Sen knew that using the liquid qi would make Heavens’ Rebuke more powerful, but he hadn’t fully appreciated how much more potent it would become. Add that in with the wrong balance between the lightning and killing intent, he’d expected a lot of destruction. What he saw, though, was so far beyond his expectations that he didn’t know quite how to process it. The building that he’d leapt from was simply gone. In fact, most of the buildings in the immediate vicinity were gone. The destruction between where he stood and the wall seemed worse, though. Sen had been pretty focused on that wall at the time. He wondered if that had influenced the way the technique had expressed itself. Beyond the immediate ring of destruction, most of the buildings were little more than hollowed-out ruins with collapsed walls and roofs. In places, a partial second floor remains where he could see a bed or cabinet exposed to the air.

What captured his attention, though, were all of the dead spirit beasts. When he hid, he sacrificed access to a lot of information about the world nearby. Then, when he’d finally made his leap, he’d been almost entirely focused on his qinggong technique and controlling Heavens’ Rebuke, however ineptly. There had seemingly been more spirit beasts nearby than he knew, based on the sheer scale of the carnage. Sen couldn’t even guess at the actual number. There were some mostly or partially intact bodies on the ground. Yet, for each of those, there were countless pieces of spirit animals. Then, there was the blood. It was simply everywhere Sen looked. It covered the ground, the debris, and what intact walls were nearby.

The smell of the area was almost enough to overwhelm even Sen’s usually strong stomach. What he didn’t see were the insects he would have expected to be covering the area. With so much decaying flesh and blood around, the air should have been blackened with all the flies. Sen considered the idea that the lingering remnants of destructive qi in the area might be keeping them away. He supposed it was possible there was something about the spirit animal corpses themselves that kept the insects at bay, but that seemed less likely. As Sen took it all in, he wondered if he should swear off using Heavens’ Rebuke ever again.

That kind of destruction was too unpredictable, too widespread. It was just too much in every sense. Killing a specific person or spirit beast was one thing. It was unavoidable really, as he’d finally come to accept. Cultivators killed each other, even if Sen thought the reasons were often stupid. That was just the harsh reality of things, at least at Sen’s cultivation stage. He couldn’t change the rules of cultivation society by himself. One day, if he made it to the nascent soul stage, maybe he could decide not to kill or at least keep it to a minimum. Yet, he wasn’t entirely convinced it was completely avoidable even then. Master Feng didn’t talk about needing to deal with challenges that often, but that could just be a matter of the elder cultivator not finding them particularly noteworthy.

The very thought of becoming a nascent soul stage cultivator made Sen look around again and shudder. If he unleashed an attack like that as a core cultivator, let alone a nascent soul stage cultivator, he couldn’t even imagine what kind of destruction it would create. As it stood, if Sen launched a poorly controlled Heavens’ Rebuke in a place where people still lived, dozens of people could die. Maybe more. He may have to accept killing other cultivators, but it was all too easy to lose sight of how those fights could spill over onto the mortal. As much as Sen struggled with finding the right path, he thought that not killing a bunch of mortals as a side effect of his fights with other cultivators or spirit beasts was a reasonable expectation for himself. Not that he could really prevent other cultivators from doing stupid, destructive things that might endanger mortals, but that was simply beyond what he could reasonably take responsibility for.

Shaking off those ruminations, Sen considered how to handle the mess in front of him. He had zero desire to go walking through all of that blood and viscera. Yet, he wasn’t keen to simply leave the cores behind for someone less squeamish. He found himself thinking that if Changpu had simply been willing to wait, Sen probably would have let the man just have whatever cores the sect cultivator was willing to harvest from the disgusting mess. Sen settled for extending his spiritual sense over the area and sending out a little wind qi over the area. Between the two, he was able to pick out a number of cores both obvious and hidden. As he prepared to retrieve them, he felt someone approaching from behind. He called his spear out of his ring and turned to face Wu Meng Yao. She didn’t have a weapon drawn, but she didn’t necessarily need one. A cultivator with even a little qi in their dantian was always armed.

Yet, she barely looked at him. Instead, her eyes wandered over the catastrophic destruction behind Sen. By turns, she looked ill, horrified, and afraid. When she did finally turn her attention back to Sen, she gave him a very respectful bow.

“I wanted to thank you for the pill you provided. It probably saved his life.”

Sen shrugged. “Like you said, politics. I don’t need your sect breathing down my neck for the rest of time.”

Wu Meng Yao looked like she wanted to protest but couldn’t seem to come up with anything to actually say about that. So, she moved on and gestured to everything behind Sen.

“Did you do that?”

“Yes.”

She didn’t move or speak for a long moment as she really took it all in. When her gaze shifted to Sen, she looked confused. “How?”

“Carelessly,” answered Sen, turning back to what he was doing.

With a beckoning gesture, his wind qi scooped up the loose cores that were easily accessible. For the rest, it plunged into flesh or through loose stone to seize the cores. The cores flew to Sen from every direction. Some of them shed dirt or dust as they flew, while others dripped blood. Taking a moment to add a water qi cycling technique, Sen doused the lot of them and let the wind qi dry them off. Then, he added them to the rest in his storage ring. He really needed to take Auntie Caihong’s advice and find some down-on-its-luck alchemy shop that would take some of those cores in trade for part ownership. Sen had been uncomfortable with the volume of cores he had in the ring before he just added all the new ones. He had a legitimate fortune in that ring and, now, someone else knew about it. Sen heard Wu Meng Yao take a breath before she spoke again.

“I meant, how could you, a foundation formation stage cultivator, have caused this kind of destruction?”

“I knew what you meant,” said Sen walking over to stand by her. “I just don’t mean to give you any more information about me than I already have.”

“What if I promised not to tell anyone?”

“Is that a promise you really think you can keep? Honestly?”

She hemmed and hawed for a few seconds before she said, “Probably not.”

“You know what the sad part is? I actually like you. I think you mean the things you say about acting honorably. That’s part of why I won’t tell you anything else. You know what happened here with the spirit beasts. That’s the information you need to take back. Anything else you take back, especially about me, will almost certainly be to my detriment. The less you know, the less guilt you’ll have to carry if your sect does something unfortunate.”

Wu Meng Yao studied Sen’s face for a while before she said something that had clearly been on her mind. “You didn’t have to do what you did to Changpu. It was cruel.”

Sen regarded the young woman in much the same way she had him. “Yes, it was cruel. No, I didn’t have to do that. I’d already won. But tell me, when you all go back and talk about this, what would the rest of your sect have thought if I just slapped him around and then let it go? Do you think they would have respected that? Feared that? Or do you think they would have thought I was weak?”

“I don’t know,” answered Wu Meng Yao.

“Neither do I,” said Sen. “And that’s my problem. I must project strength. Even if I hate what that calls for me to do. Even when I think it’s stupid, or cruel, or unnecessary. I don’t have a sect backing me up out here. It’s just me. Now look at Changpu. I expect that most of the time, back at your sect, he’s considered a good guy, right?”

“He is.”

“Yet, the second he thought I was even a little weak, he turned on me because I got something he wanted. I genuinely hope that more of the people in your sect are like you, but I expect that most of them are like Changpu. Those people won’t respect mercy, only strength. So, I did something irrevocable to Changpu. I did it within the bounds of your sect protocols. I can only hope that it sends the message that coming after me will be more costly and more troublesome than it’s worth.”

Sen started to walk away at that point, but a thought occurred to him. He turned back and lifted an eyebrow at Wu Meng Yao. “Where are your prisoners? I can’t imagine you just left them tied up somewhere.”

The sect cultivator made an inarticulate noise of anger at that point. Gathering her control, she looked at Sen.

“They’re dead.”

“Dead? Why are they-,” Sen paused then and shook his head. “No, that’s really none of my business.”

Wu Meng Yao waved it off. “It doesn’t matter if you know. After you left, Wang Chao wasn’t paying attention the way he should have been. They managed to free themselves.”

“So, they picked death out here over an execution back at your sect. Can’t say it’s necessarily what I would have done, but I understand it,” said Sen.

“I don’t,” snapped Wu Meng Yao.

“Sure, you do. They picked death on their own terms, instead of death on yours. Hells, it’s just about the most cultivator thing they could do. Everything in cultivation is about forging our own path in opposition to the path set forth by the heavens. So, they forged a path in opposition to the one set out by you.”

“I know,” sighed Wu Meng Yao.

Sen let his gaze linger on the sect girl for a moment before he dipped into a deep, respectful martial bow. “There may be cores and other useful materials left in the city. I’ve gathered what I mean to take, so the rest is yours. Perhaps you can win some favor with them in your sect. Travel safely, Wu Meng Yao. I hope I meet you again, one day, under less fraught circumstances.”

The young woman returned his bow. “Travel safely, whoever you really are. Perhaps, if fate wills it, we will meet again in a better time and place.”