Sen had no ready answer to that emotional outburst. He lacked even a basic frame of reference, let alone the necessary experience to understand what the fox had been through. Sen possessed no wisdom to offer. He didn’t even have an empty platitude he could mouth. His only solace was that Laughing River likely didn’t expect him to provide any of those things. He hadn’t really been asking questions. That was just the form the fox’s grief and apparent guilt had taken in the moment. So, Sen remained silent while the fox regained his composure. It didn’t go quite the way Sen expected. Instead of looking lost or sad, the fox’s expression grew stony in a way that left Sen’s insides feeling abruptly cold.

“It appears I may have been hasty in my decision to leave my people be,” said Laughing River. “After we finish our business here, it seems that I may need to go correct some wrong assumptions.”

Sen got the distinct impression that translated into Laughing River killing the foxes who had started that rumor about him in the first place. It almost had to be the foxes he’d saved from the massacre. He supposed they’d seen an opportunity when Laughing River voluntarily stepped away from all of the foxes. They could have invented some story about how they were delayed and missed the slaughter through luck or something similar. They would have all needed to be on the same page, though. Sen wondered if there had been some attrition in that group on the way home from the disaster. It sounded cold-blooded, but he supposed ambition often was cold-blooded in a way that made any obstacle look like it needed to be removed permanently. He’d seen enough evidence of that from the sect members he’d been unfortunate enough to encounter over the years. The one thing that Sen knew was that he wanted to be far, far, far away from whatever corrections that Laughing River had in mind.

“You should probably start with your granddaughter,” observed Sen, trying to keep the fox focused on the immediate problems in their vicinity. “We’re going to have a hard time finishing this little project of yours if she actively interferes. And she’s going to get a lot of opportunities to interfere.”

Laughing River eyed Sen like he thought the cultivator was trying to trick him but gave a reluctant nod.

“I suppose I should. I guess I’ll have to go try to find them for real.”

“Seriously? What were doing all morning if you weren’t looking for them?”

“I found a nice tree to take a nap in,” said the fox with zero shame.

“You could have found them all along?” demanded Sen.

“Oh, no. I wasn’t lying about it being a very difficult task, even for someone with my extraordinary skills. I just wasn’t motivated.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like that sect girl. You didn’t seem inclined to just kill her and be done with it. I figured that since my darling granddaughter injected herself into the situation, I’d let her deal with it and spare your fragile conscience.”

“You know why I don’t want her dead,” said Sen.

“Something about sects and, I don’t remember, something else. It all sounded very tedious.”

Sen desperately wanted to yell at the fox, but he suspected that Laughing River was intentionally irritating him to reclaim some ground after having exposed such raw emotions. Shaking his head, Sen tried to think about calming things like choking the fox into unconsciousness. That mental image helped him feel a lot better.

“What are you thinking about?” asked the fox. “That smile is positively creepy. Don’t ever smile like that at anyone you don’t intend to kill.”

Sen looked directly at Laughing River without changing his expression and said, “Noted.”

“How droll,” said the fox. “Alright, I guess I’ll go start searching for real. No time like the present to start finding out who I need to go murder for telling lies about me.”

“Don’t foxes lie all the time?” asked Sen, feeling a little confused about where foxes drew the line about lying.

“Of course we do, but not about things that matter. Well, not about things that matter to us. What happened that day matters to every single nine tail fox alive, and foxes are lying about it. I won’t let that stand.”The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

A lot of questions half-formed in Sen’s mind before he decided that it just wasn’t worth it. “You know what? I’m not even going to try to unravel that madness.”

“For the best, really. That kind of work should be left to professionals.”

“Professional what?”

“Liars,” said Laughing River with a bit of his old cheer coming back. “If my granddaughter shows up here, you should try to keep her here.”

“Why would she show up here? And how would I get her to stay?”

“As for why she’d show up here, who knows? But she keeps tracking you down, so it’s not impossible. As for keeping her here,” the fox gave Sen a scathing look, “try batting your eyelashes at her, or propositioning her, or hitting her on the head. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if you were dropped on your head repeatedly as a child.”

Sen almost stifled a groan.

“Well, I’m still here putting up with your antics, so it seems entirely too probable.”

“Heh. A little on the nose, but that’s the right spirit,” said Laughing River before he slipped out the door.

A few minutes later, after realizing he didn’t actually have anything specific to do, Sen went outside. There was still some daylight left but not enough for him to reasonably get much more of the formation made before night fell. He briefly considered doing some alchemy, but the entire situation had left his mind feeling dull and wrung out. That was the wrong place to be when working with materials that might literally explode in your face if you treated them the wrong way. He thought he could probably force the necessary level of clarity if it mattered, but there was nothing he needed to make that badly. Instead, he decided to work through his jian forms. That was something that didn’t depend so much on him thinking as him finding the appropriate kind of mental state. Fortunately, it was a state of calm emptiness. He could do calm emptiness.

It also helped that pure muscle memory would do a lot of the work for him. There was still some room for improvement since his body cultivation advanced. It seemed like a long time ago to Sen with so much having happened since then, but it hadn’t truly been that long. With more fights in the near future being a near-certainty, it was as ideal a time as any to work out a few more of those kinks. Despite having done some of those forms thousands of times, they still felt vaguely off to Sen as the precision he’d come to expect wasn’t quite there. He stopped after one particularly sloppy parry. You’re still thinking too much, Sen admonished himself. Do first, and then analyze. Sen resumed the first stance of the form and just stayed there for nearly five minutes. He let all of his recent concerns about Li Yi Nuo’s sect, the horde, the ruins, and what he might find in them drop away one by one. Only when his mind was truly clear, did he begin.

Rather than trying to figure out what to fix as he went through the forms, he just did them. He was viscerally aware of when things felt wrong but let that information fade into the back of his mind. He didn’t analyze anything. He just did. As he completed one form and moved to the next, he was vaguely aware that things were happening more smoothly. By not trying to fix every little thing, he’d given his body room to find more of an equilibrium between the stringent demands of the martial exercises and his body’s new capacities. It wasn’t perfect. The body can’t think its way through problems, but not all of the problems needed that kind of attention. Only after he’d gone through all the forms he knew, including the one he’d almost accidentally picked up from Shi Ping, did he stop and start letting his mind analyze what had been going on.

Sen knew better than most how important control was when using a fist or using a blade. Yet, looking back, he could see that he’d been trying to overcontrol things in spots. When he’d let go of that, some of the problems had self-corrected. The places where there were still issues were places where he’d have to go back and practice individual moves until he relearned how they should feel under new conditions. He expected some people would find the work dreadfully dull, but it was the price of mastery. He was about to get started when he heard clapping. He spun toward the sound. Sen found himself wondering if that damned old fox was a diviner. Misty Peak was smirking at him as she clapped a little more.

“That was quite the performance,” she said.

“It really wasn’t,” said Sen.

The fox woman gave him a skeptical look. “It looked pretty solid from over here.”

“The formations must be clouding your vision,” said Sen. “Aren’t you worried that your grandfather is going to come back?”

“No. He’s off trying to find me. I put down a false trail for him to follow. It’ll be at least another hour before he figures it out.”

“I’d have thought you’d have something better to do than come and watch me. I mean, hostages don’t feed themselves.”

“They don’t keep themselves quiet, either,” complained Misty Peak. “I have to gag her to get a moment of peace.”

“You could just let her go,” said Sen. “Surely, you’ve realized by now that she’s useless as leverage.”

“Don’t be silly. I can’t just let her go. What will you give me for her?”

“I can probably find some loose pebbles around here somewhere.”

Misky Peak gave Sen a little pout. “Well, that’s not much of a gift, is it?”

“She’s not much of a hostage.”

The fox woman looked past Sen, frowned, and gestured at the galehouse. “Where do these things keep coming from?”

Sen looked over his shoulder at the stone building and said, “I make them.”

“Really?” asked Misty Peak with an expression of genuine surprise.

A hand dropped onto the fox woman’s shoulder and clamped down as Laughing River stepped out of nowhere. There was an expression of pure dread on Misty Peak’s face.

“He really does,” said Laughing River. “You should come inside and see it for yourself.”