Book 3: Chapter 20: Lessons
Falling Leaf glared across the table at the Caihong and resisted the urge to smash the teapot. No, she reminded herself for the hundredth time, Ma Caihong. She was so frustrated with the woman, with the situation, with the countless, stupid human rules that she had to learn. They had rules for everything. They had rules about when to sleep. Rules about when to eat. Rules about how to eat. And so many rules about bowing. She honestly didn’t know how they kept track of it all, let alone why they’d want to make their lives so complicated. Then, there were the clothes. Those were so complicated, and her graceless human body didn’t make it any easier. To make it worse, she knew that this was forever. As soon as she had done it, she knew. She’d never be able to go back. She’d mourned that loss for so many days. No, she reminded herself, weeks. The humans call them weeks.
That was something else she struggled to understand. The humans were obsessed with naming time. For Falling Leaf, time was simple. There was day. There was night. There were seasons. That had always been enough. Now, though, there weren’t just days. There were specific days, and they had names that she needed to remember. Those days happened in a specific order, and the humans put great stock in that fact for some unfathomable reason. But the humans couldn’t stop their madness there. No, they had to break their days up into some made-up thing called hours, as though there was a real difference between time in the morning and time in the evening. There was just day and night. She knew this. She had always known this. But Ma Caihong insisted that this was something that Falling Leaf needed to know.
The worst part, though, was that she had to learn how to fight. She remembered how to fight, but the way she fought wouldn’t work in this new body. She had to learn how the humans used their metal claws, and how they used their qi. At least that part hadn’t been so bad, she thought. She’d been pleasantly surprised to learn that gathering qi and using it in her human body was easier than it had ever been in her beautiful, lost panther body. She actually enjoyed learning about that, which Ma Caihong had figured out all too quickly. Now, the woman wouldn’t teach her about qi or fighting unless she made progress with all of the other stupid human things.
The worst part, though, was that she’d made this change so she could go to her human boy, and that seemed farther away now than it had on the day she changed. There were times when she felt defeated, lost in a tide of things she didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. But she had to learn. She had made this choice. There was no going back, so she must go forward. Grimacing, she turned her attention back to the teapot and started over.
***
Feng Ming was thinking about pastries. He hadn’t been back to that little shop in years, and that was unfortunate. They had been a nice family. Just as importantly, they had real skill in their craft. So many people made a hash of their professions, squeaking by with barely adequate results. He truly didn’t understand why someone would put so little effort into something they would spend so much time doing. Of course, he also understood that many mortals found themselves doing work they didn’t wish to do, but he wasn’t certain that was really a good enough excuse to do the work badly. After all, he’d never particularly enjoyed practicing the jian, but it was the weapons his master had chosen to train him in. He’d been diligent about it and invested himself in it as thoroughly as he invested himself in his cultivation exercises. He thought that the results spoke for themselves. He wasn’t so arrogant as to believe that he was the greatest swordsman alive, but he thought he could reasonably claim to be among the top ten.
That was something he’d appreciated the entire time he’d been teaching Sen. That boy’s dedication and drive were simply unparalleled in Feng Ming’s experience. He’d been relentless. No, thought Feng Ming, relentless doesn’t do it justice. That boy had been pitiless with himself. If Feng Ming had been half so driven in his youth, he would have ascended four thousand years ago. Although, that would have been a pity. He would have missed out on so many interesting things. He’d have barely gotten to know Kho Jaw-Long or Ma Caihong. There were students he would never have trained. There would also certainly be a lot more people in the world that the world would be better off without. There had also been hard times in there. Friends lost to wars, to other cultivators, even to his own stupidity. Yet, those losses, the poignance of them, gave him a much deeper appreciation for all the grand wonders and tiny miracles he had witnessed in his long life. In the end, he was glad he’d taken his time.
He suspected that Sen wouldn’t. It would be too much like a half-measure, and if there was one thing that boy hated, it was half-measures. Although, Feng Ming suspected Sen would deny that. There was a streak of kindness in that boy that Feng Ming had worked exceedingly hard not to extinguish. It occasionally made the boy make bad choices, but also did a lot of work to soften the other thing that Feng Ming saw in him. There was a tower carved of pure diamond that ran straight through that young man. It wasn’t always obvious, and he’d personally witnessed Sen try to hide it, but that obdurate, unbreakable hardness was there, obvious to those with eyes to see. That was why the boy had been able to endure all those double advancements. It was why he’d been able to train like a pack of devils was waiting for him to take a break. It was also why the boy had found himself in his current predicament.
That thought brought Feng Ming back into the moment. He’d only been half paying attention to the demonic cultivator that had been waving a jian at him like a toddler and throwing pitiful qi techniques at him for the last few minutes. Sighing to himself, he decided that it was high time to end this charade. Feng Ming moved his arm in a casual thrust. The thrust sheared the other man’s blade in half, shattered three separate defensive techniques, punched through the man’s chest, and severed his spine. Feng Ming withdrew the blade and peered down at the man on the ground.
“A lesson for you to take into your next life,” said Feng Ming. “A lesson all warriors must eventually learn, or it will kill them. Know your enemy.”
Then, with a casual flick of his wrist, he deprived the man’s body of its head. As he casually looked around at the smoldering ruins that had once been the sect the demonic cultivator was hiding in, Feng Ming wondered if he had the time to visit that pastry shop.
***
Kho Jaw-Long couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun. Not that he wasn’t concerned about the boy. He was very worried about Sen. The boy was almost freakishly talented. That much had been obvious with the way he’d taken to alchemy. It was only his own hangups about pills that had bottlenecked him there, but Caihong said he’d started doing things with elixirs that she’d found fascinating. He could appreciate what she meant. Sen had soaked up formation knowledge like a sponge. If he could have had five more years with the boy, he’d have turned him into a formation master like nothing the world had seen in five hundred years. The threat of losing a talent like that alone was bad enough, but the strange, half-starved, nearly feral boy that Ming had dragged up the mountain had filled an empty place in Kho Jaw-Long’s heart that he hadn’t even realized was there. He was more son than student, and Kho Jaw-Long would, by the heavens, protect what was his.
Of course, that didn’t mean he couldn’t have a good time while he protected what was his. And, if someone couldn’t have a good time killing demonic cultivators, they were just doing it wrong. Fortunately, he knew how to do it right. It helped that there just wasn’t a group of people more rightly deserving of grisly deaths than demonic cultivators. That was how Kho Jaw-Long found himself hovering in the air over a sect, lighting wrapped around him so tightly that he blazed like the sun, issuing threats and demands. Below, he saw the sect members running around like headless chickens, while elders tried to put up formations that would keep him out. Like those fools even knew a formation that could stop him.
“Just send her out,” shouted Kho Jaw-Long, his voice amplified with a bit of air qi.
He’d taken a page out of Sen’s book and started cultivating a bit of other kinds of qi. He’d never be able to do the kinds of things Sen did. He’d started too late for that. But he could pull together enough qi of different types for little tricks. Of course, that little trick sent off wholesale wailing and terror below as they thought he was one of the rare prodigies who successfully cultivated multiple qi types. He let them think it.
“You cannot have her,” shouted back one of the elders. “You cannot hope to defeat the might of the entire Thundering Mountain sect!”
At those words, Kho Jaw-Long threw back his head and laughed. Then, he descended on them. Their formations broke, shattered, or burned away without slowing him by a moment. He landed in front of the elder who had just spoken. The man’s eyes looked like they were about to fall out of his skull, which made it hard for Kho Jaw-Long to keep a straight face, but he mastered his glee and put on an appropriately stern face.
“I assure you, I can,” he said. “Although, if you’ve called out all of this much force to protect a demonic cultivator, perhaps I should just cull the entire sect. You’re probably all corrupt.”
Exactly one minute later, the demonic cultivator was dragged before Kho Jaw-Long. Five seconds later, her smoldering skeleton was dragged away to be, well, probably thrown on a trash pile somewhere if there was justice in the universe. He looked over at the elder and nodded.
“I see that you’ve learned at least one lesson today.”
“What lesson is that, honored cultivator?” asked a pale-faced elder in a shaky voice.
“Not everything is worth dying for.”
Then, he was flying away on a platform of qi. The list Sen had sent was long, and Kho Jaw-Long was in a mood to travel.
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