Lo Meifeng was frustrated. Orders had come down from the top, the very top, that some kid was supposed to be kept under quiet observation, assisted if absolutely necessary, and efforts made to spread the silly name that a bunch of rural fools had given to him. Honestly, thought Lo Meifeng, why would anyone want to be called something like Judgment’s Gale? Then again, her entire organization took orders from a man called Fate’s Razor, so maybe she didn’t really have room to judge. What she didn’t understand was why they were bothering with some kid that nobody knew existed until a few months before. It had seemed like a fool’s errand and beneath the finely honed skills that Lo Meifeng had spent centuries perfecting on her way to core formation. Yet, orders were orders, and only the very foolish ignored orders from men like Feng Ming. If it was her job to babysit some kid, she’d take it as an easy assignment meant to give her some time to rest and recuperate. Or so she had imagined when first handed the orders.

Thinking back on it after the fact, she wondered if her superiors knew what an unbelievable pain this assignment would turn out to be. Following the kid had been simple enough, at first. He’d gotten himself attached to a caravan and those moved slow at the best of times. Then, things had gotten strange. The damn kid had run off into the forest and thrown down with some spirit beast that was stronger than he was by at least two or three in-stage cultivation levels. She’d almost intervened then, but the kid pulled out a victory with some damn technique that she’d never seen before. She might have been more impressed if he hadn’t nearly killed himself in the process.

Then, things had gone back to normal. At least until they got to Tide’s Rest, where the kid had stood on the beach and stared at the ocean for hours. There’d been that odd confrontation with the sect girls, where she still wasn’t sure entirely what had happened. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he suppressed them with killing intent, but it just wasn’t possible for a foundation formation stage to be wandering around with a killing intent that strong. Then, things had gotten really weird. He’d had a standoff with some other sect flunky while throwing around multiple kinds of qi. Something else she thought she knew was all but impossible. Then, he’d vaporized that poor sect bastard before he just disappeared into the night like some kind of damn spirit.

Ever since then, she’d been desperately trying to find him. She’d wasted a lot of time in the north looking for him before finally heading south. She started catching hints of his presence there, but every time she thought she was close, she arrived to discover that he’d come and gone. He’d apparently saved some wagon driver on the road and earned himself a worshipper for life. The story struck her as patently bizarre. The wagon driver and his entire family were mortals. She couldn’t understand why the kid had bothered. After that, he’d spent some time in a small village. It seemed that he’d amused himself by dispensing alchemical miracles for a pittance, killing rapists, and anointing a local farm family into some kind of village royalty with the threat of his unending wrath for any who dared to harm them. The villagers there seemed to think he was some kind of saint. Still, orders were orders, so she made a point to drop the title of the man who had so dramatically altered their lives.

Now, there was this literal smoking ruin before her. She didn’t even need to wonder who had caused it. This had the kid’s fingerprints all over it. Lo Meifeng didn’t know how he was connected, but an empty town filled with burned-out buildings and what looked like an absurd number of dead spirit beasts, how could he not be connected? She wandered through the town, piecing together some of what had happened and feeling the blood in her veins run colder and colder. If things had been half as bad as it looked like they had been, this was exactly the kind of thing that she was supposed to intervene in. After a while, she found a group of sect kids pillaging spirit beast parts. Well, two of them were pillaging. One of them was sleeping off to one side with fresh bandages on the stump of an arm. Had they fought here as well, she wondered. It might help explain the sheer scope of the damage. She announced her presence with a pulse of her qi.

All three of them stumbled over to her as fast as their legs would carry them. She might not be in their sect, but they weren’t nearly far enough along in their cultivation to ignore anyone in the core cultivation stage. Some pointed questions got a very disjointed story out of the three. They had met her wayward charge. They didn’t spell it out, but there had been some interpersonal issues of some kind centered on the pretty girl who was very clearly not saying a lot. When it came to what had happened in the town, they didn’t really have a complete story. All that they did know was that her charge had come here, found the place empty of human life, filled with spirit beasts, and that he had fought them. Lo Meifeng took another long look at the destruction around her. He did all of this by himself?

He’d also apparently taken the big sect cultivator’s arm as an object lesson about stealing. Lo Meifeng didn’t know what to make of that. It seemed out of character for him. He had killed that rapist, but even that had come after the man had assaulted the farm girl. Or after the man tried to assault her at least. Lo Meifeng personally thought that the kid was a bit too forgiving and compassionate. Taking the arm was icy cold and calculated. The kind of thing designed to give people pause. Maybe he’s just growing up, thought Lo Meifeng. She’d have to ask him when she finally found him. It was clear that trailing him wasn’t going to work. She’d have to be more proactive.

“You’d have to talk to Wu Meng Yao to get the rest of the story. She talked to him last,” said the pretty girl.

“Where is she?” asked Lo Meifeng.

“She went ahead to report to the sect about the spirit beasts.”

And about the kid, thought Lo Meifeng with a grimace she didn’t let reach her features.

While she wasn’t satisfied that she had anything even close to the whole story, she was satisfied that she had enough of a picture to move on. She remembered her days as a foundation formation stage cultivator, and they had not looked anything like what this kid was going through. She couldn’t even begin to calculate the odds of any cultivator just wandering into a town where the entire population had been inexplicably massacred by spirit beasts. Then for him to single-handedly rain down enough destruction to send them packing, it defied explanation. Whatever details she was missing, she couldn’t waste any more time in the empty town. She needed to catch up with the kid or at least catch up with the other sect girl before she made her report. When it became obvious that she meant to leave, the big sect kid with the missing arm piped up.

“Who is he? What’s his name?”

Wishing that literally anyone else had been given this shit assignment, she faced the three sect cultivators. All of them had expressions that were equal parts wary and desperate to know. Lo Meifeng thought about just saying that she didn’t know. The sect kids wouldn’t know any differently. No one would know, a traitorous voice in her heart whispered. As much as she wanted to listen to that voice, she ignored it.

“They call him Judgment’s Gale,” said Lo Meifeng through mostly unclenched teeth.

As she all but flew out of the town using her qinggong technique, she desperately wondered how she was going to report all of this in a way that wouldn’t get her killed.