In the end, Lifen’s mother took Sen’s advice. What customers were still at the Silver Crane were sent home. The employees who had somewhere else to go went there. The guards fetched water by the barrel and, later, Sen remembered to ask them to find some buckets. One of the more enterprising guards took it upon herself to acquire a cartload of sandbags. Sen took a moment to praise that woman and dropped a silver tael in her hand. That was the kind of helpful thinking that Sen wanted to encourage before a crisis. Sen spent his time setting up the most complex formation he’d ever attempted. Most formations were more passive than active by nature. They redirected things, like energy or attention, rather than creating something. Sen wanted this formation to create something.

He wanted a barrier that would block physical and qi attacks from getting into the building. He couldn’t make something like that permanent because the energy costs were so high. He didn’t even try to fuel it with environmental qi. It took concentrated qi sources for that kind of formation. Fortunately, Sen had an absurd number of beast cores sitting in his storage ring. He sorted through and picked out a number of the more common qi attribute cores. There was a bit of guesswork involved, but he thought that he could make the barrier last through the night with the cores he had on hand. At least, he could if the barrier didn’t come under sustained, direct assault too many times. Of course, that also assumed no high-level core formation stage cultivators showed up. If that happened, all bets were off and Sen was going to have to fall back onto plans b and c, neither of which he liked.

Eventually, Sen found himself leaning against a window frame, brooding out at the street. He despised waiting around for someone else to start a fight that may never even come. Yet, his intuition told him that the fight would come, one way or another. The goal was to make sure as few mortals got caught up in the mess as possible. That meant the people inside the Silver Crane, but it also meant the other mortals in the surrounding area. Sen couldn’t go detonating a malformed Heavens’ Rebuke here. Everything he did would have to stay under the tightest possible control. Unfortunately, he could only control what he did. If other cultivators started tossing off wild techniques, there was very little he could do about it. There were limits to his abilities, and shutting down all of the techniques that four or five or six other cultivators were throwing around was beyond him.

It wasn’t even necessarily the raw power required, but the limits of his concentration and the number of parallel qi patterns he could cycle at one time. He thought that three was probably the hard cap if he wanted to do anything meaningful with a given kind of qi. It was definitely the limit for his concentration. For a while, he’d thought it was a matter of practice, but experimentation had shown him otherwise. In the end, the human mind or, minimally, his mind just couldn’t sustain more than those three. He thought that he might be able to do four, but only if he was willing to devote every last speck of his attention to it. It could make an interesting thing to test one day, but it wasn’t useful in situations where he needed to act.

“You’re worried about what’s going to happen,” said Lifen.

“I am,” admitted Sen. “A situation like this was exactly the kind of thing I hoped to avoid.”

“It also seems like something you were going to face at some point, no matter what.”

Sen snorted. “Why is that?”

“You aren’t willing enough to bend the knee to any sect.”

“I was willing to bend the knee.”

“Not really. You were willing to extend a certain level of respect, but they always want blind obedience. You’re never going to give that to them. So, eventually, you were going to end up in a situation like this.”

“Yeah, that’s probably true. It doesn’t mean you need to be in it. You really should just go take a room somewhere under some other name.”

Sen had tried to talk Lifen and her mother into leaving, several times, but neither would hear a word of it. He didn’t really expect a final plea to work, but he didn’t think he could live with himself if he didn’t at least try. Lifen was shaking her head before he even finished the statement.

“No. I will leave this place if and when I decide to leave this place. I will not be driven from it by others,” she said before she looked out the window at the slowly darkening street. “Do you think they’ll really come?”

Sen nodded. “I do. It’s the wrong move on their part, but I think they’ll do it anyway.”

“Honor,” said Lifen with a sigh.

“Pride,” corrected Sen. “They might call it honor, but it’s really just pride. I’ve stung that pride a couple of times now. If they’re like most people, they won’t be able to look past it. They’ll feel like they need to punish me for it. If they can’t get at me, they’ll settle for anyone close to me that they can find. I already sent word to Grandmother Lu’s to shut down early, and to make sure everyone scatters for the night. I don’t think they can connect me to the place, but it’s not worth taking the chance.”

“Is that why you’re here? Because they can connect you to this place?”

“Yeah. They saw you. They know you, which means they know about the Silver Crane. It’s too easy, too tempting of a target.”

“When do think they’ll come?” asked Lifen.

“After dark. Probably around midnight.”

“Where will you be then?”

Sen gave Lifen a smile that made her blood run just a little colder.

“Me? I’ll be in the dark, waiting for them.”

***

Sen wasn’t sure if he’d underestimated their anger or overestimated their patience, but the first sect members turned up a good hour before he expected them. Fortunately, Sen was cautious. He’d been outside, cloaked in shadows, and hiding since nearly an hour before that. He gave them the opportunity to demonstrate their intent before he acted. They’d walked right up to the brothel and tried to kick the door in. Well, he thought, intent doesn’t get much clearer than that. When it became obvious that they weren’t going to be able to force the door open, the apparent leader snarled at the others.

“Find a way in. Then, we’ll teach these fools a lesson about crossing the Soaring Skies sect.”

Sen had been expecting it, but he was still disappointed. He’d wanted Wu Meng Yao to be right about her sect. It would have been one thing if they’d shown up and demanded that Sen be turned over to them. He wouldn’t have gone with them, but he would have dragged the fight to somewhere else, content in the knowledge that the people in the Silver Crane would go unharmed. Even with his senses limited, though, he could tell these were all qi-condensing cultivators. He had to wonder if these people had come on orders from the elders, or on orders from someone a lot farther down the sect food chain. He supposed it didn’t make a difference at this point, not for these cultivators. They were already dead. Sen just needed to make it a formality.

For once, it seemed the heavens were cutting Sen a break because there was nearly total cloud cover. With no moon or stars overhead, there was so much darkness to work with that four of the sect cultivators died without even realizing he was there. He didn’t drag it out or try to punish them. It was nothing but a hand over their mouths and a quick thrust with the jian to stop their hearts. The fifth sect cultivator seemed more prepared. She had a spear out and was watching the darkness around her with careful eyes. Sen summoned his own spear and let the shadows slip away from him. Her eyes went wide, and he could feel her less developed spiritual sense trying to find what her eyes told her was in front of her.

“Who are you?” she asked.

Sen shook his head. “You shouldn’t have come here. Slaughtering mortals? Petty revenge? Is that what you joined a sect to do?”

The woman looked away. “I took an oath.”

“I’m sure you did,” said Sen.

He’d mostly been killing time, waiting for the last sect member to finish trying to sneak up on him. When Sen judged that they were about the right distance away, he spun and sent his own spear on an arc that very nearly cut the sneaking cultivator in half. Sen wasn’t without pity, so he ended the man’s suffering before turning his gaze back to the woman he’d been speaking to. He could see her trembling in shock or fear from where he stood.

“Go back and tell whoever sent you that this is a fool’s errand. If they send more, I will spare none,” said Sen and pointed down the street with the still-dripping spear. “Go.”

The woman seemed more than happy to seize the opportunity to leave and took off at a sprint. Sen wanted to think it would end there, but he didn’t. It had gone too far. He needed to jar the senses of the next batch they sent. After considering for a moment, he decided to do exactly what he had told Lifen’s mother he would do. He made a pile out of the corpses in the street right in front of the brothel. There was no dignity or honor in it. They were just tossed there like trash. It would incense some, which would make them easier to fight. Angry people did stupid things. It would frighten the rest. Scared people hesitated, and hesitation meant death in combat. Using his qinggong technique, Sen bounced back and forth between buildings until he could take up station on a nearby rooftop. As much as he hated the futility of what he expected to come, there was no escaping it. All that was left to him was to survive it. So, he waited, and cultivated, and steeled his mind.