For the next three days, Sen used his quingong technique almost non-stop, keeping it right at the edge of what his passive qi gathering could support. He stopped for nothing, often diverting into the forest to avoid contact with the people on the road or to skirt around the one village he saw. He took his time at night, setting up the most ironclad obscuring formations he could. In short, Sen wanted nothing to do with anyone. That desire for isolation was something new for Sen. Even when he’d been living on the streets, he hadn’t wanted isolation. It was just a necessity for personal safety. After years of daily interaction with Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong, he’d assumed his time of isolation was well and truly over. After that disaster with the spirit beasts, followed by the fight with Changpu, Sen wanted breathing room from others.

Some of it was simply to have time to sort out his own thoughts. It was difficult to maintain any kind of perspective in the moment. He wanted a little distance to decide if his new attitude about the Jianghu and other cultivators was rational or another overreaction. He was a little disappointed when he concluded that, barring some new information, his attitude probably was the rational approach. He worried that projecting strength all the time might invite challenges he didn’t want, but he was certain that simply letting things slide would provoke more challenges like Changpu’s. In a world where people worshipped strength more than anything else, it seemed unavoidable.

Yet, participating in constant personal tests of strength and skill was something that interested Sen very little. He might not be able to avoid it all the time, but he’d much rather spend his time pursuing those all too-infrequent moments of enlightenment. The trick, he supposed, was figuring out how to limit the one and increase the odds of the other. Unfortunately, his only guides to enlightenment were those occasional tugging feelings he got, and he wasn’t feeling very optimistic about those. Yes, they had inevitably led him to situations where he could learn things, and even to situations where enlightenment was a possibility, but they’d also led him straight into situations where violence was almost inevitable. He didn’t believe those things were inextricably linked. In fact, most of his moments of enlightenment had come in moments completely free of violence. Looking back on his recent experiences, he found he’d been happiest on the Luo farm. Although, he supposed it was easy to be happy when you spent most of your time helping people heal.

Unfortunately, he also knew that healing wasn’t his path, at least not as the thing he pursued all the time. It had been gratifying, and he was glad that his skills could help those people, but it had grated at him too. For all the good he might have done, he was only delaying the inevitable. Death loomed large over the mortals. They were simply too fragile, too easy to injure, and too prone to illness. He could help them, but he could never really save them from those frailties. If he tried to adopt that as a profession, he wouldn’t last. He could do it as a sideline, or intervene in an emergency, but it wasn’t a calling for him.

He also didn’t relish the idea of being a professional sellsword. Oh, Sen didn’t mind the idea of occasionally hiring himself out to protect a caravan or deal with an especially dangerous spirit beast. It was honest work. He was good enough with the jian and spear that he could likely keep himself employed that way full-time. Yet, it would become grating as well. Moving with caravans was boring and, he knew, would likely mean traveling between the same places constantly. Given his recent experiences, he wasn’t thrilled at the idea of revisiting the same places multiple times a year. No, moving on seemed like a better choice. As for dealing with rogue spirit beasts, he supposed that idea had some merit, but he would tire of the killing. In the end, he just wanted to see the world, to see the places that he’d heard about in the stories he’d heard on the mountain, and even to see places that his teachers hadn’t seen.

Wandering wasn’t a profession that would support him and none of the obvious options suited him. He didn’t wish to kill full-time, or heal full-time, or live in abject poverty full-time, so he’d need to carve out something new for himself. A sellsword healer, maybe, he mused. He couldn’t be the first to think of it, but he also hadn’t heard about anyone else doing it. He supposed it wasn’t a common combination of skills. Still, it would give him an excuse to move on whenever the feeling took him. There was always work for people with those skills, but the location of that work wasn’t consistent. And there was a kind of balance in it. If he couldn’t avoid the violence, he could at least add something beneficial to the world. The idea still felt incomplete to Sen, but it was at least a plan.

It was clear to him now that he’d been far too cavalier about setting out into the world. Worse, he knew that he wouldn’t have listened if others had warned him about it. No doubt that was why Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho hadn’t wasted their words. Grandmother Lu basically had warned him about it with all her talk about practicalities. It had been arrogance on his part. He’d just assumed that he understood how things worked. Why he’d thought that, Sen couldn’t imagine. Dumb luck had had more to do with his survival these last few months than anything else. Granted, he’d leveraged his skills and abilities as well as he could when one crisis or another arrived, but a little more thoughtfulness on his part could have made the road much smoother for him.

He’d lost sight of what he meant to do when he’d left the mountain, of what he meant to be. He could see, in hindsight, that he’d been too idealistic. Master Feng and Uncle Kho hadn’t sunk years of time into training him to fight for their own amusement. They had known combat was unavoidable and done their best to prepare him to survive those inevitable and, Sen sighed, likely frequent fights. He had to temper that desire to not be some reckless agent of chaos with his more realistic understanding of the demands of the Jianghu. His ideal had been one of pacifism, quietly moving from place to place, picking up enlightenment as he went. The world simply wasn’t going to accommodate that idea. He would have to fight. Some of those fights would come to him, regardless of his wishes, and the need to project strength would make it impossible to avoid others.

Yet, recent experience had shown him that he was all too capable of triggering fights with his poorly considered behaviors. Those fights were avoidable. It was on him to make sure he geared his behaviors and responses in a way that let him avoid them. It wasn’t the ideal he hoped for, and it meant more death in his life than he wanted. It was also more realistic. Short of locking himself away somewhere like a monk, he had to meet the world as he found it. That he found it exactly as full of the problems his teachers had warned him about was disappointing, but he couldn’t say it was unexpected. Some of those problems he would meet head-on, and some he would do his best to de-escalate. He expected that he would fail at the latter sometimes, but at least it would be a failure in the service of trying to live as the person that he wanted to be.

Steering clear of others wasn’t just a way for Sen to give himself time to get perspective. It also gave him time to finish healing. Despite what it may have looked like to the other Soaring Skies sect members, fighting with Changpu had been physically grueling for Sen. He’d kept it off his face, but his bones hadn’t been done healing, nor had his muscles or any other part of him. He’d set his own healing back a lot with that little display. As necessary as he still thought it had been, he’d paid a price for it. Avoiding others meant he could give his body the time it needed to put itself back together. It had taken several more elixirs to get the job mostly done. He’d considered making another, but there was a point at which even cultivators just had to let their bodies heal at their own pace. Whatever lingering pains or soreness he was experiencing, he was confident that he could defend himself if needed to do so.

As he left his body to its healing, Sen pulled out his map. He had meant to go to Emperor’s Bay originally, mostly because he knew Grandmother Lu had a shop there, but he was strongly reconsidering the decision. Unfortunately, roads were all too few across the continent. Sen could cut across the wilderness, but that was risky. Along roads and near settled areas, spirit beasts tended to be weaker. They were hunted there, so they only tended to grow to a certain level of strength. In the deep wilds, though, Sen knew there were truly powerful spirit beasts that were the equivalent in strength to core stage and nascent soul stage cultivators. He didn’t like his chances of surviving an encounter with spirit beasts like that. Maybe he could hide from them, but it seemed like a terrible risk for a questionable reward. No, he would stick with his original destination. He was fairly certain he had a healthy lead on the Soaring Skies members. If he kept his visit to the Emperor’s Bay short, he ought to be gone before that sect ever learned anything about him.