As the night slowly slipped away toward morning, Sen sat on the steps and cultivated. He couldn’t know for sure, but he had an intuition that the next fight, if it came, would not be so easy. It may even well be one he couldn’t win. Shen Mingxia knelt to one side, always in the periphery of his Sen’s senses. Unwilling to forsake her vow to the sect, and unable to confront him directly, she hovered there in a kind of moral limbo. He supposed that the night’s events would ultimately free her from those constraints, one way or the other. The wise thing for her to do would be to leave, no, to flee from the city as fast as her legs could carry her. If Sen ultimately prevailed in this conflict, she would still owe him a debt, still be forever compromised in the eyes of the sect. There was every possibility that they would cast her out.

If he lost, Sen thought that her prospects were much worse. There was an equally likely possibility that they would kill her in that event. Kill her for refusing to lift her spear against him, for honoring what she saw as a life debt. They would only see her betrayal, not her honor. Then, they would kill her in the name of honor, but not in its spirit. He turned to look at her and wondered what she was thinking right then. Had she come to the same conclusions he had? Was she simply awaiting her death? Was she hoping for it? He supposed that she might be. Honor had forced her to stay her hand but watching him cut down other members of her sect must have cost her something dear. She might have been close to some of them, a martial sister or even a lover. He’d cut down Han Jun, who seemed to be something of a teacher to her, although he hoped she wasn’t mourning that loss too greatly.

He decided to try one last time. “You must know that your time with the Soaring Skies sect is over.”

Her shoulders slumped. “I know.”

“Then, why stay? It gains you nothing. It serves nothing. They broke faith with your vow. If they cut me down, you will likely follow a moment later. It’s a waste of life.”

Shen Mingxia’s eyes blazed with fury as she stabbed a finger at the pile of bodies. “A waste of life? That is a waste of life. You didn’t have to kill them. You chose to kill them.”

“Yes, it is a waste of life, but don’t forget that I didn’t come to your sect and start killing randomly. Your sect came here. You came to what is, however briefly, my home. Tell me, what were your orders regarding the people inside? How many would you have spared?”

Shen Mingxia’s dropped her gaze. “We were to spare none.”

“And would that not have been a waste of life?”

“They’re just-,” Shen Mingxia started to say but cut herself off.

“Just whores? So, they deserved to die beneath a cultivator’s blade because someone got offended that I said no? By that logic, should I write off the deaths of your sect mates as meaningless because they were just qi-condensing cultivators? Their cultivation was beneath mine, so they didn’t matter, didn’t warrant consideration?”

“That’s, it’s different,” whispered Shen Mingxia.

Sen stood as he sensed what was coming. “It’s always different when you know the people who died.”

Sen had felt the power of core cultivators before, and that’s what was heading his way. Yet, it was off, wrong somehow, but he couldn’t put his finger on how. The cultivator was still too far away, but there was something in that approaching energy, something that raised the Sen’s hackles. He frowned and let his hand drop to his jian. He started cycling for wind and, after a moment of consideration, started a second cycle for shadow. In the corner of his eye, he saw Sen Mingxia’s head jerk toward him and her mouth drop open. She didn’t speak, but he saw her mouth a single word. How? He didn’t have the luxury to address her question or her apparent shock. The closer that core cultivator got, the more unsettled Sen became. It wasn’t the power of the cultivator. By Sen’s estimation, they were probably only just into core cultivation. It was the growing sense of wrongness about that cultivator’s power that was consuming Sen’s attention.

A minute or two later, the core cultivator flew over a building and hovered above Sen and Sehn Mingxia. If Sen hadn’t spent so much time on the Luo farm looking at wounds, examining injuries, and crafting remedies, he might have simply written off his intuition. Yet, he had spent that time and begun to hone the beginnings of the kind of understanding that Auntie Caihong took for granted. As Sen locked his gaze on the floating core cultivator, he could feel that there was something corrupt in the man, not just in his body, but in his cultivation. It wasn’t obvious. It might even be something that could go unnoticed by others if it had happened slowly enough, written off as a slow change in the man’s cultivation or a byproduct of his development of a core. Of course, Sen had been there for none of that, so it scraped against his senses, his understanding of how the body and the spirit should feel when they were healthy. He didn’t even know he was going to speak until the words were out of his mouth.

“What have you done to yourself? Why have you corrupted yourself this way?”

The arrogant sneer that the core cultivator had worn was wiped away in an instant. His shock was so complete that he fell out of the air, only barely managing to cushion his fall at the last second. When the man had steadied himself, his eyes locked not on Sen, but on Shen Mingxia. And it was a look of fear. Sen understood then. He had exposed something dangerous, something that this core cultivator wanted kept quiet. Worse, he’d exposed it in front of another sect member. Sen’s body was in motion before his mind caught up, acting on an intuitive understanding of what the core cultivator would do. Sen dipped low, caught the shocked Shen Mingxia in his arms, and activated his qinggong technique to hurl them both away from where she had been sitting. A split second later, a pillar of fire slammed into the protective barrier that Sen had established earlier. Sen could almost hear the formation straining, but he was more preoccupied with shielding himself and the woman in his arms from the wash of scalding heat that rolled over them. He looked Shen Mingxia square in the eye and spoke a single word.

“Run.”

Then, the fight was on. There was a flurry of motion, blade meeting blade in patterns burned into muscle and tendon. There was no thought, no consideration, just a swift, fierce meeting that tested the limits of Sen’s years of training. When the pair split apart, Sen had a shallow cut along the ribs on his left side. The core cultivator had a similar cut along one cheekbone that left half his face a wet mess that would no doubt have been bright red in the daylight. The core cultivator glared at Sen as he futilely wiped blood from his cheek.

“You doomed her when you opened your mouth. She can’t run fast enough to get away from me.”

“You’d have killed her anyway,” said Sen. “Besides, I’m pretty sure I can buy her a little more time.”

“You have some minor skill with the blade, but you’re no core cultivator. You can’t hope to stand against me.”

Now that he’d had a moment to breathe, and to think, Sen thought he’d figured out at least some of what was going on. Every cultivator used some kind of cultivation resources to drive or progress their advancement. Sen had adopted the least aggressive approach, relying almost exclusively on plants and alchemical agents used in elixirs. Most others relied on the more aggressive approach of using pills. It was harsher on the cultivator, but arguably more reliable. Of course, even cultivation had shortcuts if you were willing to pay the price. There were questionable ingredients that you could use in pills that would sometimes drive someone forward at a faster pace or even facilitate a breakthrough. The price for such shortcuts, the price the core cultivator Sen faced had paid, was corruption. The more questionable the ingredients, the deeper and more destructive the corruption became. Sen had no experience with such corruption. He’d only learned about it secondhand from Auntie Caihong, so there was no chance he could identify the corruption himself. Still, he might be able to get the man to tell him.

“What do I have to fear from a cultivator who used demonic ingredients to make a false core?” asked Sen.

It was only a guess on his part, and just barely better than a wild stab in the dark. Of course, his only real goal was to keep the man talking. Sen had always rejected the idea that one could advance through combat. He’d never understood what he could learn from combat, what kind of enlightenment he might gain through violence, that he would want. Over time, though, he had seen a sliver of something that he might gain. The violence itself, the fighting itself, was and likely always would be a failed source of insight for him. He despised it too much. There was, however, a clarity to combat, a focus that could drive creativity. If nothing else, combat provided an opportunity to test ideas that would be dangerous or too costly in other circumstances. Sen was preparing to test an idea, but he needed more time.

“I had to,” the cultivator almost screamed. “I had to do it. There was no other way, no other, no other way. I had to.”

To Sen, it sounded like the man was trying to convince himself. It also sounded like he was at least a little unhinged. The man’s behavior did help Sen understand what seemed to be a stark divide between what people told him the Soaring Skies sect was, and what he’d seen the Soaring Skies sect do. If this half-mad, demonically influenced creature was an elder, it could go a long way to explain how so much dishonorable behavior had gone unnoticed and unaddressed. While Sen hadn’t sensed similar literal corruption in any of the other sect cultivators, corruption could happen in a lot of ways. He supposed that this core cultivator could have been encouraging it without even being fully aware of his actions. Not that it mattered much to Sen. Only one of them was going to walk away from the fight, and Sen was determined that he would be the one. Then, as if someone had blown out a candle, the expression on the core cultivator’s face went blank, and there were no more words.

The two were back to fighting a heartbeat later. Almost all of Sen’s attention had to stay fixed on the fight with the core cultivator. The other man was faster, his qi more more powerful, but it was a more balanced fight than most people would expect. What Sen lacked in raw speed, he made up for with superior training. What he lacked in pure qi power, his body cultivation helped to offset. Still, Sen recognized that he wasn’t going to win the fight cleanly. He’d already picked up half a dozen shallow cuts and two deeper wounds from thrusts he couldn’t completely avoid. His hands and arms ached from parrying blows. In a straight conflict, Sen would lose against this man. Worse, Sen could feel the other cultivator getting ready to launch some kind of qi attack. It was something else Sen didn’t recognize, which made him very nervous. He doubted he’d be able to just roll out of the way of whatever the core cultivator planned on hitting him with.

For all of that, though, Sen hadn’t been idle. He’d been cycling shadow the whole time and reinforcing his jian with metal qi. He’d also been slowly fusing some of that metal qi into the shadows he was manipulating. It was difficult. The two qi types didn’t want to blend. A part of Sen desperately wanted to fall back on Heavens’ Rebuke, but he didn’t dare unleash it with so many mortals around. If he lost control, the loss of life would be a full-blown tragedy. So, he persevered, forced the shadow and metal qi to twist together, to fuse. Then, taking a slight bit of inspiration from Heaven’s Rebuke, he let a tiny fraction of his killing intent bleed into the new technique.

Sen simultaneously triggered the new technique and threw himself back from the other cultivator. It saved his life, but Sen wasn’t able to completely avoid the outer edges of the other cultivator’s attack. The ground where Sen had been standing exploded upward as a small column of fire reached for the sky. The force of the attack had shattered the stone of the street. Sen felt it as a shard of that shattered stone punched into his chest. Breathing became almost impossible, the pain threatened to shatter his concentration, but he clung to his control of his own technique. Half a dozen spears of solid shadow, metal qi, and killing intent drove through the core cultivator. As abruptly as that pillar of fire had appeared, it vanished. The fire had left Sen temporarily blinded, but his night vision slowly reasserted itself. When he could see that the only thing holding up the core cultivator were the spears that Sen was maintaining by the skin of his teeth, he released the technique.

Feeling that this was one of those times when it was appropriate, Sen took out one of Auntie Caihong’s healing pills and made himself swallow it. Swallowing was agony. Breathing was agony, but he made himself do it until he felt the wash of qi through his body. Then, gritting his teeth, he seized the stone that was currently lodged in his lung and jerked it free. Consciousness teetered on the brink for most of a minute, but the healing pill was doing its job and mending his lung. As breathing became easier and the pain receded, Sen forced himself to stand and stagger over to the core cultivator. Much to Sen’s intense disappointment, the man wasn’t actually dead, just the next best thing to it. Sen gave serious consideration to ending the man right then and there. It would be so, so much easier. But, sadly, the man was more useful to Sen alive. Muttering hate beneath his breath, Sen began setting up a suppression formation around the core cultivator. When he finished that, he staggered to the front door of the brothel. When someone tentatively opened the door, Sen suggested that they send a message to the Soaring Skies sect asking them to kindly retrieve their demonic elder.