Book 4: Chapter 64: Ruminations
Sen trudged through the door of the house in the middle of the night. It was blessedly quiet. He found his way into the kitchen and made tea. He took his time with it, making it the way he had once done when he lived with Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong. Then, he sat down and simply held the cup in his hand for most of a minute. He didn’t experience the warmth of it the same way he once had, which sapped some of the pleasure from the experience. Yet, the ritual and the smell of the tea still soothed him. He lifted the cup to his lips and took a sip, savored the subtle mix of flavors, and then swallowed. He hadn’t bought the tea, but it was very good. He’d have to ask the others where they got it.
Sen’s body felt heavy, and it was like his mind was stuffed full of loose material. It had been a long time since he’d felt a tiredness like that, and he knew it wasn’t just from pushing his body too hard. His physical resilience was still as potent as ever. He was tired in places that had nothing to do with the body. He hadn’t killed a few of Tong Guanting’s people or even dozens of them. He’d killed hundreds. It hadn’t even been fighting really. For all intents and purposes, Sen had gone on a rampage as bad as any spirit beast attack and figurately bathed himself in a river of blood. He'd only gotten away with it because they were all cultivator criminals, and anyone who might have stopped him had turned a blind eye.
The civilian government probably couldn’t have stopped him, but they could have made life impossibly difficult for him. Yet, they’d probably been overjoyed to have someone slaughtering semi-immortal criminals who were beyond their normal reach. The other sects in the city had likely seen Tong Guanting and his people as a blight but didn’t want to start a cultivator war in the streets. He still wasn’t sure why the other nascent soul cultivators had tolerated the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate and its leader, but he suspected their answer wouldn’t make sense to him. He supposed he could always ask Lai Dongmei if he really wanted to know, but he didn’t suppose he cared that much or even thought that it mattered.
Now that it was over, though, all of those people got to just move on. Sen was the one with all that blood on his hands. He could admit to himself that he didn’t feel the kind of overwhelming guilt he had thought he might. They were all criminals. He’d had personally witnessed some of them threatening and even harming mortals, then watched them laugh about it after. Those kinds of things had gone a long way to assuage his conscience. Yet, he wasn’t na?ve enough to think that every person he’d killed had been irredeemably evil. With so many deaths on his hands, it only stood to reason that some of those people might have been redeemed. Of course, the problem he’d faced was the same problem that soldiers faced on the battlefield. Knowing that some of the people on the other side probably didn’t deserve to die was something wholly different than being able to know them on sight.
For all his strength and all his gifts, Sen couldn’t see into the minds and souls of others to judge them in an instant. Whatever cultivators liked to tell themselves, and whatever mortals might think about them, cultivators weren’t gods. Not until they ascended, at least, and Sen suspected not even then. He had fragmentary memories of seeing other worlds while he was recovering from Lan Zi Rui’s vicious attack all those months ago. Worlds where cultivators had truly godlike powers, yet even there they hadn’t been true gods. He was willing to admit that those might have been hallucinations his consciousness generated to help protect him from the pain of massive trauma. They hadn’t felt like hallucinations, though. He’d had plenty of those too, and the hallucinations had, for lack of a better word, a spongy quality to them. Those visions of other worlds had had a quality of depth to them, as though they were underpinned by something more substantial than Sen’s meager imagination.
He had much clearer memories of brushing up against that organizing power that seemed to permeate all of reality and the vast reaches of its domain. His mind wisely shied away from Sen’s direct memories and experiences of the unspeakable distances contained in that domain, but it couldn’t wholly lock away the overwhelming sense of the gulfs of space so grand that Sen had no vocabulary to describe them. Those experiences had been sitting in the back of his head for a while now, and he’d considered them in idle moments, trying to soak meaning and understanding from them. While he hadn’t gotten any specific enlightenment from those ruminations, they had led him to the inevitable conclusion that the reality was a dramatically more complex affair than most people credited. Yet, recognizing that complexity had in many ways made things harder for him.
As troubling as karmic consequences had seemed before, they seemed vastly more mysterious and difficult to assess with the sense that people didn’t just live on this one world. While Sen suspected that most people’s karma didn’t extend beyond this one world, that was no guarantee. For all he knew, he had unintentionally influenced the karma of people beyond this world with his slaughter. Maybe it had been for the better, but maybe it had been for the worse. It had been that troubling line of thoughts that had ultimately taken him to the idea that maybe he didn’t belong on this world. He’d rejected it at first. It had sounded silly and far-fetched. Yet, that made more sense to him than the idea that he was just some kind of unparalleled, once-in-history cultivation genius. Even among genius cultivators, simply getting to core cultivation was normally the work of decades and that was considered meteorically fast. Moving through the stages of core cultivation could take someone centuries.
Sen could recognize that he was relatively intelligent and had more than a little natural aptitude for the cultivation. He was also willing to work brutally hard to make gains. But he knew in his heart that he wasn’t a genius. He wasn’t crashing through advancement after advancement on his own merits and vast insights. He didn’t think for a moment that he was better at fire cultivation than Shi Ping or Lo Meifeng. He doubted he could hold a candle to Chan Yu Ming’s understanding of water cultivation. He kept surviving through a combination of excessive qi reserves, brute force, superior training, cultivation flexibility, and a kind of ruthlessness that made him feel like a stranger in his own skin at times. Those things made him seem more capable than he actually was in objective terms.
If he was advancing on his own merits and relative understanding of cultivation, Sen estimated that he should probably still be somewhere in the low end of foundation formation. The irony was that he’d probably still be considered a unique talent in any sect, at least if he was operating in anything like normal circumstances. Yet, looking back, he could see moments where he’d accomplished things that only made sense if he’d gotten profoundly lucky or had some instinct that he couldn’t have gotten by being born on this world. Any time he considered that frankly insane experiment he’d done to expand and reinforce his qi channels and dantian, he’d marveled that he hadn’t simply killed himself. He should have died. It shouldn’t have worked. Not doing it the way he’d done, in a mad rush to finish with advancement bearing down on him. The creation of Heavens’ Rebuke was another moment where he’d done something that no one had ever told him to do or even described. It had just felt like the thing to do.
He suspected that somewhere deep in his soul, he carried some kind of instincts with him from wherever he’d been before or maybe from wherever he was supposed to be. He didn’t really understand the ins and outs of reincarnation, so there was more guesswork there than he’d like. Looking beyond that, though, he could almost feel an invisible hand at work, arranging situations for him. Creating encounters that would rush him forward in one way or another. Encountering Master Feng alone was so unlikely that, considering it in hindsight, it strained Sen’s sense of credulity. Of course, lucky encounters did happen, but they were rare. They kept happening to him. Unlikely situations, unlikely encounters, unlikely moments of enlightenment, and all of them racing him toward ascension. He could dismiss some of these things, but not all of them.
Even if he was supposed to be where he was, someone or something was taking a hand in his life. Arranging things to ensure that Sen wrung the maximum cultivation value out of his time. Yet, those same situations were also pushing Sen to become a more effective weapon. While even he still struggled to accept it, he had killed a nascent soul cultivator. It should have been impossible at his level of development. Sen doubted that anyone else in the early stages of core cultivation had the exact right combination of talents, skills, and experiences to replicate that feat. He cringed inwardly at what he might be capable of if he survived to become a nascent soul cultivator. He suspected it would be equal parts awe-inspiring and terrifying. And Sen had become too jaded to believe for a moment that someone was going to all of the trouble to help make that happen out of some altruistic impulse. If or when he ascended, someone was going to want a return on their investment. And Sen feared that they were going to be the exact kind of people that he would feel compelled to tell no.
Sighing, Sen lifted the cup to his lips again, only to discover the tea had gotten cold. Frowning, he cycled fire qi and warmed the liquid in his cup and the teapot. Hours later, when the others got up, Sen was still sitting at that table, a cup of cold tea held forgotten in his hand.
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