The guards who were there that night would talk about it later. They only spoke of it to each other, in hushed tones, fearing that others would think them mad. Yet, they knew what had happened. For whatever reason, whether it was the heavens sending a rebuke, demons acting out their inscrutable plans, or simply the whims of angry spirits, the shadows came alive that night. All of their stories were different, yet they were also the same. There was no warning or telltale sign, just a moment when all went dark, and then consciousness fled. Some claimed that they had felt hot breath on their necks or remembered the smell of medicine, but even the others who were there paid scant heed to those words. It had been the shadows, and not of those men ever walked without fear in the night again.

Sen surveyed the pile of unconscious guards with a vague sense of satisfaction. He and Falling Leaf had slipped over the walls of the mayor’s home wrapped in shadows of Sen’s making. Sen had swiftly realized something in the ten minutes that followed. Falling Leaf was positively, terrifyingly invisible when hunting in the dark of night. Sen had known, in an abstract way, that she must be very stealthy in the dark. Yet, he had never really seen her hunt. He’d been too busy, and she’d never invited him to go along. When he had seen her fight, it had always been in the heat of the moment, at times when stealth was of limited value. In the end, though, Sen realized that he’d just never seen her make an effort to be invisible. Looking back, he supposed that he wouldn’t have known if she did.

As the two of them made their way around the grounds, Sen would wrap the guards in shadow and contain their voices with air qi. Falling Leaf would drive them to the ground, and then Sen dosed them with a sedative he’d cooked up. He’d been a little hesitant to make it as potent as it was. Auntie Caihong had warned him that sometimes, for reasons even she didn’t understand, people just wouldn’t wake up after getting a strong sedative. He’d finally concluded that the possibility that one of them might not wake up was by far the better choice than an absolute certainty that he’d have to kill them. The sedative also had the side benefit of making memories a little foggy. It wasn’t a true forgetting potion, but it would leave the guards feeling uncertain about the exact details.

Sen peered up at the sky and frowned. He’d spent more time than he should have on making the sedative. He estimated they had maybe an hour of true night left. Depending on the servants inside the house, some of them might already be up. After Grandmother Lu’s questions about whether he planned to kill everyone at the mayor’s manor, he’d been trying to figure out the best way to handle things inside. He supposed he could just go room by room and force the sedative down everyone’s throats. It wasn’t subtle, but it would spare them and, more importantly, him from any foolish, heroic actions.

Master Feng had told Sen that many, maybe even most, cultivators put a low value on mortal lives. While killing lower cultivation stage cultivators was frowned on, killing mortals was all too commonplace. Other cultivators just didn’t care, and the mortal authorities that might object simply didn’t, out of fear that they would follow their subjects into death. Sen personally found the whole idea a bit bizarre. If killing lower-stage cultivators was normally considered improper, it seemed to him that killing the weaker mortals should be less acceptable, taboo even. Master Feng had agreed with Sen’s logic, then promptly told him that he should still expect other cultivators to treat mortals as disposable.

Sen supposed he had broken custom by killing those cultivators at the shop, but he doubted anyone was going to raise too much of a fuss about it. He hadn’t gone looking for them, after all. They had come looking for him and even broken into someone’s shop to get at him. That was a pretty solid indication of hostile intent in his book. At least, he kept telling himself that. Sen knew, even if he kept shoving that knowledge to the back of his mind, that he’d let the last one at the shop go to ease his own conscience. Knowing that there was a near-perfect certainty that they would have attacked him, even if he’d given them the gold, hadn’t changed the pure fear in that woman. He hadn’t spared her, not really. By letting her go, he’d spared himself from living into her perception of him as some kind of cultivation killing machine.

In hindsight, sparing her had probably been a mistake. The mayor had made his intention to see Sen dead perfectly clear. She had worked for him, a man who casually ordered innocent people killed for imagined slights against an honor that none of them seemed to possess. Sen feared that he and Shen Hua would cross paths again one day, and he’d be forced to finish what he’d started in Grandmother Lu’s shop. The thought made him feel tired. Still, Sen had taken what seemed like the best course of action to him, given the circumstances.

These circumstances were different. He didn’t need to kill all the mortal workers inside. He certainly didn’t want to kill them. They weren’t cultivators sent out on some kind of mission. They were just maids, cooks, and groundkeepers. Sen had seen them when he lived on the streets of Orchard’s Reach. He’d watched them as they bought food or, on occasion, didn’t buy food because they didn’t have the money. In the face of all that was happening around them tonight, they were just…Sen struggled to put their role in the right context. He finally hit on it. They were just bystanders to the actions of those with more money, better position, or the raw power cultivation provided. Mere proximity was not a good reason for them to die.

When Falling Leaf batted at his leg, Sen realized he’d been frowning up at the sky for at least two or three minutes. He supposed that he’d been trying to buy himself a little time to decide how to handle things inside. He sighed. Force-feeding the sedative it was. With the decision made, the work went surprisingly fast. Between his superior strength and his ability to dampen sound with qi control, it wasn’t difficult to get people to take the sedative. Most of the workers seemed almost resigned to it. A few of the younger men and women seemed more obviously afraid. He supposed that waking up alive and otherwise unharmed would be a nice surprise for them. He did find a few workers that were already up and around. Those people had taken a bit more effort because they’d been awake and alert. Even with that wasted time, it wasn’t even true dawn by the time he reached the mayor’s bedroom.

He gave serious thought to just killing the man immediately and then leaving. Of course, his wife was in bed with him. Sen didn’t know anything about her. She might have known everything her husband was up to and approved of it, or she might not know anything. Plus, there was the lingering issue of their son, who was thrashing and choking with Sen’s iron grip around his throat. Sen lingered outside the door, trying to decide what the best thing to do was. If he left the wife and son alive, it would be a problem for him later. That much was obvious. Even if the mayor’s wife wasn’t involved, he sincerely doubted she’d just brush off the death of her husband. The mayor’s son, well, his idiocy had been demonstrated quite thoroughly. Leaving him alive just meant a future filled with direct or indirect attacks. The blistering hatred in the boy’s eyes said as much.

Sen steeled himself for what had to be done. He drew back and foot and kicked. He meant to just kick open the door to the bedroom. Instead, his kick tore the door right out of the wall and sent it crashing into the room. Sen stared at the wreckage of the door for a second, then shrugged, and dragged the kicking and gurgling boy into the room with him. There was a flurry of motion and sound at the bed. The mayor’s fat form fell out of the bed, even as the man’s eyes flicked back and forth, searching for the source of the disturbance. The woman simply began screaming for the guards, the servants, basically for help of any kind. Sen just walked forward toward the mayor. The fat man struggled to his feet, before leveling a furious, imperious look at Sen.

“You!” he roared. “How dare you invade my home, you worthless piece of street trash!”

Sen frowned, perplexed by how the man seemed wholly unaware of how much danger he was actually in. Then, taking his cue from Master Feng, he backhanded the mayor. Sen did make sure that he struck the opposite side from the one Master Feng had hit. Balance was crucial, after all, in cultivation, and in life. The mayor landed on the bed, spitting out teeth and blood. Sen had restrained the blow enough that he didn’t actually break the man’s jaw. Probably. The sound of the mayor’s wife still screaming grated on Sen’s nerves. He fixed her with a glare, let the tiniest sliver of killing intent slip free, and said one word.

“Silence.”

The woman started shaking and her mouth snapped shut so hard that Sen thought it must have hurt a little. Sen really didn’t have a plan for this moment. He thought he knew what had to be done, but the how of it still eluded him. Instead, he said something that had been on his mind since that first fight in the market.

“You’re so stupid,” he said, fixing the mayor with a glare of his own. “You didn’t want me here. You didn’t want Grandmother Lu here. You could have gotten everything you wanted. Do you know that? Here’s the worst part. All you had to do was nothing.”

“What?” the mayor garbled.

“I never planned to stay. Once I left, Grandmother Lu would likely have moved somewhere else, somewhere she could manage her trade business more easily. You just needed to wait. You could have learned all of that by having someone ask one question. But you couldn’t let it go,” Sen said, in a moment of understanding. “You couldn’t let the sting of your wounded pride rest.”

“Honor,” mumbled the mayor, irrational hatred written across his face.

“What honor?” asked Sen.

Then, knowing he’d said everything he meant to, Sen drew his jian. He drove it into the mayor’s heart and, with a contemptuous little twist, he pulled it free. That seemed to send a jolt through the mayor’s wife. She looked at Sen’s face and read the truth in it. Sen was done talking.

“Wait!” she shrieked. “Please, you don’t need to kill us. It was him. It was all him.”

Then, a paw came out of the darkness and opened the woman’s throat from ear to ear. I’d lost track of Falling Leaf in the brief moments of chaos when I’d first entered the room. It seemed that she had her own opinions about the mayor’s wife. I saw her eyes peering out at me from the shadows.

“Lies,” said Falling Leaf. “Could smell it.”

Well, Sen thought, I guess that answered that question. The struggling and thrashing in Sen’s left hand had intensified. He looked down to see the mayor’s son all but foaming at the mouth in rage and grief. Sen allowed himself a single moment of pity for the boy, knowing that he’d have been just as enraged if Grandmother Lu had died. Then, the moment ended. Letting out a deep breath that contained all Sen’s regret, he dragged the mayor’s son up so that he was on his feet. The boy went wild, throwing formless, crazed blows that did little but move Sen’s clothes around when they connected at all. Sen let the boy, and he was a boy in temperament if not body, burn off that rage. When something like sanity reentered the boy’s expression, he snarled at Sen.

“I will kill you for this. If it takes me a thousand years, I will kill you!”

Sen didn’t answer. He just reached out and, with a fast movement, snapped the boy’s neck.

“Perhaps,” said Sen to the boy’s blank eyes. “Perhaps you will in the next life.”