The longer Sen stayed in the town, the more unsettled he became. It wasn’t a huge place, probably only home to a few thousand people. At least, that was Sen’s best guess. Of course, any place that was meant to house thousands of human beings became something wholly other when there was no one to be found. Oh, there was evidence that people had been there. There was also evidence of some violence. He’d seen dried blood that had splashed up onto walls or pooled in some places on the ground. The problem was that there simply wasn’t enough of it. He’d looked inside a few of the homes and everything was still there. Including the kinds of small treasures that no one parted with willingly. More importantly, there was no sign that the people had fled as a group. There were still carts on nearly every street. There just weren’t any people or animals. There weren’t even any birds or rodents.

Sen had extended his spiritual sense, looking for some kind of life, and found nothing. He tried to imagine what kind of threat might drive away all of the life in a place and simply couldn’t picture it. A monstrously powerful cultivator in the nascent soul stage might frighten away all of the people, and even drive most animals away. But, rodents tended to seek shelter in the face of danger. At first, Sen had thought that the people might have all fled to some central location and banded together for defense. Yet, the deeper he went into the town, the more of the same that he saw. Everything looked to be intact. The more everything looked intact, the more oppressive the place became to Sen. He swept the area with his spiritual sense, again, and came up with nothing. Nothing at all. The wrongness of that finally hit him. He’d been looking for signs of human beings, or dogs, or rodents, but he’d gotten too used to filtering out all of the other life that usually obscured the spiritual sense. Life teemed, most of it too small for the eyes to pick out, but there all the same. Except in the place where Sen stood. In that town, even all of that normally impossible-to-see life was gone too.

“Gone, or hidden,” whispered Sen.

Sen looked around himself. He’d stepped into a trap. He was sure of that. He just wasn’t sure that it was a trap meant specifically for him. If he’d been paying more attention, he would have recognized that wrongness almost immediately. If he had, he would have abandoned the town instantly and gone looking for help. Instead, he was either caught up in an illusion of some kind or someone was suppressing all the signs of life in the area. Neither of those possibilities boded especially well for him. None of his teachers were particularly skilled in illusions, so his training against them was very limited. If someone was suppressing all of the outward signs of life in the area, they were so far beyond Sen that any confrontation would only mean his death. Whatever was happening in the abandoned town, Sen decided it could be someone else’s problem. It was mostly curiosity that had brought him inside the wall in the first place. Solving the mystery wasn’t worth his life. Sen turned around and started walking back toward the gate.

“Damn, you figured it out. What gave it away?”

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, and Sen suddenly felt a bit of empathy for Cai Yuze. It was creepy to hear a voice that behaved that way. It was like the world itself was talking to you. Although, the voice itself made Sen shiver a bit as well. It didn’t sound like a human being. It was like someone was trying to speak through a mouth with too many teeth in it. Sen did his best to suppress that idea before his imagination could do something truly horrifying with it. He needed to stay on guard. He cast a wary eye around him, even though he knew it was pointless. He considered just making a run for it. Whatever was here, it had made the town the focal point of its power. If he could get back outside the walls, there was a chance the thing might decide he was too much trouble to chase. Although, it seemed all too likely that his way out was going to be blocked in some way. It’s how he would have set up a trap like this. Better to keep the creepy voice talking, he thought.

“Hello. What’s your name?” asked Sen as he tried to remember what little advice he’d been given about illusions.

“Brave. Or are you stupid, little human?”

“Just curious.”

“Just curious,” repeated the voice. “I think curiosity is just a word you humans use when you mean stupid.”

You humans. Sen felt his heart sink a little at those words. He’d been hoping this was just another cultivator. There was always the possibility of bargaining with, or reasoning with, or deceiving another cultivator. If this was something else, a demon, a devil, Sen didn’t like his chances of talking it out of doing something that would bring a swift and brutal end to the very short tale of Sen the Cultivator.

“Sometimes,” Sen admitted, just trying to keep the thing talking for a few more seconds. “But sometimes it really is just curiosity. Aren’t you ever curious about things?”

“Oh, many things, little human. For example, I’m curious what your heart would taste like. I can smell the dual cultivation on you. I imagine it changes the flavor.”

“I expect it does. If you knew what they made me soak in, though, I’m probably pretty gamey.”

There was absolute silence for a long, long, heart-stoppingly long moment before a kind of roaring laughter cascaded down on Sen from everywhere. Sen remembered to breathe again at that point. The laughter carried on for a while before it finally died off.

“Oh, definitely brave. I may even come to regret having to kill you.”

“There is no quarrel between us that I know of. If there is, I’d be happy to try to make amends.”

There was another long moment of silence, then a figure stepped from nowhere into Sen’s line of sight. He just gaped for a moment. He hadn’t sensed any qi, and even with his spiritual sense bearing down on the entire area, he wouldn’t have known that the figure was there if he couldn’t see it with his own eyes. That told him everything he needed to know about how much further along the cultivation path this being was. Of course, that was almost the least interesting thing about the figure that stood before Sen. It was taller than Sen by at least half a foot, but it looked like a great cat had started a transformation into human form and, having reached some spot in the middle that it liked, stopped. Dark fur covered the entire being. The mouth and snout had been softened and flattened a bit to something that looked more human, but the ears were still pure cat, and they flicked occasionally. There was something painfully familiar in those features, something that made Sen wish he had never left the mountain at all.

“Ghost panther,” said Sen.

He’d mostly been talking to himself, but the figure went still at those words. Its feline eyes studied him like it meant to tear some piece of knowledge from Sen.

“Yes,” it said. “I was that, once. Now, I am simply Boulder’s Shadow.”

“You’ve ascended then?” Sen asked.

If he was going to die no matter what, Sen figured he might as well die with his curiosity satisfied.

“In a manner of speaking. It’s not ascension as you understand it. There are,” the spirit beast stopped and considered for a moment, “advantages to your form. I wished to partake of those advantages, although I had no desire to become as you are.”

“Advantages? Cultivation advantages?”

“Indeed,” said the spirit beast.

Sen did not want to fight this spirit beast for more than one reason, so he tried again. “As I said, if there is a quarrel between us, I will do my best to make amends.”

The beast approached him, slowly, and walked around Sen, as though it were as curious about Sen as Sen was about it. It finally spoke.

“I believe you, little human. You could have taken what passes for human riches from these buildings with none to see or know. You didn’t. Human honor is a pale thing, but you seem to possess it. Sadly, the quarrel is not between us.”

“Then, who is the quarrel between?”

“Your kind and my kind. Humans and spirit beasts. You hunt us, kill us, take our cores. For all things, there must be a balance.”

Those words resonated inside Sen. His whole journey as a cultivator had been a stumbling, inelegant attempt to find balance, within and without. He had just never considered that such things might play out on a stage as big as the world itself. Nor had he ever considered that he might end up as one of the dead in that large-scale attempt at rebalancing. Still, he supposed there was a kind of balance in that as well. How many spirit beasts had he personally killed up on the mountain? How many had he helped kill on the way to Tide’s Rest? The numbers were uncomfortably high.

“So, what will you do now?” Sen asked, both wanting and not wanting to know.

“I cannot stop what happens inside these walls. But I need not participate directly. If you can escape my brethren and get beyond the town walls, I will let you go.”

Sen wanted to feel hopeful about those words, but the spirit beast had sounded bleak to Sen. Like he was making an empty offer. Then, the illusion fell away, and Sen understood.