“You did what?” asked the horrified prince.

Sen didn’t think that the prince was actually asking him since Lo Meifeng had reacted in exactly the same way the evening before. On the one hand, he understood their reactions. Core formation cultivators didn’t usually stare down nascent soul cultivators and then, essentially, blackmail them. On the other hand, Sen hadn’t gone looking for that confrontation, let alone planned it. He had been reacting on instinct, rather than some well-thought-out strategy. It was something that he felt he did too often, but it was hard to have a well-thought-out strategy for things you didn’t expect. Sen supposed that he could spend more of his time thinking up the least likely events he could expect to have happen to him, and then plan as though they were certainties. That idea didn’t appeal very much to Sen. He thought that would mostly result in him having a lot of plans that he never used while still making things up as he went.

“Yeah,” he finally said to the flabbergasted prince. “I pretty much backed him into a corner. Incidentally, if your main problem was with Elder Tang Ehuang, she’s going to be locked up for the next century.”

“How far along is your cultivation?”

Sen thought about it. “I’m initial core formation. Although, I’m probably not too far off from adding a layer to my core. I’m a little farther along with my body cultivation.”

“How powerful are you?”

“I’m not bad, but it’s not always about direct combat power. In a straight-up qi technique fight, either Tang Ehuang or Feng Bai could have beaten me. I might have made it a bit of a challenge with Elder Tang, but she’d have probably won in the end. With Feng Bai, he’d have destroyed me. So, I made those fights about something else.”

“How so?”

“With Tang Ehuang, I made it a literal battle of wills. That wouldn’t have worked with everyone, but she made it clear that her ego was fragile. Fragile egos don’t make for strong wills. With Feng Bai, I made it a metaphoric battle of wills. I was willing to commit to an extreme outcome. He wasn’t for several reasons. That gave me the better bargaining position.”

“I doubt I would have had the nerve to try a gambit like that.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to try something like that. You have a lot more to lose than I do.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I do. You have a family, rank, wealth, a home, and the rest of your life. You have an entire kingdom to lose if you make a bad bet. I have a few close friends. I have some wealth, but that doesn’t matter as much to cultivators as you might think. That’s it for me. If I died today, it would hurt the people I’m close to, but there wouldn’t be many ripples in the pond of life. If you died today, it would cause a much more serious upheaval.”

The prince studied Sen for a moment before he said, “You say I have the rest of my life, but you didn’t mention that for yourself. As I understand it, cultivators at your level of development have nothing but time. Centuries and centuries of it.”

Sen froze. He hadn’t meant to reveal that particular bit of information to the prince. It wasn’t that he necessarily didn’t trust the prince with it, but it wasn’t information that the prince needed. It wasn’t information that anyone outside of his core circle needed to know. Still, he’d let it slip, no matter how inadvertently. The question was how best to deal with it. He could brush it off, saying that cultivators saw life and death differently. It was true enough that he could probably get away with it. He could also just ignore the implied question. It would still give the prince information, but the man would have to draw his own conclusions. Of course, Sen wasn’t sure he wanted the man drawing uninformed conclusions. Sen could also just come clean about it. The information would likely make Sen seem more dangerous and even less risk-averse than his reputation would suggest. The silence had apparently dragged on for long enough that the prince had gotten nervous or uncomfortable.

“I didn’t mean to pry,” said the prince.

“It’s fine,” said Sen, not thinking it was fine at all.

“If it’s a private matter, I understand.”

Sen ultimately decided that he’d rather seem more dangerous to his enemies than less. It might take a little of the pressure off as well. If people thought he was going to die all on his own soon without any need for outside help, they might just decide it was more practical to wait it out and see what happened than commit resources to the task of killing him.

“There’s a problem with my body cultivation. If I don’t fix it, I’ll probably be dead within two years.”

Prince Jing considered that statement and said, “I can see why you say you have less to lose. Is that why you need the manual?”

Sen snorted. “It’s not the only reason, but it’s certainly the most pressing reason.”

“You seem remarkably healthy for a dying man.”

“The real dying part hasn’t started yet,” said Sen in answer to the prince’s mild skepticism. “But it is coming. Soon.”

“Does Yu Ming know?”

“She does. It probably makes me even more appealing for her plan. If I don’t deal with this problem, she won’t have to worry about me for long.”

The prince shook his head. “She doesn’t think that way. She never has. Yu Ming has always been more passion than cold logic. It’s why she makes such terrible plans.”

“She does make terrible plans,” said Sen, “but she isn’t stupid.”

The prince nodded. “That’s true. She’s foolish, at times, but not stupid. More than one person has mistaken the one for the other, though. It was a relief to me when she became a cultivator. It’s a remarkably good shield for someone like her. Most people aren’t willing to try to take advantage of someone who can literally bring down the walls of their house.”

“What is she doing right now? She only gave me a vague sense of what to expect next.”

The prince’s brow furrowed. “I’m not entirely sure. I expected to be summoned after she returned, but that hasn’t happened yet. If I had to guess, though, I assume that she’s negotiating with our mother.”

“Negotiating? I never had parents, so I’m sure I missed a few things, but is negotiating something children normally do with their parents?”

The prince chuckled. “I don’t believe so. Yu Ming’s relationship with our parents is complicated. She’s willful, and our mother expected obedience. Needless to say, there is tension there. If she wants her plan to work, though, she needs mother to help bring father around. Mother will want things from her that Yu Ming will flatly refuse to do or that are simply impractical for a young cultivator. So, they’ll need to bargain for what they want.”

“What kind of impractical thing?”

“It’s hard to know for sure. She might demand that Yu Ming settle in the city. She might demand that Yu Ming marry immediately and start producing children. Since that’s not something you’ll be willing to do, it’s off the table. But there will be some kind of concession involved.”

Sen shuddered. “No offense, but that sounds like someone who wants to control her children.”

The prince hesitated but nodded. “That is a fair assessment.”

“I sincerely hope that she understands that I will not be making any such bargains, and Yu Ming can’t commit me to one.”

The prince smiled at that. “My mother is formidable, but you stared down a nascent soul cultivator. I think even she will recognize the folly in trying to bring you to heel.”

“Good. As for the Steel Gryphon sect, I don’t know the details of your conflict with them. If the source of that conflict was Tang Ehuang, though, you may find them more tractable now.”

Prince Jing nodded. “Perhaps. Time will tell on that account. I’m curious, though. Assuming you get everything that you came here for, the manual, freeing Yu Ming, what will you do then?”

Sen shrugged. “I’m a wandering cultivator. I expect I’ll go back to wandering. I may find a mountain to claim at some point and just become a story that people tell. In the end, though, ascension is the goal for every cultivator.”

“Ascension,” said the prince. “You leave the world behind and become a god?”

“That’s the theory, but it’s a bit of an open mystery. We know that ascending cultivators go somewhere. Personally, I’m not sold on the idea that we ascend to the heavens.”

“No? Why is that?”

“Because I’d make a terrible god. Most cultivators would make terrible gods. We’re all selfish. Most of us are petty and prone to violence. Being a cultivator doesn’t stamp out human failings. As often as not, it seems to amplify those failings. Maybe the universe really is so badly made that we ascend to godhood, but I hope that isn’t the case.”

“Then, what do you hope will happen on ascension?”

Sen shrugged. “That we go somewhere else. That it’s a place that helps us correct our failings, rather than making them worse. I doubt that’s what happens either, though. I expect that what actually happens is that we go somewhere else, and that nothing is really different except the stakes.”

“Why is that?”

“Because people are people. Do you think that being born somewhere else is really going to make them less flawed?”

The prince frowned at that. “No. If you think that, though, then why do it?”

“Once you step onto the path of cultivation, it’s very difficult to step off. The concerns of cultivators are very different from the concerns of mortals. You build everything in your life around cultivation. It changes the way you think, the way you behave, the way you assess risk and reward. In my case, it even changed my body in fundamental ways. It’s also nearly impossible to avoid making enemies, which means stopping is a good way to get killed by those enemies. If you can get to the point of ascension, you’ve become so powerful that staying is, in many ways, pointless. You can do anything you want. Have anything you want. You’ve literally met every challenge along the way and succeeded. I expect that by the time a person reaches that point, they’re ready to go somewhere else, for new challenges if nothing else.”

“When you talk about it like that, it makes the politics of the kingdom seem very small and inconsequential. Is that why you don’t like getting involved?”

“Well, involving cultivators in mortal politics is a bit like killing a fly with a hammer. We’re the wrong tools for the job. I don’t think your concerns are inconsequential. They certainly aren’t inconsequential for all of the mortals who live here. They’re just not particularly relevant to me.”

“Yet, you involved yourself anyway. I know that you’re after that manual, but it sounds like that’s something that you could have gotten on your own if you tried hard enough.”

While Sen liked the prince and even trusted him to a certain extent, he wasn’t willing to divulge the existence of those soul tugs to him. Instead, he offered a nonchalant shrug.

“She asked me to,” he said.

“And that was enough?”

“It was on the day I decided.”