After the very long discussion about the Jianghu, Sen became withdrawn from the others for a time. He still practiced every morning and trained with Uncle Kho every afternoon. Yet, after the evening meal, he would retreat to his room or go outside and spend time with Falling Leaf. The ghost panther could clearly sense that something was troubling Sen, but she didn’t ask about it with or without talking. She simply stayed nearby. If she was pleased by the fact that Sen took comfort or solace in her presence, she didn’t speak about that either. And Sen was troubled by what he had heard. So many of the stories that people told about cultivators had some grounding in truth. Everything that he’d heard about what the Jianghu was and what it meant for cultivators cast some of those stories in a different light, but not a better one. To Sen, the whole lot of them sounded petty and violent and for no good reason.

When Master Feng had first started training him to defend himself, Sen had just assumed he meant defend himself from bandits or spirit beasts. He hadn’t imagined that becoming a cultivator meant that he was deciding to embark on a life where he’d have to fight, to hurt, and maybe even to kill other people all of the time. To make matters worse, Sen was far enough along to recognize that he was actually good at combat. He wasn’t sure exactly how good. He only had Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho to use as measuring sticks. That made it getting a real sense of his own progress difficult at best.

Uncle Kho had once laughingly told him, “You're three thousand years too soon to defeat me, young Sen.”

From anyone else, Sen would have treated that as a good-natured boast. From Uncle Kho, he suspected it was a literal fact. Compared to them, he really was a woefully undertrained, wildly incompetent fighter. That might have bothered him, and it probably would have even a year or two before. Yet, he found it difficult to feel bad about something that likely held true for nearly everyone in the world below the nascent soul stage. Being incompetent compared to them was a bit like saying that your campfire was dim when compared with the sun.

No, what made him think that he was actually getting good at it was the nature of the corrections he received. Early on, the corrections were constant and blunt. His arm was three inches out of position. His feet were in the wrong place. He was overextending in one moment, and not taking a strike far enough in the next. Those corrections had steadily diminished in frequency and tone until they reached the point that they were more in the nature of gentle suggestions. Try adjusting your right foot a hair back. Increase the speed of the twist at the end of that strike by two percent. Of course, Sen had made the crucial misstep of telling Auntie Caihong he didn’t know what two percent meant. Then, he’d compounded his error by explaining he didn’t know what any kind of percent meant. He’d lost a week of evenings to learning a bunch more math. While he could see the usefulness of it, after he learned, the process itself was as painful as math always was for him to learn.

Yet, for all the time and effort he’d put into training those skills, he’d spent very little time thinking about using them on other people. Oh, sure, he’d had a couple of pleasant daydreams about going back to Orchard’s Reach and handing out a few well-deserved beatings, but that was as far as he’d ever taken it. He’d never dreamed about felling his rivals on the way to immortality. Sen wondered if that was a sign that he was headed down the wrong path. Did you need a desire for that kind of combat to progress as a cultivator? All three of the older cultivators said that it could push your cultivation ahead to fight others. There was the potential for flashes of enlightenment in the heat of battle. Yet, none of them seemed to know if it was even possible to progress to the higher stages of cultivation without it. As far as they knew, it had never happened. The only thing that Sen was certain of was that he wanted nothing to do with the kinds of duels that Master Feng had described as commonplace among cultivators. He also believed them when they said he’d find it almost impossible to avoid the fights.

When going around in circles in his own head didn’t get him anywhere, Sen went to talk to Auntie Caihong. She’d seemed the least committed to the idea of fighting as a cultivation aid. She smiled at him when came into the kitchen where she was preparing something.

“Auntie, why did you become a cultivator?”

The question seemed to catch the woman off guard because she stopped stirring whatever was in the pot and turned to look at him.

“I don’t think anyone has ever asked me that before.”

“What? How is that possible? Nobody ever asked you about it?”

Auntie Caihong thought for a few moments before she went back to stirring. “My father decided it. I was sent away to a sect when I was a little younger than you.”

Sen was taken aback by that comment. “He just sent you away?”

“It was common then. It’s still common. Families with too many daughters look for ways to, I suppose, unburden themselves.”

“Too many daughters?” Sen asked, utterly baffled.

“That’s a much longer conversation,” said Auntie Caihong. “Let’s just say that many families see daughters as an expense they don’t want. So, if they can hand one off to a sect to become a cultivator, well, it’s one less expense.”

“So, you never really decided?”

“I did decide. I decided the day I left my family home that I would never let someone else control my fate that way again. Becoming a cultivator gave me the power to live the life I chose.”

“Did you know what it meant? All of the fighting? The killing?”

She hesitated at that. “No one ever really knows. You can’t truly know what it is until you’re in the middle of it. But, yes, I knew about that part.”

“Didn’t it bother you?”

“Yes. It still does. I’m fortunate, though. I’m not like Ming or my husband. They were known for fighting. Ming built his entire, well-earned reputation on it. I didn’t. I will fight if I have to, but no one is going to come looking to prove themselves against me. That’s half the reason Jaw-Long stays here on this mountain. It lets him avoid a lot of unnecessary bloodshed.”

“What’s the other half?” Sen asked, curiosity overriding good sense briefly.

“It lets him avoid all of the people who’d want to learn from him. They’re even worse than the people looking for a fight. After a fight, the other person usually goes away. Or, they’re dead. Would be disciples? They just hang around, begging and pleading to learn from him. It’s very tedious.”

Sen frowned at that. “But he teaches me things all the time.”

Auntie Caihong threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, Sen, that’s because he actually likes you.”

With no resolution to his quandary, Sen went to Uncle Kho and posed the same question about why he became a cultivator.

“It was a simple choice for me. I grew up poor. I was either going to end up a soldier or try to become a cultivator. There was a lot of war going on in those days. A lot of young men like me went off to those wars and never came back. I wanted to live a long life. The longer the better, I thought. And nobody seems to live longer than cultivators. So, I found myself a wandering cultivator and pestered the man until he agreed to teach some things.”

“Did you know that it would mean fighting all the time? Maybe killing all the time?”

“I’d heard the stories. I figured they were probably true. Of course, fighting never bothered me that much. I was good at it.”

Finally, Sen went to Master Feng with his questions.

“Why?” Master Feng repeated. “Power. Plain and simple. I wanted power.”

“For what?”

“I wish I’d really asked myself that question. I’m pretty sure that I thought I’d conquer the world or something equally useless. Once I had some power, I realized that being in charge of things only sounds good from the outside. When I think about all of the work that would go into ruling the world. Makes me shudder.”

“So, you didn’t conquer the world out of,” Sen hesitated, then plowed forward, “laziness?”

Master Feng laughed. “Laziness and an uncommon amount of good sense. Trust me, we all dodged catastrophe when I put those dreams away.”

“And you knew what it meant, becoming a cultivator? The Jianghu, the duels, all of it?”

“I didn’t know any of that. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t have cared. Being thoughtful about life is something most of us don’t pick up until later.”

In the end, Sen was left where he started. Sitting outside with Falling Leaf. He’d poured out his worries and concerns to her, while the cat listened attentively. Then, when he was done, he stared up at the stars.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted.

“You’ll fight,” said Falling Leaf.

Sen jerked his head around to stare at the ghost panther. It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d run into that fox. He just wished she’d said something else.

“What?” He demanded. “Weren’t you listening? I don’t want to fight anyone.”

Falling Leaf regarded him with eyes that almost seemed to glow in the darkness. “The bear does not wish to fight the wolf. Yet, if the wolf comes, the bear will fight because it must. You say that others will come for you. You do not wish to fight, but you will fight. Because you must. Because they will harm you if you do not. It is the only path forward.”