Book 5: Chapter 3: Symptom
As the weeks bled into each other and the last remnants of winter faded away, Sen found himself having to work harder and harder to keep up the pace of their search. At first, he simply supplemented his body with some of that liquid qi that was constantly forming in his dantian. It worked, for a while. Yet, he could feel it growing a little less effective each day. Finally, he started making excuses to take breaks during the day just so he could rest for a few minutes. The true seriousness of the problem became apparent to him in the middle of a cool spring afternoon. Sen had his spiritual sense spread, scanning the area for anything that might even hint that a nascent soul cultivator had been there. He was searching for any trace of the kind of overwhelming qi that he’d felt so often from Master Feng. He was so focused on his spiritual sense that it caught him wholly unprepared when a pain exploded in his stomach. Sen jerked attention back to his body, but it was too late.
He'd been running at a ridiculous pace through the trees and that pain had interrupted his stride. The next thing Sen knew, he was crashing and bouncing along the ground. He tried to summon air qi to halt the wild tumble, but more pain made his vision go white. It felt like someone was shredding his organs from the inside while simultaneously setting fire to them. Sen was only vaguely aware of it as his body slammed against a tree. The pure momentum of his body shattered the trunk and barely slowed him. He was pretty sure that he hit more trees, but that pain inside of him was simply overwhelming. Sen had been hurt before. He’d learned to cope with pain under the tutelage of Master Feng and Uncle Kho, or so he’d thought. This agony was something altogether new. It had come on him so fast and with such strength that he simply hadn’t had any time to prepare himself for it.
In the end, all Sen could do was curl in on himself and endure. He clenched his jaws so hard against the screams that wanted to escape his lips that he was shocked his teeth didn’t shatter, again. Bit by bit he pushed the pain away from the center of his consciousness. It wasn’t gone, but he carved out a space in his mind where he at least had a chance to put one thought in front of another. Bit by bit, he reclaimed reason from the howling insanity of pain. When he finally managed to secure enough control that he could open his eyes, he found Falling Leaf crouched over him. Her face looked drawn like she thought he might die right then and there. Sen forced himself to sit up. He went to give her a wan smile but realized he could taste blood in his mouth.
“What happened?” she asked.
Sen looked down at his stomach. He didn’t know what to tell her. He didn’t know what specifically had happened. Then again, he supposed he didn’t need to know specifically what had gone wrong. He did know what was happening. He offered Falling Leaf a shrug.
“What we knew would happen,” he said. “My body is starting to fail.”
“We should go back,” she said. “You should rest.”
Sen shook his head and spat out the blood that was still in his mouth. “This won’t get better. We have to use the time we have. While I can still move.”
Falling Leaf glared at him. “We won’t find anyone if you kill yourself today.”
“I won’t die today,” said Sen, not sure he really believed it.
“Then,” she hesitated, clearly uncertain what she could say, “then you will rest here. For a little while.”
Sen wanted to protest but the very idea of standing up, let alone running again, made him want to whimper.
“Alright,” he said, giving in to her demands and his own deepest desire. “For a little while.”
Sen let himself sink back down to the ground. After a moment, he pulled a blanket out of a storage ring and used it as a makeshift pillow. He let his eyes close and went back to reclaiming control of himself. It was harder than he thought it would be and took almost half an hour of focused effort, but Sen managed to push the pain away enough that he felt almost normal. The pain wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t the center of Sen’s universe anymore. Finally able to think again, he went looking for the cause of the pain. He cast his senses inside of his body. His first thought was that something had gone wrong with his dantian or core, but those both looked perfectly intact and healthy. He turned to his organs next. They seemed fine, as did his muscles, and the nearby bones.
Sen couldn’t understand what was happening. The pain didn’t come from nowhere. He knew that much. Perplexed, Sen just hovered for a moment before he decided to try to look or at least sense deeper. He plunged his awareness down into the tissues of his muscles and organs. There, he finally found the problem. The tissues themselves were starting to break down. He just didn’t understand the mechanism. They weren’t decaying. It was more like they were fraying and unraveling. Despite all of his attempts to understand what the problem was, Sen couldn’t find an insight that would explain it to him. Without that insight, he didn’t have any chance of coming up with any fix for the problem that would be more than a temporary measure. He knew he could shore up his body for a while with elixirs and pills. Yet, that wasn’t a fix for something like this. Those elixirs and pills were meant to work with a body that was, for the most part, functioning as it should. His body clearly wasn’t. Without that damn manual, he couldn’t even be sure what was supposed to be happening with his body.
Sighing to himself, Sen withdrew his awareness from inside his body. He took out a general healing elixir and drank it. He waited until it hit his stomach and then did his best to direct its healing properties to the tissues in his body. The pain he’d kept shunted to the side started to fade, but it didn’t go away entirely. I guess this is the new normal, thought Sen. Constant pain. Not letting himself groan the way he really wanted to, Sen got up from the ground and stowed the blanket back in his storage ring. He felt Falling Leaf watching him from nearby. After it was clear he meant to resume their search, she came over to him.
Sen spoke before she could. “I know. You think I should rest. There isn’t time for that. At some point, I won’t be able to do any of this. That means, pain or not, we have to keep going while I still can.”
While Sen had learned to read Falling Leaf’s expressions more accurately over the last several seasons, there was still something fundamentally alien about how she thought and reacted to some things. In those moments, her expressions were often an opaque mystery to Sen. It seemed that she was in full-blown panther mode in that moment because he had no idea what her expression meant. In the end, she simply nodded.
“It is your life, Sen. I cannot tell you how to spend it.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
Falling Leaf gave him a much easier-to-read expression of pure frustration. “I didn’t say I understand. I just know that you will ignore me if I insist. There is no benefit in that for either of us. If you’re going to spend your energy, you should spend it searching. Not wasting it in a pointless argument.”
Sen wanted to feel a little offended. He wanted to, but he didn’t. She was right. He was going to proceed whether she wanted him to or not. Even if she’d decided to scream at him for an hour, he would still continue the search. It was his life, and it was also becoming very clear to him that he was running out of chances to save it. He would keep going until he literally couldn’t drag himself out of bed. A fate he feared would arrive far sooner than he would like. Yet, despite Sen’s intentions, there was a part of him that thought that this was a doomed venture. For all the method he was putting into the search, it didn’t mean much. Unless he literally stumbled over the woman’s home, Sen knew that it would just be a matter of pure luck to find Fu Ruolan or for her to find them. As the afternoon wore on, Sen could also feel the elixir slowly losing the battle. If he had done as Falling Leaf suggested and rested for the rest of the day, it might have helped more.
Unfortunately, even if he’d been willing, they were miles and miles from the galehouse. In fact, they probably should have moved to a new one already, but he’d been putting it off. Now, he wished that he’d done it sooner so they wouldn’t have as far to travel at the end of the day. Even worse, he didn’t think he’d have the focus necessary to make another one. Plus, there were things he’d left in the last one that they’d need to collect. He also knew that he was going to have to start pouring time into making the elixirs he’d need to stumble his way through the next month or two. If the pain he’d experienced that day was any kind of indication of what he could expect in the future, there would come a point where he wouldn’t be able to push the pain away. When that dark day arrived, it was over.
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