Book 3: Chapter 3: Moon Cakes
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. No sooner had the captain walked away than Lifen appeared. She smiled at him, clearly happy to see him up and about, but there was a line of worry between her eyes. Sen gave a quick, longing glance at the beach before giving Lifen his full attention.
“I’m glad to see that you’re awake, but should you be up and about? Lo Meifeng seemed,” Lifen frowned a little, “concerned that you might have damaged yourself.”
Sen lifted an eyebrow at that. After a moment of consideration, though, he supposed that Lo Meifeng wouldn’t have needed any kind of special knowledge to develop that concern. Bleeding from the eyes, ears, and nose, followed by unconsciousness rarely heralded good things for most people. She wasn’t even wrong. Sen had damaged himself. It just wasn’t the permanent kind of damage. At least, he didn’t think it was. He supposed that you never knew for sure until you tried to heal from something. He did his best to give Lifen a reassuring smile.
“I’m fine,” he said.
The skepticism on her face was so profound that it almost looked like parody to Sen.
“Fine? Really? So, if a giant wave came crashing into the cove, you’re all ready to protect us in another one of those bubbles?”
Sen coughed a little sheepishly. “No. I wouldn’t want to do that again. Not right now, at any rate.”
“Mmmm hmmmm,” said Lifen.
Sen held up a hand. “But, I’m not hurt in a way that needs bed rest. It’s nothing a bit of alchemy and a steady supply of qi won’t solve.”
Lifen looked dubious but relented. “Fine. It’s not like I could really stop you, anyway. How about you just try to not injure yourself any more for the next day or two.”
“I will do my utmost to avoid more injuries for at least a day or two,” said Sen, giving Lifen a little bow.
“Yeah, right,” she sighed.
“What are you doing up on deck, anyway?” asked Sen. “I figured you’d be tucked away somewhere with your cultivation manuals.”
“I’m helping.”
She said the words slowly, as though she might be speaking to a particularly dense horse.
“And that’s good, but why?”
Lifen rolled her eyes. “I might not be the cultivator Lo Meifeng is, or stack up against the might of Judgement’s Gale, but even my level of cultivation makes me stronger than most of the people on this ship. It gives me more endurance too.”
Sen blinked a couple of times in surprise. She wasn’t wrong. Somehow, he’d fallen into the trap of thinking of her as physically weak. And in comparison to a core cultivator or an advanced body cultivator, she was. Relative to mortals, though, she’d seem just as superhuman as Sen did. Just maybe a touch less flashy. Sen only had experience dealing with mortals as a foundation formation cultivator. He knew that even a casual blow from him could end a mortal life in a snap. He'd never dealt with mortals as a qi condensing cultivator. He’d never had to consider their relative strength levels or relative durability. Yet, he supposed the gulf between mortals and qi condensing cultivators must look about as wide as the gulf between foundation formation cultivators and core cultivators. Right up until you were closing in on bridging that divide, the gulf was vast.
Sen nodded. “That makes sense. I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms.”
“That’s because you, at times, are ridiculously bad at considering the practicalities.”
Sen laughed. “My grandmother would agree with you.”
Lifen stiffened and then let out an exasperated breath. “Honestly, I hate that woman sometimes. I can feel her glaring at me.”
Sen looked over Lifen’s shoulder and saw Lo Meifeng standing there, tapping her foot impatiently. A familiar impish feeling swelled in Sen’s chest. He was careful to keep it off his face as he leaned down and whispered in Lifen’s ear.
“Want to have a bit of fun at her expense?”
“Sure,” said Lifen, suddenly enthused. “What will we do?”
“Let’s pretend that we’re going to head back to the cabin and do some of that pillow biting she recommended.”
A tiny giggle escaped from Lifen’s mouth before she pressed her lips together and nodded. Standing back up straight, Sen offered Lifen his arm. She slipped her arm through his and directed such a lust-filled stare up at him that Sen found it so distracting he nearly tripped. They’d made it all of three steps before Lo Meifeng appeared before them in a burst of speed and wind.
“Oh no, you don’t,” the woman declared.
Sen and Lifen kept straight faces for about three seconds before a snort escaped Sen. Then, a giggle slipped through Lifen’s tightly compressed lips. Then, they were both laughing uproariously at the increasingly unamused Lo Meifeng. The woman glared at both of them before she realized that she’d been the butt of their joke. Then, she just looked exasperated.
“Children,” she muttered to herself. “Lifen, go back to being helpful if you please. I need a word with the young hero.”
Lifen looked like she might protest, but the young woman just couldn’t seem to sustain the annoyance through her mirth. She patted Sen’s arm before she wandered off to find some way to put her more-than-human strength to good use. Sen watched her go, appreciating the young woman’s curves. An annoyed cough brought his attention back to Lo Meifeng. She was glaring at him again.
“What?” he demanded. “She’s nice to look at.”
Lo Meifeng opened her mouth, thought for a moment, then sighed. “Fine. I suppose she is. If you’re done leering, though, we do need to talk.”
Sen groaned out loud. “Really? I’ve been out of bed for all of half an hour. Is this something that we need to discuss right now? Or is this just something that you’ve been chewing on for the last day or two that you want to unload on me now that I’m back on two feet?”
Without missing a beat, Lo Meifeng said, “Both.”
“Alright. Let’s have it.”
“Did you think that I was joking when I said that it was my job to keep you alive?”
Sen frowned at her. “No.”
“Okay. So, at what point did you decide that you’d take on a core cultivator in a monsoon?”
Sen snorted. “What makes you think I had a chance to decide any such thing?”
That seemed to throw Lo Meifeng off. “What?”
“The amount of time between when I realized that there was another cultivator out there and when there was a giant wave about to drive us to the bottom of the sea could be measured in seconds. I didn’t decide anything. I just acted. What happened to that other cultivator anyway?”
Lo Meifeng processed his words in silence for a moment before her lips turned up into a smug little smile. “He won’t be bothering us again.”
“Was it a demonic cultivator?” Sen asked in a hushed tone.
“No,” said Lo Meifeng. “Not that I could tell anyway. Still, it’d be awfully coincidental if he was just out here whipping up storms and trying to sink ships for fun.”
“Possibly. Unless he was out here trying to sink ships for profit. Most ships carry cargo. It’s easier to take if all those pesky crew members are dead.”
“There are easier targets than a ship with three cultivators on it.”
Sen sighed. “So, are we assuming they know where we are?”
Lo Meifeng paused then to consider her answer. Ultimately, she shook her head. “They may have suspected we left by ship, but I imagine whatever orders they handed out were something along the lines of sink any ship you find with cultivators aboard.”
“What if he reported back?”
“Unlikely. There aren’t that many long-distance communication treasures out there. Certainly not enough to hand them out to every would-be assassin. When he doesn’t report back in, they’ll know something happened, but even that’s not really proof it was us. Plus, we’ll be long gone by the time anyone comes looking.”
Sen didn’t really like it, but there also wasn’t much to be done about it. He might feel comfortable about hopping off the ship right then and there and taking his chances in the wilds, where no one was likely to find him. He’d only given Lo Meifeng even odds of surviving it. Lifen wouldn’t make it. That meant that they were stuck with the ship until they at least reached some kind of civilization and roads. He didn’t love the idea of traveling openly on the roads either, but they’d come a very long way from Emperor’s Bay. The demonic cultivators might have a long reach, but they couldn’t be everywhere, couldn’t watch every mile of road, every stretch of river, every possible means of travel.
“Very well,” said Sen, not doing much to hide his lack of enthusiasm for the plan.
Lo Meifeng arched an eyebrow at him. “I suppose you have a better solution.”
“I don’t. It doesn’t mean I love the one we have. If that’s all, I have some things I need to go and do.”
“Go?”
“To the beach. I need access to a steadier supply of all the types of qi than I can get out here on the water. Otherwise, it’ll take me five times as long to heal.”
“Fine, I’ll get a boat ready.”
“No need,” said Sen, and leapt over the side of the ship.
Even as he fell toward the water below, he could hear Lo Meifeng shouting after him.
“Damn it! I have to come with you!”
Feeling another surge of impishness, Sen shouted back a bunch of garbled nonsense with only one understandable phrase in the middle. “Moon cakes.”
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