The first few moments of screaming were so loud that Sen suspected that anything made of glass or fine pottery in the immediate area probably broke. Even at a bit of distance, the sound hurt Sen’s ears. He was just glad that there weren’t many people living nearby. Bit by bit the screaming reduced in volume to something more like what a normal human being would do. When Sen heard a noise that was probably something breaking through a door or a wall, he made his way back over to the building. He found Tong Guanting sprawled out on the street. There was already a stink of rot coming off the man. Sen focused for a moment, cycled earth qi, and shaped two stone chairs that rose out of the street facing one another. Sen sat down in one. He briefly cycled air qi, lifted Tong Guanting, and dumped him in the other chair. The nascent soul cultivator forced his eyes open. The whites of the man’s eyes were bloodshot and yellowing, while there was a milky film obscuring his irises. He still saw well enough to recognize Sen.

“Poison,” coughed Tong Guanting. “Tell me what it is.”

Sen regarded the man with a calm expression. “I didn’t dose you with one poison. I dosed you with twelve. Honestly, I don’t even think any of them have names. I made them for you.”

“Damn you.”

“I expect you’re wondering why you can’t do anything with your qi right now. If I were you, I’d want my last act in this world to be taking me with you. I suspect you’re trying right now.”

Tong Guanting sat up a little straighter, fury giving him a moment of strength. “What did you do!”

“I destroyed your qi channels.”

A look of unadulterated horror spread across Tong Guanting’s face. “What?”

“I spent some time in Inferno’s Vale a while back. Are you familiar with it?”

The nascent soul cultivator slumped back down in his chair, no longer able to support himself. When he didn’t answer, Sen continued.

“It’s a strange place, but it is just overflowing with fire qi. I did something scary while I was visiting, so no one complained when I went and took a bunch of natural treasures from the parts of the valley they didn’t go to very often. In fact, I’ve spent a lot of time in places where people don’t normally go. I collected a lot of dangerous things. I used some of them to make something very specifically designed to burn your channels to nothing. I wasn’t sure how strong it needed to be, though, so it’s entirely possible that it burned up your dantian along with your channels. The point is that, even if you still have qi, you can’t do anything with it. I wasn’t going to let you take half the city with you when you die.”

Tong Guanting started shaking his head. “Impossible. It’s impossible. You’re just a core cultivator.”

“I get that a lot. Here’s the thing. I’m pretty sure that I’m not supposed to be here.”

The dying cultivator in the other chair started coughing so hard that blood dribbled out of his mouth and down over his chin. When he finally managed to catch a little breath, he glared at Sen.

“What’s that mean?”

“I mean, I don’t think I was supposed to end up here. Not if things went the way they’re supposed to with reincarnation. It took me a while to figure it out. I didn’t know any better for a long time. It wasn’t until I got out into the world that I started to see it. I’ve got way more power than I should for my cultivation stage. I mean, I did some things to help that along, but those aren’t enough to explain it. I’m also advancing too fast. So fast that we actually have something in common. We’re both dying. It’s ironic really. All anyone needed to do if they wanted to be rid of me was wait a little while. None of this needed to happen. You’re dying for nothing.”

“Why tell me this?” wheezed Tong Guanting.

“Because you’re going to be dead very soon, and I wanted to tell someone. I know you’ll keep the secret because you won’t have a choice. Plus, since I made you my victim, it only seemed fair.”

“Fair,” sneered Tong Guanting. “When has fair ever meant anything.”

Sen shrugged. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. It’s probably not fair that you got killed by someone a full cultivation stage behind you. Then again, I expect that your gang has probably killed a bunch of people who didn’t have it coming. Maybe this is just Karma coming around on you.”

“You talk too much.”

“Alright. I don’t mind if you die in silence.”

Sen sat and patiently watched as Tong Guanting slowly deteriorated. He saw the veins and arteries darken until they were plainly visible through the man’s skin. The muscle beneath the man’s skin started wasting away, and his head started to loll to one side. While Sen was content to ride out the rest of Tong Guanting’s life without speaking again, it seemed the cultivator criminal wasn’t.

“Where should…you have gone?” the man asked in a choked whisper.

Sen thought about it. “I’m not sure. A higher plane, maybe. A different world. Some place where my advancement would have been more natural. I guess that didn’t fit in with someone’s plans.”

“Plans?”

“It’s just a guess. Things have been arranged a little too neatly for me here. I think someone is trying to race me through advancement so I’ll ascend. Then, I expect I’ll find someone waiting for me, expecting me to do their bidding.”

Tong Guanting let out a choking, wheezing laugh at that. “Won’t…they…be surprised.”

Sen got half a smile that he was sure the other man wasn’t physically capable of seeing.

“Maybe. Not if they’re paying attention, though,” said Sen.

He could feel the nascent soul cultivator teetering right on the edge of life and death. So, he asked the last questions that Tong Guanting would ever hear.

“Are you leaving anyone behind? Family? Children?”

“Why? Want to…kill them…too?”

“No. I have no quarrel with them. I’d just rather not see them left destitute and without a home.”

Sen thought that the man wouldn’t answer or maybe even couldn’t answer, but the criminal cultivator managed to gasp out a few last words.

“No family. No one.”

Then, the last flickering remnants of life drained out of Tong Guanting. Sen wondered if a death like the one he’d just witnessed was waiting for him if he failed to complete his body cultivation path. He found the idea painfully plausible, so he tried not to dwell on it. He still had a little bit of time left to work with. Not all hope was lost, yet. Sen pushed himself out of the chair and considered the body before him, and the building behind that corpse. Neither was safe for anyone to get near in their current states. The poisons Sen had used were so deadly and unique that even he only partially understood them. Fortunately, he had some options to work with. He started by cycling up some fire qi and burning the body and everything flammable in the building to ashes.

He was very careful to keep those ashes contained with a combination of wind and earth qi. Once he couldn’t burn the body or building any more than he already had, he stopped cycling for fire and focused most of his attention on earth qi. He drove that qi deep, deep beneath the city until he could feel the very bones of the world beneath him. He slowly turned that stone to liquid and pulled it up to the surface. He encased the ashes and what was left of the building in that liquid stone, sealing away any remnant poison in an impermeable stone cocoon. Then, he pushed that cocoon back down into the earth, so deep that no one could possibly get at it by accident. And even those who might, in some fit of madness, try to get at it on purpose would struggle to bring it back to the surface. Where the building had once stood, Sen summoned fresh soil. He used his wind qi to gather seeds and sprinkle them over the soil, and then wood qi to encourage their initial growth. It wasn’t much, in Sen’s opinion, but a small oasis of plants sprung up where so much death had happened.

Sen felt them coming long before they arrived. When the three nascent soul cultivators touched down behind him, Sen didn’t look at them. He really wasn’t in a mood to talk to anyone.

“You actually killed him?” asked Lai Dongmei.

“Yes,” said Sen, feeling very vulnerable.

He had considered the very real possibility that if he successfully killed Tong Guanting, the other nascent soul cultivators in the city might decide he was a threat that needed to be eliminated. Their immediate arrival gave some credence to that suspicion.

“How?” asked Feng Bai.

Sen ignored the question. “I’ve had more than enough killing to last me a long time. I’d appreciate it if someone could be sent to tell what’s left of the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate that it’s time to find a new line of work. I’d do it, but I think it’d just turn into a massacre.”

“I asked you a question, boy,” said Feng Bai, his voice cold and demanding.

Sen took a deep breath and tried to stay calm. This had been his other fear. That they would demand information or that he provide them with the poisons he’d used. He had no intention of doing either. Sen felt that no one, including him, should know how to do what he’d just done. He slowly turned and looked at his master’s brother. Sen didn’t have a good sense of his own emotional state, so he wasn’t sure about his expression. He decided that it must have been fairly ghastly because Feng Bai’s imperious glare almost immediately cracked into uncertainty. When Sen answered, his voice was utterly flat, emotionless, like the voice of a dead man who never quite made it to his grave.

“Would you like me to show you?”

Feng Bai seemed to realize that he’d crossed a line that he shouldn’t have because he took on a more conciliatory tone.

“You’ve had a difficult day. We’ll discuss this at a more…,” he started to say only for Sen to cut him off.

“We won’t. I have no intention of sharing the means or the methods I employed. That knowledge is mine. If you want it, earn it for yourself.”

“You need to learn your place, boy,” said Feng Bai. “My brother obviously didn’t do a good enough job teaching you that.”

“Spare me your posturing. Do you think I’m too stupid to realize that the three of you let me deal with the Tong Guanting problem for you? I don’t owe you anything. You owe me.”

Feng Bai was trembling with rage. He drew a fist back.

“Enough,” said the man Sen didn’t know. “That isn’t going to work, Bai. Look at him. Really look at him. He’s not afraid of you. He’s not afraid of any of us. Even if he didn’t have the power to destroy us, which he apparently does, what happens if you injure him or kill him? You’ll just draw the wrath of your brother down on us all.”

“To say nothing of Kho Jaw-Long,” added Lai Dongmei.

“And Ma Caihong,” said Sen.

Sen found it deeply amusing that while the threat of Master Feng and Uncle Kho hadn’t appreciably moved Feng Bai, the mention of Auntie Caihong made the man flinch. The angry nascent soul cultivator lowered his fist, took a shuddering breath, and shook his head.

“Ming always warned me about my temper,” said Feng Bai. “I overstepped. I apologize.”

Sen just wanted the frustrating conversation to be over, so he offered Feng Bai a bow. It was just barely deep enough to suggest that Sen acknowledged Feng Bai as a superior, but it was deep enough. Face was saved. Catastrophe was averted. Sen decided to take his wins where he could find them. Feng Bai was savvy enough to see the out that Sen was offering and accepted it, immediately taking his leave and flying away on a qi platform. The man Sen didn’t know gave him a long, contemplative look.

“You have ice water in your veins, I think,” said the man, giving Sen a faint smile. “I am Jin Bohai. When you reach the nascent soul stage, seek me out. I suspect that there will be things we could learn from each other.”

With that, he too ascended into the air on a qi platform, leaving Sen along with Lai Dongmei. She gave him an uncertain look.

“I thought you were boasting when you said you had a way to kill him.”

Sen sighed. “I wasn’t.”

“You knew we were using you?”

“It wasn’t that hard to figure out. All three of you are more powerful than Tong Guanting was. Any of you could probably have driven him out or killed him. As a group, he wouldn’t have stood a chance against you. I presume you all had some obscure reason for not doing it, but you weren’t going to pass up an opportunity for someone else to deal with him.”

“I thought you’d be angrier about it.”

Sen rubbed his face with his hands. “What would that accomplish? I’d be angry, and the three of you wouldn’t care. I’ve spent the last few days being angry with my friend and that didn’t accomplish anything either.”

Lai Dongmei studied him briefly and seemed to be weighing something before she said, “I’d care.”

Sen studied her back. She could be lying to him, but he didn’t think she was. There wasn’t really anything to gain from it. He’d already done what they wanted him to do. He felt some of the numbness inside of him recede and something rose up to take its place. It wasn’t affection, but it might have been affection’s cousin.

He gave her a small smile. “Okay. Maybe you would have cared.”

She smiled back before her eyes looked off into the distance. “I’ll see to it that the rest of Tong Guanting’s people get your message.”

“Thank you. I'm honestly too tired to go and deal with them.”

“You should get some rest. You look tired, which you really shouldn’t as a core cultivator.”

Sen nodded. “Yeah, I’ll need it. This was just one of the problems on my plate.”