Book 2: Chapter 40: The Enormity of Simple Things
With his minor business settled for the day, Sen and Sun Lifen left Grandmother Lu’s shop. Sen suspected that the employees who knew who he was were greatly relieved by that. He glanced over at the young woman who seemed both pleased and exasperated. He knew he shouldn’t feel that way, but he was still vaguely amused by her reaction. As if she could sense his amusement, she gave him a narrow-eyed look.
“Yes?” Sen asked.
“That wasn’t necessary.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t, Sun Lifen, but it didn’t hurt anyone either, did it?”
She frowned at that, then said, “No, it didn’t. I think you can just call me Lifen at this point, don’t you?”
“As you wish. But only if you call me Sen.”
She rolled her eyes at him but nodded. “Where to now, oh mighty and honorable Sen?”
“The ocean,” said Sen, “assuming we can find a ride there.”
“We can find a rickshaw,” said Lifen, glancing around as though she expected one to appear immediately.
While it took a bit more walking, Sen did manage to flag down a rickshaw. It was something of a novel experience for Sen. Except for a few times with the caravan and his brief time with Bijan, Sen had done nearly all of his traveling by foot. Simply sitting in a little covered cart and letting someone pull him along was odd and interesting. People tended to make way for carts and rickshaws, so they made better time than they would have on foot. Like so much else about the city, Lifen seemed to take this kind of travel for granted. She spent far more time being entertained by Sen’s reactions to the experience.
“You really did grow up in some rural town, didn’t you?” she asked.
“I did,” admitted Sen. “I never could have imagined a place like this when I was a child. My whole world existed in a place that wouldn’t even be big enough to be considered a district here. Honestly, it’s a bit much for my tastes. There are so many people here, and so many of them are unhappy.”
“Yes, many of them are,” said Lifen.
“Including you?” asked Sen.
“Including me,” she agreed. “Surviving here means doing what you must, and fate is often unkind in deciding what you must do.”
“Isn’t that why we become cultivators? To defy the heavens? To chart our own paths?”
Lifen gave Sen a weary, sad smile. “Perhaps that is so for you, but you are a foundation formation cultivator. A powerful one with knowledge of alchemy and the jian, a wealthy grandmother, and teachers. Not all of us enjoy such advantages.”
Sen snorted, which drew an irritated look from Lifen.
“You think such things do not matter?” she demanded.
“Oh, you misunderstand. I know they matter. It’s just that those advantages are relatively new things for me. Up until about six years ago, I was him,” said Sen, pointing at a skinny young man huddled back in the shadows of an alley. “Fate is often unkind, I agree, but not always. I became what I am because a cultivator chose me, trained me, and enlisted others to teach me. I owe him much, not that I can ever repay him or my other teachers.”
“Why is that?”
“I’ve nothing to offer people like them. Their power, it’s so far beyond me that I don’t even have words for it. They aren’t quite gods, but they’re the next best thing to it.”
Lifen was staring at him, her eyes wide. “I don’t understand.”
“My master is a nascent soul stage cultivator. All of my teachers were. I could live another thousand years and still have nothing to offer them. There is literally nothing I can do for them.”
“Perhaps they do not wish for you to do anything for them. Perhaps they just wish for you to be in the world.”
It was Sen’s turn to stare. “I don’t understand.”
“Your teachers, they are old and powerful, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Do they have children?”
Sen thought hard. “Not that I know of.”
“Other students?”
“Maybe once, long ago, but none that they spoke of. Certainly, none that I met.”
Lifen shrugged. “People want to leave legacies behind them. I don’t know your master or your teachers, but perhaps they mean for you to be that legacy. If they are to become true immortals, to ascend, they won’t get that opportunity again. Not in this world.”
Sen was suddenly very glad that he was sitting down. He’d spent years wondering why Master Feng had picked him, and why Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong had spent so much time on him. He’d crafted elaborate theories at times, ones that stretched all the bounds of logic. Yet, in all those years, he had never stumbled onto that simple explanation. It had never even occurred to him. With their apparent reputations, Sen had just assumed that they’d built the legacies they wanted to build. Yet, maybe they wanted a different kind of legacy, a living legacy that carried more than the stories people told but true memories of them. Someone who could speak of their strengths, and their weaknesses, and the kindnesses that the Jianghu so rarely permitted cultivators to indulge in.
He also hadn’t considered the press of time. For him, centuries still seemed like vast, incomprehensible stretches of time. For them, though, centuries likely flowed by in a blink. After thousands of years, the knowledge that they must either ascend or face a true death within a handful of centuries must weigh on them the way that mortals seemed to dread that passage of a few decades. Sen could see where the gap in his thinking had come from. Once he started down the path of cultivation, he knew that his life would be very long, but he hadn’t experienced enough of it for time to weigh down on him yet. He had simply been too young to understand. It was such a simple thing, yet the enormity of it left Sen speechless. He didn’t even remember the rest of the trip to the gate in the wall. If Lifen spoke to him, or if he answered, he could never recall after.
It was only as they approached the gate that Sen really came fully back into the moment. He braced himself for another explanation, as he’d been forced to give the guard in Tide’s Rest, but the guards simply looked at the two of them, drew their own conclusions, and waved them through. The city wall was set much farther away from the shore than it had been in Tide’s Rest. There was also a lot more vegetation around, and Sen made a mental note to wander through and look for medicinal plants later. Fortunately, there were established paths through the growth. So, the two of them walked in a comfortable silence for a time. It was only when Sen could hear the steady crash of the waves on the beach that he tried to make Lifen cover her eyes.
“I’m not going to cover my eyes,” she said. “It’s silly.”
“Then, be silly for a few minutes. I’m the only person who will see it.”
She rolled her eyes again, but finally acquiesced and put her hands over her eyes. Sen gently grasped her arm and led her the rest of the way down onto the shore. Once they were fully onto the beach, Sen let go of her arm.
“Okay,” he said. “Now look.”
Lifen lowered her hand. Her eyes widened and her lips parted slightly at the sight of all of that water. Sen took a moment to appreciate it. Even with all the ships and boats out there, the simple vastness of the ocean, the stretch of blue that extended out to the horizon and beyond, gave Sen a sense of perspective. As pressing as his own needs and concerns were, they were also nothing. Were he to die at that moment, the ocean would carry on. The sky would carry on. The land would persevere, and the plants would grow. The winds would race across the land and carry the scents of soil and humanity up to birds in the sky. As much as his own concerns mattered to him, as much as they occupied his thoughts, they were not the world itself.
“Can you feel it?” Sen asked, his senses extended.
Whatever opportunity had been at Tide’s Rest wasn’t present here, but the raw power of the ocean remained. Sen could feel it out there, could feel the push and pull of the tide, both threatening and beckoning, swelling and receding as though it couldn’t decide if it loved the land or hated it.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for?” said Lifen.
“Push your senses out. Look below sound, beyond sight.”
Sen could feel Lifen trying to do as he asked and realized that it was beyond the limits of her cultivation. As he did with so many other things, Sen felt his way through the next few moments. He felt for the right combination of factors, for the right cycle of his qi, for the right moment. Then, he pressed his hand against her back, and let a bit of his qi flow into her. Lifen gasped as, for a few, brief, precious seconds, she could feel what Sen felt, observe what he observed in the world beyond the limits of her own spiritual sense. Then, as the right alignment of factors passed, Sen pulled his qi back. Lifen seemed lost in her own world for a time, so Sen returned to simply looking at the ocean. He doubted it would be soon, but Sen decided that, one day, he would sail on those waters.
Eventually, Lifen turned to him. “Why did you show me that?”
Sen smiled. “Because it’s just water, and it isn’t. It’s also power, and beauty, and destruction. It’s immediate, and it’s eternal. Mostly, though, I showed it to you because cultivation makes it very easy to get lost in the internal. Our dantians are inside of us. Our channels are inside of us. We cycle inside of us. We spend so much time looking inward that we forget that we still exist in the world. It has things to tell us, too, if we look, and if we listen.”
“And what has the world told you?”
Sen considered that for a moment, weighing all of his experiences since he left the mountain, judging the good and the bad. “That I can be more than one thing without betraying myself. That the same hands can give and take. That simplicity can breed certainty, but it doesn’t necessarily breed truth.”
When the sudden rush of qi surrounded him, Lifen stumbled back, uncertain of what was happening. Sen knew, though, and felt another surge of irritation as the universe seemed to make him the object of some obscure joke.
“Really?” he said, glaring at the sky. “Again?”
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