“Who is she?” asked Falling Leaf, peering curiously at Chou Dai Lu.
“This one is Disciple Chou Dai Lu, Lady Fa,” answered the girl with a bow.
“I caused her some problems,” explained Sen. “So, she’s part of my sect now.”
The ghost panther looked at the girl for a few moments before shrugging, apparently losing interest. Falling Leaf being Falling Leaf, she’d been absent the past few days while scouting ahead and hunting. The addition of someone to Sen’s sect, however far from home they might all be, wasn’t sufficiently different to keep her attention for any length of time. New people had turned up at the sect compound all the time. As long as they didn’t do anything to annoy Falling Leaf, she tended to forget about them.
As for the Chou Dai Lu, she had been duly impressed two days prior when he made a small bathhouse complete with hot water. Sen had been tempted to make a full galehouse, but there didn’t seem to be any point. He didn’t plan to make them at every stop, so why show off a skill he didn’t plan to use regularly. What he hadn’t expected was for Misty Peak to show up almost immediately.
“What makes her so special?” demanded the fox-woman, waving a hand at the girl disappearing into the new structure. “Why didn’t you ever make me a bathhouse?”
Sen had given her a blank look before saying, “You never asked me to.”
“What?”
“She needs to get cleaned up. If you had ever turned up looking like you’d been sleeping outside for a week, I’d have probably made one for you too. As things stood, you never asked me to make one.”
Bathing was one of the logistical problems that Sen hadn’t given much thought to when they’d left the capital. It was, in retrospect, an obvious concern. He knew from his alchemy training that people who didn’t bathe regularly tended to get sick. And, in a camp where everyone was in such close proximity, illness would spread very fast. Fortunately, the military seemed to have worked out the details of those problems. Most of the soldiers in the camp made do by quickly wiping themselves down with hot water, drying off as fast as possible, and getting dressed again. When he'd asked where they got the hot water, he was told that the cooks warmed large cauldrons of it. He supposed that made sense. They almost always had fires burning when the army wasn’t actually marching. It wouldn’t be that difficult to keep hot water available. The soldiers could just grab buckets of it. Sen thought there must be a schedule of some kind, but he hadn’t pried into the details.
Sen wasn’t sure about what the cultivators were doing. His own control over water and fire qi made it trivial to conjure hot water around himself in a sphere. It wasn’t like he needed to breathe for the ten minutes he remained submerged and scrubbed at himself. Bathing that way wasn’t particularly relaxing, but it did possess the elegance of efficiency. Drying off was equally simple, as he could just command the water off of his body. Perhaps, the sect cultivators did something similar to the army, just on a smaller scale. They always appeared clean, so they had to be doing something
.He’d assumed the nine-tail fox had her own methods. However, her continued complaints about the unfairness of it all finally drove him to make a second bathhouse. Sen wasn’t sure that giving in to that particular demand was a good idea. He worried it might set unrealistic future expectations, but it was too late to change his mind. Misty Peak had already vanished into the newly-made building. After Chou Dai Lu finished her bath, Sen had a very long discussion with her about what her training would look like along each of the paths he’d briefly described to her.
He made a point to get details of her training up to that point. She wasn’t on a body cultivation path, at least not beyond the body cleansing and refining that most qi-condensing cultivator went through. She also wasn’t so deep into foundation formation that it was too late to start her on one. He had manuals for quite a few of those, especially since he destroyed the Twisted Blade Sect. Odds were good that he could find an appropriate one for her. Preferably one that would set her on a path for a less self-destructive core formation body cultivation method than the Five-Fold Body Transformation.
After that, he’d sent her off to think about it. It was the best he could do, even though he strongly suspected what her answer would be. While Sen was well-aware that his circumstances couldn’t be replicated, no one else seemed to believe it. That’s why it wasn’t shocking when Chou Dai Lu came back the next day and asked to become his direct disciple. He personally thought it was a decision she’d come to regret, but allowing people the room to make mistakes was also part of cultivation. If she wanted to endure the kind of training he would put her through, he would let her. Before that, though, Sen intended to travel ahead to Inferno’s Vale. He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that he wasn’t going to like what he found there. If that was going to prove true, he wanted to get it over with.
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“So, we’re going to go see the fire people?” asked Falling Leaf.
“Did you get that far?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“I could have, but I don’t move as fast as you do,” she admitted. “It didn’t seem wise to be that far away without a way to come back quickly if I needed to.”
“Then, yes, we’re going to go see the fire people.”
“Fire people?” asked Chou Dai Lu.
“The Order of the Celestial Flame,” said Sen. “We, Lady Fa and I, have been there before.”
“I see,” answered the disciple.
Forming a qi platform beneath the three of them, Sen took them south. He let his spiritual sense and killing intent spread out around them. Neither was at full strength, but both were strong enough to keep any weaker spirit beasts at bay. If there was going to be a fight, Sen preferred to direct his attention to the stronger, more dangerous spirit beasts that might still be roaming the area. He’d honestly expected to have to fight a few, but things remained peaceful as the ground sped by beneath them. Falling Leaf soon grew bored of passively standing. She sat down and, after a time, curled up on the invisible platform, used her arm as a pillow, and fell asleep.
“I don’t know how she can sleep that way,” whispered Chou Dai Lu.
“This is nothing new to her, and she trusts that I’ll wake her if trouble finds us.”
Sen had braced himself for an endless string of questions from his new disciple. This would have been the time to ask them, as he wasn’t otherwise occupied. Yet, the girl seemed content to watch the trees. Her seeming fascination baffled him. Trees in winter had always struck him as skeletal reflections of themselves in bloom. A rather stark reminder that the coming of winter also meant the coming of death. It was old thought from a much more desperate time, but it felt all the more salient now. Sen looked at Chou Dai Lu for a moment and wondered if she was waiting for him to impart wisdom some wisdom.
He didn’t think he had much wisdom of his own to offer. Becoming nascent soul cultivator hadn’t granted him any revelations or insight. There was no blossoming of fresh understanding. He’d just received more power. Taken another step on the road to ascension. That was probably enough for most cultivators, but it had felt hollow to him and reinforced his belief about what ascension actually was. If it truly meant joining the heavens, this process should prepare him to take on such an important role. Yet, the only wisdom he had to offer was wisdom borrowed from his teachers. Perhaps, I’ll have something useful to say to her tomorrow, thought Sen.
They were too close to Inferno’s Vale to delve into a long conversation anyway. The closer they got to the Order of the Celestial Flame’s territory, the more certain he became that only tragedy waited for them there. There were no scouts or patrols. Nothing at all to indicate that cultivators even existed nearby. It wasn’t until they were practically in the vale that Sen felt the presence of cultivators. Four of them. That was all. He brought the platform to a stop and spoke.
“It’s time to wake up.”
Falling Leaf stirred and slowly got to her feet. She looked around while yawning. It was only then that the ghost panther’s eyes narrowed. She sent a sharp look his way. He wasn’t sure if she was picking up exactly what he was, but it was clear she didn’t like whatever she was sensing. He gave her a somber nod and looked to Chou Dai Lu.
“You should prepare yourself, disciple. What we find ahead will likely prove distressing.”
Despite his words, even Sen wasn’t prepared for what waited ahead. The area surrounding what had once been the compound for the Order of the Celestial Flame was a killing field. There were corpses, human and spirit beast alike, everywhere. Beyond that was utter devastation. Nearly half of the vale had been reduced to ash. That had to have been the work of the Order’s Matriarch. Sen could feel countless beast cores buried in that ash. The spirit beast might have won the battle, but the Matriarch had made them pay for the victory in blood. Any hope that Sen might have held that there were more survivors hidden somewhere was dashed, though. There wasn’t a single building left standing. Only rubble remained now.
“By the heavens,” said Chou Dai Lu.
Sen felt an irrational urge to tell the girl to shut up or maybe to tell her the heavens clearly weren’t paying attention, but he suppressed it. Yelling at her wouldn’t change anything that had happened here. Sen directed his qi platform to land outside a crudely constructed hut that only had canvas for a door. Two core cultivators he didn’t remember stepped out, weapons in hand. Not that either of them looked prepared to use those weapons. There was no life in their eyes.
“Judgment’s Gale,” said the one on the right. “I think you’ve come too late this time.”
Sen felt the rebuke in the man’s words, but chose to ignore it. This battle had been over long before Sen could have arrived. It was only the winter cold that had kept this place from turning into a sea of decay and disease. When spring arrived, though, he cringed to imagine what it would be like. He also feared he would have to inform Lo Meifeng that her brother was dead. Unless, by some miracle, he was one of the two still inside the hut.
“Since you are here,” said the other one, “perhaps your alchemy can still save the Matriarch.”
Sen was surprised to learn that the woman had survived, but maybe he shouldn’t have been. He was hard to kill. It stood to reason the Matriarch would be as well.
“Show me,” he said. “I’ll see if there’s anything to be done.”