Book 2: Chapter 61: Change
Falling Leaf was bored. She’d gone through her usual morning. She caught a rabbit to eat. Then, she’d gone and let the Kho give her treats. Sometimes the Caihong would join him, but she hadn’t that morning. Then, Falling Leaf had snuck into the house and stolen one of the Kho’s snacks from his plate. She always found the look on his face when he saw the empty plate funny. Then, she’d gone and watched the Caihong work her strange alchemy. It was equal parts fascinating and disturbing to watch the woman convert beast cores, cores like the one inside Falling Leaf herself, into pills, potions, and elixirs. On the one hand, Falling Leaf didn’t understand why they bothered. Simply consuming the cores was always sufficient for spirit beasts to advance. Although, she could sense that the pills and elixirs were more potent than the cores themselves, at least in some ways. She didn’t think that she’d want to try them, though.
After that, she’d found a nice sunny spot on a rock to stretch out on. She used to just drop right off into a nice semi-conscious state, but not anymore. Now, she wondered about things. The Feng came and went, but he hadn’t been back in long enough that Falling Leaf was starting to wonder what had become of him. Except, she knew that wasn’t entirely true. The Feng was interesting because he was so powerful, but she didn’t actually care about what happened to him. When he came back, he often carried news about her human boy. She’d been bored ever since he left. Before, she always had him to watch as he trained or as he fumbled his way toward mastery of cultivation exercises. And they would do things together. She’d tried running around the wall things by herself, but it wasn’t the same. Plus, he would bring her new things to eat. Except, she knew that wasn’t the real problem either.
She missed the Sen. She worried about the Sen. The news that the Feng brought back with him was always equal parts reassuring and alarming. It was always reassuring because it meant her human boy was still alive. Yet, the things he’d been doing, fighting by himself, without her to ensure that nothing ambushed him. It made her heart ache. It made her want to find things to hunt, and hurt, and kill. But that wouldn’t make it better. She’d learned that the hard way. It distracted her, briefly, but the worry always came back. That terrible, gnawing worry that was like hunger, except no food could make it go away. Part of her, most of her, wished that she had gone with him when he asked. She’d had good reasons not to go. She couldn’t have gone with him as she was now. To go would have meant to change.
She knew it could be done. She was even relatively certain that she could do it. The problem was that she didn’t know if, once done, it could be undone. No one seemed to know. She had sought out elder spirit beasts, those who wouldn’t fell her on sight, and asked them. She had even, with difficulty, carried out conversations with the Caihong, the Kho, and the Feng about it. They didn’t know either. Falling Leaf liked herself as she was. If she could change and then change back, well, that would just be interesting. She liked interesting things. If she changed and could never make the conversion back, that would not be interesting. That would be terrible. To never feel her body coil and leap again, to never know what was around her from the merest touch of wind on her whiskers again, to never be that silent presence in the night again, it was a magnitude of loss that Falling Leaf could not even begin to process. And the very idea terrified her.
A little piece of her felt shame over that fear. Of course, the Sen wouldn’t have wanted her to change knowing what it might mean. She knew him well enough to know that. He might have even forbidden her from doing it. The silly creature, thinking he could command a ghost panther. Nothing could command a ghost panther, except, possibly, another ghost panther. They were too independent to ever willingly serve another. Of course, that was also why they were almost extinct. Falling Leaf knew that she might even be the last of the ghost panthers. There was a kind of sadness in that, but she didn’t think it was sadness like the humans felt. She understood that all things eventually passed. All people, all creatures, all species would eventually fail. Not because they were weak, or because they didn’t deserve to live, but because nature was ever-changing, ever-evolving, and a time always came when living things lost the race to keep up with that change.
Of course, that wasn’t what had happened to her kind. They had been hunted, and not even by cultivators, but by other spirit beasts. Those who believed that all should serve beneath a single master, a single pride leader, who would lead them against humanity. Her people had laughed at that. The time to cull the humans had come and gone, long, long ago. They were too many, and their cultivators too common. The best that the spirit beasts could ever hope for was to find a kind of balance with the humans. To lay claim to territory and defend it vigorously enough that the humans and cultivators chose to go elsewhere. Falling Leaf doubted that even that would be sufficient. She believed a day would come, not in her lifetime, nor likely the lifetimes of even her great-grandcubs, should she be lucky enough to have them, but a day would come when the only way that spirit beasts would survive would be because the humans decided to let them survive. She sincerely hoped that she wouldn’t live to see that dark day.
A quivering in her senses made Falling Leaf jump to her paws. There was no mistaking that presence. The Feng was returning. He thought he could mask himself and perhaps he could from the sense-blind humans, but not from her. When he moved, the very world shivered at his passing. She was off like an arrow in flight, moving in a straight line toward the Kho den. Occasional trees would get in her way and be batted aside like the nuisances they were. She leapt over the wall thing, bypassed the formations with a thought, and landed on the stones at the same time as the Feng. The old cultivator frightened her a little. He had the power of an ancient dragon, maybe more, and yet he masqueraded as a frail, old human man. She didn’t understand if it was a ruse, some kind of camouflage, or one of those human jokes that never made sense to her. He gave her a look, part bemused, part mystified.
“How do you always know?” he asked.
It was too much work to actually explain with words, so she did the shrug thing that she’d learned from the Sen. The Feng sighed.
“That boy was a bad influence on you,” he muttered.
She followed the Feng inside the den and waited while the humans said unimportant human things to each other. Then, finally, the Feng started talking about the Sen.
“It seems our boy has gotten himself in over his head.”
The Kho laughed. “Well, that didn’t take long. Do we need to go crack some sect heads?”
The Feng shook his head. “No, this is real trouble. Somehow, and I don’t know exactly how, he managed to expose an entire damn cabal of demonic cultivators.”
“What?” demanded the Caihong.
“Like I said, I don’t know all the details. He got into it with some sect down in Emperor’s Bay and killed an elder.”
The Kho and the Caihong immediately started yelling things at the Feng. The noise hurt her ears, so she hissed at them. Everyone immediately stopped talking. Falling Leaf glared at the Feng. He got the message.
“Believe it or not, that’s not actually the important part. The important part is that the elder was a demonic cultivator, and he had himself a whole list of other demonic cultivators in a little notebook. No, I don’t know why about that, either. So, don’t ask. He handed a copy of the list off to the person I have watching him. They got it to me.”
The Feng pulled out a stack of pages and handed them to the Kho and the Caihong. Falling Leaf felt panic clawing its way up her throat. Even spirit beasts knew about demonic cultivators. They were predators, the worst kind of predators. They would hunt her human boy. She needed to get outside. Slipping away from the humans, she opened the door with her jaws and stumbled out onto the stones. Her heart wouldn’t stop racing. She’d let the Sen go off by himself, and now he was going to be hunted like prey. He wasn’t ready to fight that kind of battle. He was too kind, too quick to show mercy. They would use that against him. They would kill him. There had been a hundred reasons not to change, to stay as she was, to let him go off by himself. And none of that mattered anymore.
While a human might have wavered or second-guessed, Falling Leaf was ultimately a spirit beast. Once the course was set, there was no reason to wait. Sadly, that didn’t mean she was prepared for what it meant. When she ignited her core, sent qi blazing through her body, commanded the change, she could never have understood the pain it would bring. Muscles and tendons were shredded under that irrevocable command. Bones broke and shattered, only to be reformed. It felt to her as though everything inside of her was on fire, and drowning, and being struck by the Kho’s lightning, all at the same time. She remembered the Sen screaming after taking pills, and now she thought she understood why. But that was a vague thought, lost somewhere in the back of her mind, hidden behind the twin pillars of agony and determination.
Falling Leaf understood that any hesitation, any slackening of her will would mean death, or something truly grotesque. There was nowhere to go but forward. So, she pushed, willing the change, willing her body to become something other than it had been, something that could pass among the humans. She endured the pain, endured the fire, and eventually, when all thought had been consumed in the inferno, she simply endured. Then, as abruptly as it had all started, it was over. It was all she could do to keep breathing. It felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. Her body was wrong. Nothing moved the way it should. She couldn’t smell everything anymore. She felt deaf. What if it didn’t work, she thought in horror.
“What in all the hells were you thinking?” shouted the Feng.
It all came rushing back to her. The Sen. The demonic cultivators. She lurched to her feet, only for her balance to give out. The Feng caught one of her arms. She fixed her gaze on him, eyes burning with need and fury.
“You will take me to him! You will take me to him, now!”
Then, Falling Leaf’s eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed. The last things she remembered were being caught in strong arms and the Feng’s aggravated voice wafting out of the darkness that was quickly overtaking her.
“Well, that’s not going to complicate things at all.”
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