Sen hesitated for the briefest of moments, mostly out of pure shock, before he walked over to the much-restored Grandmother Lu. She wrapped her arms around him in a tight embrace. Sen, mindful of his increased strength, squeezed her back gently. She held him like that for a long moment before she pulled away and cupped his face in her hands. She bestowed an uncomplicated smile on him, radiating something akin to pure joy at his mere presence.

“I worried I might not ever see you again, boy,” she announced, patting his cheeks gently before gesturing at the chairs.

Sen laughed then, earning a startled look from the older woman. He waved a hand in the air.

“I worried the same thing, more than once,” he said.

“Oh,” she said, the sparkle of understanding in her eyes. “Yes, I suppose I must have looked to be nearly a corpse to your young eyes.”

She sat down and looked at the tea and the plate of cookies, clearly bemused by their presence. Sen walked over and poured a cup for Grandmother Lu. He took his own seat and smiled at her, as a weight that had hung around his heart for most of six years crumbled away.

“It looks like I missed a lot in my time away on the mountain. You built all of this,” he said, gesturing around him.

“I don’t think you missed nearly as much as I did,” she said with a snort, but then she smiled at their surroundings. “Yet, your fortuitous encounter became my fortuitous encounter as well, it seems. That and those pills your master left behind. At my age, one does not imagine such unexpected boons. Yet, I was wise enough to grasp them with both hands when they arrived.”

Sen leaned forward, eager to hear her tale. “Was it the pills that gave you such a miraculous transformation?”

Grandmother Lu leaned back and sipped at her tea, a thoughtful expression on her face. “They did, although, probably not in the way you mean. I didn’t take one and find myself remade the next morning.”

A little wave of disappointment ran through Sen. He had spent enough time with Auntie Caihong to have a fair grasp of what medicinal and alchemical ingredients could and could not do. Yet, there was still a bit of the boy left in him as well. He had listened in wonder as people told stories about fish who became dragons by leaping over enchanted rainbows or the magical stone puppet, Sun Wukong, who roamed the world in search of the secrets to transformation and, in his own act of defiance against the heavens, transformed from dead stone to living flesh. He had hoped that Grandmother Lu’s story would have the same magical quality, simply because it would have been such a good story. Yet, he didn’t let his minor disappointment distract him for long.

“Please, tell me what happened,” he said.

“I suppose to understand what has happened now, I’ll have to tell you about what happened to me before. I never did tell you how I ended up in that little hovel, did I? I suppose it made me too sad to think on it. Well, you deserve to know. I come from a family of cultivators.”

Sen sat up sharply at that revelation. “Really?”

“Oh yes, and powerful ones at that. Well, I thought so when I was a girl at any rate. I imagined that no man could be as powerful as my father and no woman as swift as my mother. I suppose meeting that old monster you call a master has given me perspective. Peak core? Nascent soul stage, is he?”

Sen hesitated, not sure if he should answer the question, but it wasn’t as though Grandmother Lu didn’t already know about Master Feng. She’d even made some educated guesses, it seemed.

“Not core formation stage. He’s at the nascent soul stage. Peak nascent soul,” said Sen, putting as much emphasis as he could on the word peak.

Grandmother Lu went still as she processed Sen’s words. “I suppose we’re all lucky that your master didn’t simply level the town after the games the fool mayor tried to play.”

“I don’t think he’d do that,” said Sen. “He’s a little bit lazy about some things, to be honest. He could destroy a town, I think. He has the power. But why go through all of that effort when he can just humiliate the mayor?”

“Ha! Saved by laziness, of all things. Well, I’ll raise a toast to his poor character soon. Now, where was I?”

“Your parents,” offered Sen.

“Yes, my parents. It turned out that they weren’t interested in raising mortal children. So, my sisters and I were started on the path to cultivation young, too young really. They pushed us hard. In my case, they pushed too hard. Too many cultivation aids, too close together, and not nearly enough insight on my part. I just didn’t have the wisdom at the time. It damaged my meridians.”

Sen frowned. “Well, that’s not good, but it’s fixable. Even I could probably fix it if someone caught it soon enough.”

For a moment, Sen got lost in his own thoughts as he ran through possible ingredients and reagents. The longer he thought about it, the more confident he became that, yes, he could probably fix it. He glanced up to see Grandmother Lu staring at him, her mouth hanging open a little.

“What?” He asked, feeling a little sheepish.

“You became a pill refiner skilled enough to make Twice-Blessed Heavenly Balm pills?”

Sen immediately shook his head. “Oh, nothing like that. I don’t even know what those pills are. Oh, well, I guess they must fix meridians. I mean, I’m sure Auntie Caihong could make them, but I didn’t learn pill refining. I could probably make an alchemical elixir that would heal meridians, though. I’d need the right ingredients, like earth qi-attributed ginseng, moon lotus blossoms, a fire qi-attributed devil thorn…” Sen trailed off as he registered the shocked awe on Grandmother Lu’s face. He supposed those were pretty rare ingredients. “I guess the ingredients don’t really matter.”

“An elixir?” Asked Grandmother Lu. “You can just make an elixir to heal damaged meridians? This Caihong taught you a recipe for that?”

Sen laughed. “Recipe, grandmother? No. Why would she need to teach me a recipe for something like that? It’s not like I’d be trying to help someone get over a golden river viper bite. That would be hard. I’d definitely need a recipe for something like that. That snake’s venom is some truly evil stuff.”

“I see,” said Grandmother Lu.

She looked like she’d gone pale to Sen. He hurriedly offered her some more tea. She held out her cup in a shaky hand. She downed most of the hot liquid in one gulp.

“Are you feeling alright, grandmother?” Sen asked, very concerned.

“Yes, Sen, I’m fine. It’s just, I’ll definitely need to hear more about what you learned.”

Sen smiled. “Of course. I mean, it’s all pretty basic. If your parents were cultivators, I doubt any of it will seem all that new.”

Grandmother Lu made a noncommittal noise and then shook her head. “Well, my meridians were damaged, which slowed down my progress. My father saw that as a personal challenge and pushed even harder. I didn’t know any better, at the time, so I just went along with it. The damage got worse, which slowed me down even more. Eventually, they took me to see a spirit doctor. My parents decided they weren’t going to waste money on someone who couldn’t even get through the first stages of body cultivation.”

“They didn’t even try to fix it?”

“No. They threw me out instead.”

As Sen watched an old pain cross Grandmother Lu’s face, a kind of icy resolve took hold in his heart. One day, when he was powerful enough, he would need to find those cultivators who had so badly mistreated their daughter.

Grandmother Lu shook off the old memories. “I was lucky, though. A family that lived nearby took me in. They found me work. They even helped me find a husband. My dear Haoyu. We weren’t wealthy, not nearly wealthy enough to afford the kind of help that my meridians needed, but we were happy. As the years went by, I stopped thinking about it. I had a husband and children. I wasn’t defying the heavens, but it was a good life. Then, one by one, our children married or moved away. It was just me and Haoyu.

“Then, the heavens took away what they had given me. They took my husband. It was just an accident, but he was still gone. Unfortunately, while my husband was a good man, he wasn’t always the wisest man. He had many debts I didn’t learn about until after he was gone. Bit by bit, everything we’d worked so hard to build together was sold off. Until, one day, there simply wasn’t anything left. I wrote to my children, but they didn’t have any room for an old woman.”

Sen added some more people to the list of those he needed to find one day.

“Well, I expect you can guess the rest. I worked where I could, when I could, until I ended up in that little hovel. I expected to die there, alone and forgotten. Then, you came along. You were so skinny. When you came by with that cultivator, though, I didn’t know what to think. It seems he took the measure of me fast enough, though. Those pills he left healed my meridians. It took most of a year before I could cycle qi again. It’s hard healing that kind of damage at my age.

“Once they were healed enough that I could cycle qi again, though, I had done some body cultivation. Those changes were still there. They’d just been starved for qi for most of my life. I finally got to see some of the benefits. I can’t break through again, I don’t think. But it’s bought me some years.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Sen, and he meant it. “And, you have this store.”

“Yes, that master of yours left some money. I decided that since I had some little piece of my youth back, I’d do something with that money. I built a little trading company with it.”

“If you like it, that’s not a bad way to spend your time.”

“Oh, I didn’t build this for me, Sen. I built this for you.”