in some respects, it still triggered an immediate improvement in Sen’s energy level. He could also feel some of the lesser injuries in his body starting to repair themselves. He just hurt less, which was a welcome relief. Looking around, Sen could see that his flippant response wasn’t going to be enough.

“What?” he said. “It’s basic alchemy. You can probably find every ingredient I used within two miles of this very spot.”

Sen privately admitted to himself that he might be slightly exaggerating the ease of getting some of those ingredients, but he stood by the general message.

“Basic alchemy,” said Wang Chao. “You consider that basic alchemy? Who in the hells are you?”

Sen ignored the question and started walking. “Come on, you may as well see the rest.”

The sect members fell in behind Sen with what he imagined were varying degrees of reluctance. Song Ling probably just shrugged and started walking. Wu Meng Yao almost certainly rolled her eyes or clenched her teeth before she started walking. Changpu likely spent five or ten seconds glaring at Sen’s back before he got moving. Based on the way Wang Chao had stared at him after he downed the elixir, Sen was willing to bet the man was still back where Sen had built his small fire for a good minute. He was probably just staring at the spot and imagining all kinds of missed opportunities. When the town wall came into view, though, the sect members drew to a collective halt. They gaped at the destruction Sen had wrought in the wall. In the cold light of day, even Sen was a bit unnerved by what he saw.

Yet, there was no taking it back after the fact. So, after letting the sect members stare and murmur among themselves for a few moments, Sen started walking again. When it had all been happening, Sen had been very focused on the moment. He hadn’t been taking long looks at his surroundings. So, even having been there, he simply wasn’t prepared for the scale of the damage. Sen spoke in short, clipped sentences about what he found and didn’t find when he first entered the town. Changpu gave him suspicious looks until the big cultivator finally went into some of the undamaged buildings and came back out looking a little unnerved. Even then, the sect cultivators looked like they only half-believed him.

When they came to the spot where everything had first turned violent, though, the sect cultivators only had eyes for what was left of the street. Even Sen was a little bit curious. It had all been covered in shadow the last time he’d been there. He was surprised to see the corpses of the spider spirit beast and a big lizard spirit beast lying in the street. For some reason, he’d thought the other spirit beasts would take their dead away. The street beneath those corpses was little more than rubble, where it wasn’t scorched to cinders by fire, or seared by lightning, or scored by wind blades, or melted by acid, or any of the other dozen or so visible things that had happened in that spot. Sen gave them a general overview of the conversation between him and Boulder’s Shadow. Then, the reveal of all of the other spirit beasts.

“How did you escape all of,” Wu Meng Yao gestured around at the destruction, “this?”

“I was very lucky, and a tiny bit clever. I used a technique to confuse them briefly.”

“What technique?” demanded Wang Chao.

“The effective kind,” said Sen before he whirled on Changpu.

The big cultivator was crouched over the spirit beast bodies, clearly preparing to harvest from them. Sen fixed his gaze on Wu Meng Yao as he unsheathed his jian.

“If you don’t stop him,” said Sen, “I will.”

“Changpu! Stop!” the de facto leader of the sect cultivators ordered.

The big man looked over at Wu Meng Yao. Then, he noticed Sen’s furious expression. The big cultivator got a truculent look on his face.

“What? No use wasting their cores.”

“Indeed. Feel free to harvest from all the ones that you killed,” said Sen.

The big man smirked at Sen. “I don’t think you’ve got enough left to stop a butterfly, let alone me.”

As Sen stepped toward Changpu, Wu Meng Yao called out after him. “Wait!”

“You had your chance,” said Sen.

Changpu’s confident expression faded when he realized that the supposedly injured wandering cultivator he’d just been mocking was done talking. Instead, the man was covering the distance between them at a frightening speed. Sen had spent almost all his time since leaving the mountain trying to strike a balance. He had been failing. Some of it was his own fault. He’d told himself that he’d been trying to avoid the necessity of killing, but that wasn’t really true. He’d done plenty of killing already. He’d been trying to avoid accepting full responsibility for that killing. That basic imbalance in his thinking had led him to wax and wane between extremes. He waited until someone pushed him far enough, then he justified it all. Yet, he could see, looking back, that he should have killed those bandits he encountered on the road with Bigan. Regardless of the threat they posed to him, they posed a threat to every mortal who passed that way. Leaving them alive had been dooming someone to the fate of being robbed or murdered or worse.

The fight with the spirit beasts had clarified that imbalance in his thinking for him. If he had taken his usual approach, he would have died. Instead, he had acted. There was no room in the world of cultivation for half-measures, which meant that he couldn’t continue on in that world as he had been. It would mean disaster. He didn’t have to descend into mindless butchery, but he couldn’t keep hiding from the facts of the Jianghu. Strength ruled. Sometimes that meant acting, violently, decisively, and sometimes that meant bending beneath the weight of things more powerful than oneself, lest one be broken beneath that weight. In the case of someone stealing from you, flagrantly, as a petty revenge, knowing full well that your strength outstripped their own, there could be only one response. Make them bend or break them utterly.