Sen didn’t maintain his absolute isolation stance the rest of the way to Emperor’s Bay, but he also didn’t make a point of interacting with anyone. He focused mostly on speed, only occasionally slowing or stopping if something caught his attention. He did, however, make a point to stop and intervene the one time he ran across bandits. Unlike the last time he saw bandits, he didn’t give them a choice to leave. While almost all of the caravanners made it out with minimal injury, none of the bandits survived. Sen did let the caravan people talk him into staying for a meal as a way to thank him. It was simple enough fare, but Sen was slowly learning to appreciate the joys of not having to cook every meal for himself.

When Emperor’s Bay did finally come into sight, Sen had to stop and simply stare at it for a while. Tide’s Rest had seemed big to him, dwarfing Orchard’s Reach many times over. In comparison, Emperor’s Bay was a giant among children. The main city covered miles in every direction before the outer wall formed a hard break. Yet, the city didn’t end there. Nestled in a shallow valley, Sen could see smaller towns that spread out from the main city like roots breaking the surface of the earth at a distance from a tree. Most of the outer villages and communities looked like farming concerns, probably meant to supply the city itself. Sen struggled to imagine how so many people could all live in one place or why they would want to. Out in the bay itself, there were so many boats and ships that Sen knew it would be pointless to even try to count them.

Part of Sen wanted to simply avoid the main city, but it wasn’t practical. It was the first place he had visited where Master Feng had given him some useful information about where to go. Beyond that, Grandmother Lu’s shop was located in that sprawling mess, somewhere. Sen shook off his hesitance. As vast and incomprehensible as the city looked, he knew that this wasn’t even close to the largest city on the continent. It wasn’t even the largest city in the kingdom. The capital city was supposedly much larger than Emperor’s Bay, not that Sen had any intentions of visiting the capital. He suspected that there was nothing there for him to find except a lot of trouble. Seeing his extended visual inspection of the area for the stalling that it was, Sen got moving again. Sen chided himself for not asking Wu Meng Yao about any other sects in the city. Without that information, he couldn’t be sure if anyone would be waiting around for wandering cultivators near the gates the way people had been in Tide’s Rest. With that uncertainty in mind as he approached the city, he took the precaution he hadn’t thought was necessary in Tide’s Rest. He hid himself while still several miles out from the main wall.

He supposed that anyone who had been tracking him from inside the city would notice that he’d vanished. He doubted their observations were good enough to pick him out of the crowd of people he blended into as he approached the gate. He had expected some kind of trouble when he tried to enter the city, or at least a basic attempt to get a bribe from him. Auntie Caihong and Master Feng had told him that was fairly common practice at city gates. It seemed the guards at these gates were either more honorable or less ambitious than those kinds of guards. They stopped everyone and asked what business they had in the city. For farmers, merchants, and caravans, there was generally a quick inspection of their goods.

“Purpose of your visit?” asked the guard without even really looking at Sen.

“Shopping and running errands for my uncle,” replied Sen, figuring that it was close enough to true not to matter.

The guard’s eyes wandered over Sen for a moment, perhaps judging the quality of his clothes, before he nodded and gestured him through.

Sen paused for a moment and asked, “Can you tell me where to find the Pink Orchid district?”

The guard gave Sen a longer look then, which made Sen wonder if he’d made some kind of mistake. Then, the guard gave him a wink that Sen didn’t quite know how to interpret.

“Sure, kid,” said the guard, before giving him directions. “Enjoy your shopping.”

The guard chuckled quietly to himself as Sen passed through the gate and into the city. He was immediately glad that he’d asked for directions because the city was overwhelming to him. There were too many people packed into too little space. Smells that had lingered around Orchard’s Reach, trash, human waste, food, were overpowering in the city. Sen had to force his feet to keep moving for the first ten minutes he was in the city. He also caught no less than three street kids gently patting at his robes, looking for things to steal. If he hadn’t been a cultivator with heightened senses, he suspected he never would have even noticed. After the third time he grabbed a thin wrist, word must have gone out on whatever clandestine channels the thieves used that he was a bad target.

Not that it freed him entirely from unwanted attention. He caught a few rough-looking people eyeing him from alleyways and darkened alcoves. When he made very deliberate, very unfriendly eye contact with those people, they also found other things to be interested in. After the speed of his travel on the road, the pace of movement through the city felt agonizingly slow to Sen. Even so, he did make progress. He also discovered that once he got away from the main gate, the total foot traffic fell off to something a bit more reasonable. He wasn’t making great time, but he no longer felt like he was trapped in some slow-moving dream. Still, it was a relief to have more than a few inches of space between him and all of the other people. And there were so many people. Many of them wore the familiar robes that he was used to, but he also saw people wearing clothes that obviously came from far away and using languages he didn’t know. Sen made a mental note to start asking about what languages were used where across the continent. He didn’t think he possessed any great ability with language, but he suspected acquiring at least a basic working knowledge of the more common languages would prove a useful tool.

He was also surprised by all of the food. It seemed that there were people set up near every corner selling every type of food Sen could imagine, and some that were as alien to him as some of the clothes he’d seen. He almost stopped and got some kind of meat on a stick, before an old woman warned him off of eating from that particular stall.

“That isn’t pork,” the old woman said.

“What is it?”

“No one knows for sure, but I know pork when I taste it. That isn’t pork.”

Sen thanked the old woman and decided that he wouldn’t get any food at stalls until he found a local who could give him a bit of advice about where and, much more importantly, where not to eat. He really needed to find Grandmother Lu’s shop in the city. Sen suspected that she meant for the employees there to provide him with exactly that kind of basic guidance. Every time he turned around, it seemed, he grew to better understand and appreciate her focus on the practicalities. He wanted to feel a bit annoyed at Master Feng for not offering any advice about things like picking places to eat, but Sen couldn’t quite muster the feelings. It was entirely possible that Master Feng would visit a place like Emperor’s Bay for a week and never eat anything. He couldn’t really offer advice about activities he only participated in when other people reminded him.

When Sen passed into the Pink Orchid district, the wink the guard had given him started to make more sense. There wasn’t a huge change in anything obvious. The architecture remained more or less the same. There were still lots of people around. Yet, the change was there, subtle, almost beneath the senses. As Sen looked around, he could see that the number of young women and young men had risen dramatically. They also seemed to be making an effort to display themselves with fine silks, elaborate makeup, and complicated hairstyles. The suspicious part of Sen’s mind drew a conclusion or two about Master Feng’s intent in sending him here. Sen also felt a brief moment of panic. If the pattern held true, he could cause a riot in an area like this. Yet, as he looked around, he didn’t see the usual reaction to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t draw attention from the young people, but it wasn’t the stunned expression that he’d grown so weary of. Instead, he got looks of interest and appreciation.

Heaving a sigh of relief, he continued on his way. It soon became clear to Sen that while the guard’s direction to the district had been good, finding his way around in the district was beyond Sen. He finally stopped a young man and asked where to find a place called The Silver Crane. The young man looked disappointed when he heard where Sen was trying to go, but provided a succinct set of directions that put Sen in front of a building with what could be a bird painted in silver on it. Shrugging, Sen went in and found a young woman seated just inside the door. She eyed him curiously.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I’d like to speak with the manager, please,” said Sen, following Master Feng’s instructions.

The girl looked briefly concerned before her features smoothed out. “Is there a problem?”

Sen lifted an eyebrow. “Not that I’m aware of. I just have a message for them.”

A kind of invisible tension bled away from the young woman. “Of course. Wait here.”

The girl vanished for a minute or two before returning with an older woman who gave Sen a nearly identical look of curiosity as the one the young woman had given him. Sen looked back and forth between them before he realized that they were related, possibly mother and daughter. The older woman gave Sen a polite bow.

“I am the manager of this establishment. How may I assist the young master?”

Sen returned the bow and said, “I was instructed to tell you that Feng Ming sent me.”

Then, chaos erupted around Sen.