Sen could smell the ocean long before the great expanse of water came into view. He found the smell dredged up a mixed bag of emotions. There had been good things about the ocean journey. He’d learned a great deal about water qi on that ship. He’d managed to save the lives of those sailors from that first attack. He’d even managed to help Lifen learn a little bit about cultivation and protecting herself. However, it had also been a terrible time as they fled from the wrath of the demonic cultivators. Constantly worrying that they would be found, and all that had come after. The cult, the sect war, everything that happened in the capital, and those desperate, desperate days searching for Fu Ruolan as his body drew ever closer to death. It made Sen realize that aside from that first year right after he’d left the mountain, he’d never really gotten a chance to be the wandering cultivator that he’d set out to become.

Everything had compounded on itself as one disaster led into the next. Sen felt more than a little bitter about that. He had meant to see and experience the world. While he had visited much of the kingdom, he hadn’t really seen any of it. He’d been too busy worrying about who was going to try to recruit him by force, use him, or outright kill him. It seemed like half the time he’d been too injured to enjoy anything. The other half of the time, he’d been too busy trying not to die. And he wouldn’t call what he’d been through experiencing the world. He’d been brutalized by the world. It may have helped to push his cultivation and reputation to a point that most sects would prefer not to make him an enemy, but he’d never wanted any of that. He’d have happily spent the next hundred years slowly advancing his cultivation and wandering the world.

He pondered all of those concerns, experiences, and his bitterness about them as he made his way closer to the coast. There was certainly a part of him that felt fully justified in that bitterness. Just as he might have stolen something from those villagers by not letting them die, the world had stolen something from him by not letting him advance the way other cultivators did. It would be easy to let that bitterness infect him. To let it drive how he chose to act in the world. Yet, that bitterness wasn’t really his. It belonged to that very naïve young man who had come down off the mountain. Sen could see that in some strange, misguided way he had been trying to get back to a place where he could be that person. He kept trying to free himself from obligations so he could just be that humble wandering cultivator that, in truth, he’d never really been. It had been a dream, a young person’s dream, but Sen couldn’t be that person.

He had done too much. Killed too many people. Seen how the world truly operated beyond the confines of those half-heard stories he’d listened to as a child. Stories were simple. In the stories, there were pure wandering cultivators of great skill who appeared like the wind and saved the village. There were noble sects that put honor first. There were benevolent kings who ruled their kingdoms with justice. Life, he had learned the hardest possible way, was not like the stories. He’d been that cultivator who came in and saved the village from bandits, but that salvation was a bloody affair carried out by a man who could callously put aside any concern for the human lives it would cost. He knew that there were honorable people to be found in sects, but sects themselves were not to be trusted. He actually knew a benevolent king, but he also knew how and why that man had taken the throne. Life was full of people with their own needs, agendas, and goals. There was nothing simple about that.

So, he cast aside that bitterness over a lost life that he knew would never have come to pass. Even if he hadn’t been thrown into the lethal circumstances that he’d faced, he would have been confronted with other challenges and disappointments. He would have still had to learn the hard truth that life was complicated and even people you care about may not share your goals or principles. He might regret that he’d had to learn those lessons so soon, but no man got to choose the time or place he received those lessons. The reality was that those lessons had come to him, and he couldn’t unlearn them. And if those truths had hardened him in some ways, that was often the price of wisdom. Harboring bitterness over it wouldn’t serve him, any more than clinging desperately to the dreams of another man. It’s time to find new dreams, thought Sen. Maybe those dreams wouldn’t appeal to the mind of a boy, but they would also be truer to who he had become.

When he stopped for the night, Sen pulled something from his storage ring that he hadn’t looked at for a long time. He spent hours sitting by the fire and holding that seemingly innocuous object, considering what it meant to him and what it would say to others. He had pushed it from his thoughts the way he had tried to push away everything that he associated with it. Then, with a bittersweet smile, he put on the blue robes that Auntie Caihong had given him those years ago. They didn’t fit quite as well as they once had, but the material was still excellent quality and the minor enchantments on them were in working order, preserved by the magic of storage rings. He had run from those robes the same way he had run from the identity they represented in his mind. He could see that for the foolishness it had always been. Not wearing the robes didn’t free him. It simply shackled him in denial.The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“No more hiding,” said Sen, and headed out to cover the last few miles to the coast.

The city on the coast was one of the smaller ones that Sen had seen, but he mostly dismissed it from his mind. He didn’t plan to stay in the city for more than a night if at all possible. Instead, he headed directly for the harbor. It was smaller than he hoped it would be as he walked along the docks, looking for a ship that would serve his purposes. He came up short as a ship that he recognized came into view. It was a nondescript vessel that wasn’t too old or too worn and wouldn’t draw attention unless you knew it.

“It can’t be,” whispered Sen.

He walked toward the ship, only to see one of the sailors on the deck ship staring at him with huge, disbelieving eyes. The sailor disappeared and the captain appeared a few moments later, smiling and shaking his head. The man jogged down the gangplank and gave Sen a deep bow. The man looked older to Sen. The lines around his eyes and mouth were a little deeper. There was more gray in his hair. Even so, the man had a gleam of good cheer in his eye that Sen remembered from his last voyage on the ship.

“Honored cultivator, it does this old man’s heart good to see you again.”

Sen gave the man a smile and a bow of his own. “Captain, it’s good to see you again. I fear that I rudely neglected to ask your name the last time I traveled with you.”

The captain gave Sen a thoughtful look. “Now that you say it, we didn’t exchange names, did we? I mostly dealt with the beauty you had with last time. I am Chen Ailun.”

“It’s nice to finally know your name. I am Lu Sen.”

“Cultivator Lu,” said the captain.

Sen looked over at the ship with a frown. It was hard not to feel like the whole encounter was some elaborate setup just when he needed transport. On the other hand, he had to ask himself if it was really a surprise to find a ship he recognized. If Sen had found this ship at a harbor on the far side of the continent, that would be too suspicious. From the conversations he’d had with the captain and crew, this was the exact part of the coast where they worked. Finding them at that particular harbor felt more like good luck to Sen than anything else.

“Captain, I can’t help but feel that this may be a fortuitous encounter.”

“Oh?” asked the captain, giving Sen a speculative look.

“Indeed. I am in need of transport to the same cove where we sheltered, and I find you here on the day I arrive. I don’t suppose you have room for a humble wandering cultivator and a minor detour?”

“Just you this time?” asked the captain, sounding a little disappointed.

Sen wondered if the captain had developed a little crush on Lo Meifeng. “Just me this time.”

The older man idly scratched his chin. “As far as I’m concerned, you always have a ride on this ship when you need it. I don’t forget my debts.”

“There are no debts between us,” said Sen. “Well, none save the cost of passage.”

Sen had planned to outright buy a ship and the service of a crew, if necessary, but he felt much better about traveling with Chen Ailun than with some captain he didn’t know. To that end, he had placed a meaningful amount of silver into a small pouch before he entered the city. He produced the pouch from his storage ring, causing the captain’s eyes to go wide with wonder. He held the pouch out to the captain.

“I hope that will be enough to suffice.”

The captain gave the pouch a wary look after he took it from Sen. He immediately tried to give the pouch back after looking inside, but Sen waved him off.

“It’s too much,” said the captain.

“It’s not too much for my peace of mind. I trust you and your men. I’d gladly pay double that to secure your services.”

The captain straightened up with pride at those words. “We’ll be ready to leave at your word.”

Sen considered asking to leave immediately, but he squashed that thought. “I assume you have business here. When were you planning to leave?”

The captain hemmed and hawed briefly, but finally admitted, “The day after tomorrow, but we can leave at any time you wish to go.”

Sen gave the man a gentle smile. “Finish your business. We’ll leave the day after tomorrow. In the meantime, perhaps you have some grand tale of adventure from the sea.”

“Well,” said the captain with a thoughtful look, “there was this one time when I had a couple of cultivators aboard, and the worst storm I’d ever seen threatened to sink my ship.”

Sen laughed. “A fine tale I’m sure, but you must have seen something more interesting than some fool boy of a cultivator.”

The captain grinned. He waved at Sen to follow him to a cabin. “Actually, now that you mention it, I saw the strangest-looking beast a year or two ago.”