The three of them sat around that table discussing possibilities until late. Laughing River volunteered that he could probably provide a distraction to draw off the horde briefly if it came down to it. Sen had given the fox a questioning look at that. The fox just shrugged.

“I am a fox. Illusions are what we do. How do you think I got close enough to figure out that I couldn’t get into the ruins in the first place?”

“That didn’t seem like something to open with earlier?” asked Sen.

“I’ve found that it limits people’s creativity when they think they have a simple solution at hand. You came up with an alternative option when you thought you had to, Sen. And it’ll be a much more believable one since they’ll be getting hit with actual fire. Or did you settle on lighting?”

“I’ll have to see what the qi looks like out there. I may find something unexpected. It’ll probably be fire, though.”

“But isn’t an illusion a simple solution?” asked Li Yi Nuo.

“Maybe, maybe not. They’ve seen my illusions before. They might not be fooled. Don’t forget, we also have to get Sen back out again. A little mortal peril is just Monday for cultivators. I’m less enthusiastic about sending him into certain doom. That means we’ll need distractions for both sides of this adventure.”

“What’s Monday?” asked Li Yi Nuo before Sen could do it.

The fox heaved a tremendous sigh. “Sen, remind me to give you a crash course on how reality works before I move to another plane like a magnificent specimen of fox perfection.”

“Um, okay,” said Sen with a bit of hesitance.

He was unsure if the fox was offering a good thing or a bad thing. Sen usually thought more information was a good thing, but he’d also benefited from not being given all the information as well. At the same time, the fox hadn’t said it like it was a good thing. It sounded more like a necessary thing that would turn out to be a lot more trouble than Sen wanted to deal with at the moment. Li Yi Nuo gave Sen and the fox a mildly disgruntled look.

“Why no extra education for me?” she asked.

“He’s going to ascend,” said the fox as though that answered everything.

It took a Sen a moment or two to unpack everything that simple statement contained. There was the surface statement that the fox either thought or somehow knew that Sen was going to ascend. If he did somehow know that, it begged the question of how the fox knew it and why he would share it. There was also the implication that the fox didn’t think Li Yi Nuo was going to ascend. Sen wasn’t sure that suggested any special insight over the fox simply playing the odds. Most cultivators didn’t ascend, after all. Making it to core formation was a feat all on its own. Li Yi Nuo seemed to be making the same analysis he was because she gave a fox a cool look.

“You don’t know that I won’t ascend,” she announced. “You certainly don’t know that he’s going to ascend.”

“Yeah, sure I don’t. It’s totally unlikely that the student of three or four nascent soul cultivators who went from a ragged street rat to a core formation dual cultivator folk hero in what, a decade, will ascend. That’s just a completely preposterous notion. It’s way more likely that the painfully orthodox sect girl who spent the last, hmmmm, two hundred years or so making her way to where she is will ascend.”

“I need some sleep,” said Sen.

He immediately stood and made a beeline for the bedroom he’d picked. He was quick enough that he was just shutting the door when Li Yi Nuo’s voice rang out behind him.

“A decade?! Wait!”

Sen had actually been getting tired, so it was only half of a dodge. He summoned a bed from his storage ring and flopped onto it while Li Yi Nuo banged on his door. He could hear the faint sound of Laughing River chortling in the background. Damn that fox, thought Sen. When Li Yi Nuo stopped her pointless pounding on the door, he was finally able to drift off to sleep. It wasn’t even close to light out when Sen roused himself from sleep, so he took a little time to review the alchemy primer that Fu Ruolan had given him. While he supposedly knew everything in it, Sen suspected that there were more than a few gems of insight still waiting to be found in those pages. They weren’t necessarily insights that Fu Ruolan intended to exist in the pages, but rather the more naturalistic insights that Sen sometimes found came from looking at old material with more experienced eyes. He didn’t find anything that day, but he supposed it never hurt to review the essentials, even if they were only tangentially related to his process.

When he felt dawn getting close, he went out and made tea, taking a bit of comfort in the steadiness of that routine. He poured himself a cup and took it outside. He watched the sunrise slowly transform the sky with color and light. He had an intuition that this would likely be the last real calm he enjoyed for a while. He heard light footsteps and glanced over to see Laughing River holding a cup of his own. The fox looked pensive, but he took a moment to nod at Sen. A glance past the fox didn’t reveal Li Yi Nuo.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“She’s not awake, yet. Or she’s pretending she isn’t, which is fine by me,” said the fox. “She’s fun to tease, but I don’t particularly enjoy her company.”

“Oh?” asked Sen.

“She’s, not naïve exactly, but she’s had less experience than she should have for her age and advancement.”

“I’d have thought you’d think much the same of me,” observed Sen.

“You have the opposite problem. You’ve had too much experience and advancement for your age. It’d be sort of amusing if I didn’t know so many of the details. Why? Do you enjoy her company?”

“Eh,” said Sen with a shrug. “It’s hard to enjoy the company of someone you think might get you killed on purpose.”

The fox got a gleam in his eyes. “Oh, I think that rather depends on how you spend your time with them. Danger can add a certain something to some experiences.”

Sen almost objected. “I suppose there’s a kernel of truth hidden deep down in there somewhere. At this point, I’m mostly making her stay as punishment for not taking the out I offered her.”

“A stupidity tax?”

Sen snorted. “I wasn’t thinking of it quite that way, but it’s a fair way to put it. I mean, seriously, she was talking about glory.”

Laughing River nodded. “It does rather make one wonder what she’s been reading, but that’s neither here nor there. I was curious what you decided you’d do today.”

“Same as we discussed last night. I make a pass through the forest. Get a feel for the qi. Make sure there’s nothing lurking out there that will cause too much trouble. If I have time, I might start putting together the formation today.”

“You’re going to leave her with me all day?” asked the fox in a long-suffering tone.

“It’s not like I can take her with me.”

“Oh, but you could.”

“I’m not taking her out there just to die.”

“Fine. It was just a pleasant thought. What am I supposed to do with her, though?”

“See if she has any skills that might actually be useful?” asked Sen, sounding doubtful even to himself.

“How likely does that seem?”

“It never hurts to check.”

The fox grumbled something inarticulate, and Sen decided to go while he could still avoid Li Yi Nuo. He went inside, hurriedly drank another cup of tea, and then took off. He put his hiding ability to good use as he moved through the forest. It slowed him down a little because he could only sense a fraction of the distance he was used to, but it also let him avoid a few fights with spirit beasts. He’d need to deal with some of them, but he wanted to make a complete pass around the temple before he started to do anything that might be noisy. He was both relieved and a bit disappointed to discover that the qi in the area was more or less in balance. It meant he could go with either fire or lightning, but couldn’t expect any helpful boosts for either type of attack from convenient environmental features. He was also vaguely disappointed to discover absolutely nothing else that he might use to his advantage, such as a wandering band of monks or improbably placed holy relics. I guess that would have been too convenient, thought Sen. If there are useful relics, they’re probably inside that temple.

Sen glanced upward. He wasn’t particularly nervous about being caught outside at night, but he also didn’t see any advantage to it. He had a pretty good feel for what he’d find in the forest during the day, but some spirit beasts were nocturnal. Still, he thought he had enough time to at least get started on the formation. Of course, setting up a formation wasn’t nearly as fast as simply wandering through the woods and making sure there was enough of the right kind of qi to do what he wanted. He spent several hours getting the first third of the flags into position. He was debating about whether to do one more when his intuition warned him. It wasn’t any of the usual triggers. He hadn’t felt anything in his admittedly limited spiritual sense. He hadn’t heard or seen anything. There had been no disturbances in the local qi. This was that deeper intuition born of hard, violent experiences. He spun and drew his jian in a smooth motion, leveling it at the stranger who had gotten within ten feet of him.

The figure was wearing black robes. They were androgynous with a slender build and a fine bone structure. They came to a stop and eyed the blade in Sen’s hand. The look wasn’t fearful, just respectful of what the blade could do. They transferred their gaze up to Sen’s face and offered him a small, mysterious smile that suggested they knew a million things that Sen didn’t. That smile told Sen that this person would aggravate him. The fact that Sen could sense absolutely nothing about them only made it worse.

“I suppose I should give you credit,” said Sen. “I’m not that easy to sneak up on.”

“You aren’t the only person with a facility for hiding.”

“I suppose I’m not. What do you want?”

“You’re here with him,” said the stranger, their voice as androgynous as everything else about them.

It wasn’t a question, but Sen thought that him was a rather vague term.

“Him, who?”

“The trickster. The liar. The nine-tail.”

Sen lifted an eyebrow. “Isn’t that just three ways to say that same thing?”

The stranger paused then, seemingly uncertain about how to proceed. Maybe I said something they didn’t expect, thought Sen.

“Perhaps,” said the stranger. “Aren’t you going to ask me who I am?”

“I considered it,” said Sen.

“And?”

“I decided it’s probably pointless. You’ll either tell the truth or you’ll lie, but I won’t know the difference.”

“True,” admitted the stranger.

They went to take a step forward, and Sen responded by pushing lightning qi into the jian. The area around them lit up irregularly as lightning crackled and danced along the blade. The stranger gave the jian a much longer look.

“I think we’re probably close enough,” said Sen. “So, I expect this is when you tell me what you think I should do.”

The stranger looked to Sen’s face again. “It is. You should let him die.”

“I should have known it was going to be something like that.”