Book 2: Chapter 58: The Question
There had been no real hiding it once Sen started preparing to leave. If it had just been him, and he’d been planning to vanish into the night, that would have been one thing. When he gave it some thought, he even gave himself even odds of getting away if he went alone. He could hide and set up effective obscuring formations. Of course, if he was wrong about how effective either the technique or the formations were, he’d face his enemies alone. If he was willing to leverage every combat technique at his disposal, he’d give himself fair chances, even against an initial core cultivator. Of course, that would leave a very obvious path of destruction for people to follow. Plus, the odds that he’d face only one enemy at a time seemed dismally low to him. Freedom and autonomy were all well and good, but Sen was going to prioritize survival for the moment.
That meant going along with Lo Meifeng’s plan. That meant enlisting the help of others to pull off her ridiculous plan. As it was, Sen had been haunting the main gateway into the city, talking with the caravans that came in, asking about the schedules, and hinting that he might be willing to provide some additional security if they didn’t mind him tagging along when they left. Lo Meifeng had been off investigating the possibility of buying horses or perhaps purchasing some kind of carriage they could use for travel. Both of them made a point of being very obvious about their intentions to leave the city.
Meanwhile, Lifen had been very quietly sending out trusted servants to inquire with ship captains about their schedules or to speak with local theater troupes. When Lo Meifeng had first described her plan to Sen, it had sounded ridiculously complicated and unworkable. Yet, as the information poured in, and tentative agreements were struck, it sounded increasingly feasible. Of course, that also meant that Sen could see the unasked question in Lifen’s eyes. For the first day or two, he thought she was just building up the courage to ask. Then, the truth struck him. She wanted him to ask her to go with them. Unwilling to bear the looks she was giving him, he sat her down one night after a long day of pretending to look for work as security for a caravan.
Sen didn’t really know how to ease into the conversation. He’d imagined trying to open with a casual question or three, but it always sounded awkward and unnatural in his head. In the end, he decided that being straightforward about the whole thing would just be easier for everyone.
“You want to go with me,” he said.
Lifen looked a little startled. He supposed that she’d been expecting him to ask her to go, rather than observing that she wanted to go. She took a moment to compose herself before she nodded.
“Yes.”
Sen couldn’t quite suppress the sigh that escaped his lips. He held up a hand when he saw the hurt on Lifen’s face.
“You don’t have all the information, yet,” said Sen. “If you leave with me, you aren’t just signing on to the life of a wandering cultivator. If that’s all it was, I’d be happy to have you along. As it stands, well, you’re going to be in danger no matter what you do.”
“Why would I be in danger?”
So, Sen laid out the entire situation for her. He explained about what he’d found in the demonic cultivator’s storage ring and the information he now had locked up in his head. He told her what he’d done with the notebook and tainted cultivation resources. He held back that he’d sent a copy of the information off to Master Feng. The fewer people who knew about that, the better. Then, he explained the likely responses of the demonic cultivators. He was as blunt about the dangers as he could be, both if she came with him, and if she stayed in Emperor’s Bay. She’d remained largely silent through the explanation, a faint line appearing between her eyes from time to time. Once Sen was finished, she sat quietly for a time, lost in her own thoughts.
“So, coming with you means going on the run and, in all likelihood, staying on the run for the foreseeable future?”
“Yes, that’s about the size of it. We won’t necessarily be hiding out in the wilds all the time, but we won’t be settling in anywhere, not anytime soon. We’ll always be moving on. Trying to limit our involvement with what’s happening wherever we land. It’s not that big of a deal to me because that was already what I was doing. For you, though, it’ll be a big change. There will be a lot that you’ll have to learn about staying safe away from the protection of city walls.”
Lifen snorted. “You call this limiting your involvement?”
“I’m not always successful,” admitted Sen with a bit of wince, “but that’s the goal.”
“I’d be a liability to you out there, wouldn’t I? At my cultivation stage, you’d have to watch out for me all the time. I’d be useless to you in a fight. I don’t even know how to fight.”
Sen shrugged. “In my experience, travel has a way of driving cultivation forward. That reminds me.”
Sen tossed Lifen one of the extra storage rings he had sitting around. He reminded himself, again, that he needed to get rid of the rest of them. Lifen caught the ring, puzzled over it briefly, and then pulled a couple of cultivation manuals out of it. She looked up in surprise.
“More manuals? Where did these come from?”
“The Stormy Seas sect. It was their way of making amends. You should have a manual for each of the main qi types now. It’s enough to get started with, anyway, I think.”
She frowned down at the manuals. “Amends? They didn’t do anything to me.”
“No, but they did some things to me. And I did some things to them. I didn’t really want anything for myself, but I saw an opportunity to help you. So, I took it.”
The young woman seemed conflicted but shook that off. “Thank you. I couldn’t have gotten these on my own.”
“Oh, I expect that you would have found a way. You’re resourceful.”
She smiled at him, then it faltered. “These will help with cultivation, but I still can’t fight.”
“You say that like it’s something people either can do or can’t do. Fighting is a skill. You can learn. It’s not like I knew how to fight before someone taught me.”
Lifen fell silent again for a time. “If I stay, I’m still a liability to you. Worse, I’m a liability to the people here. If someone comes to take me, I doubt they’re going to care much if they have to cut their way through everyone else to find me.”
Sen wanted to reassure her that wouldn’t happen, but he was worried that was exactly what would happen.
“Probably, but it’s not a certainty that they’ll come here or even come looking for you. If I don’t take you, they may think that you were-,” Sen paused.
“Just a whore you enjoyed?” Lifen finished for him, smirking a little. “You don’t have to try to spare my feelings. It’s not like you ever treated me that way. Hells, you may even be right. People tend to see what they expect to see. If you just leave me behind like some prostitute you’re done with, they might assume that I’m nothing to you.”
Sen shrugged. “Yes, it’s a possibility.”
“So, I come with you, and I’m a liability. I stay here, and I’m probably a liability. But, if I stay here, they may not come.”
Sen didn’t say anything. Lifen was clearly working something out in her own head.
“Is your life always like this?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“Filled with nothing but bad options?”
Sen theatrically pressed a hand to his chest and put on an exaggerated version of a wounded expression. “You’re saying my company is a bad option?”
Lifen hit him in the face with a pillow.
“I’m being serious,” she said.
Sen tossed the pillow from hand to hand for a few seconds to buy himself a moment to think. Eventually, he nodded.
“Yes. I mean, no, it’s not always like this, but it’s like this more often than I’d like.”
“For the record, that would have been the ideal moment to tell me a comforting lie.”
“Duly noted. Listen, this isn’t something you have to decide right this second. Don’t rush the choice. Take the night. Think it over. Talk to your mother. There may be some other option, a safer option, that Lo Meifeng and I overlooked. We’ve tried to look at all the angles, but it doesn’t mean we covered them. If you decide to come, we’ll figure it out. If you don’t, I’ll try to give you whatever cover I can.”
A look of relief and gratitude suffused Lifen’s expression. “Thank you.”
Sen blinked at that. “For what? I brought this disaster down on your head.”
Lifen laughed. “Well, that’s the heavens’ own truth. I meant thank you for giving me the information and time I need to make the best choice for me.”
“Oh, well, yeah. It’s what I’d want someone to do for me.”
As Sen tried and failed to sleep that night, a part of him desperately hoped that Lifen’s mother would have some other option, some way to smuggle Lifen away from the city and off to somewhere else. Yet, he wasn’t sure how much that would help or if it would just slow down a search for the young woman. He supposed it was out of his hands. Lifen would make the choice she made. He’d given her the information, and she had to decide what she’d do with it. It’s what every cultivator did in the end. Yet, for all that he hoped that she might choose to stay or find some other option, he couldn’t say that he was surprised when she came to him with her decision the next day.
“I want to go with you,” she said.
He regarded her for a long moment. “I truly hope that you’re doing this for you and not for me. For all that can be healed, there is no medicine for regret.”
She gave him an odd little smile then, one that he didn’t understand, and said, “No, there certainly isn’t.”
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