A seething mass of frustration shuddered and thrashed inside Sen’s chest. He had been so close. All he had needed was a few more seconds and then it would have been obvious to any cultivator what was happening. As far as Sen was concerned, that gathering mass of qi should have been enough to alert that stupid girl that she shouldn’t interfere.

“Damn her!” he raged.

A pressing desire to go find that girl and trade pointers until she was bloody and unconscious took hold of Sen for a moment. He indulged the fantasy, ever so briefly, then ruthlessly suppressed it. If something like that was going to happen, he would have done it in the moment. Yet, while he could suppress the impulsive desire to act, he couldn’t suppress the anger, not entirely. It just sat there inside of him with nowhere to go, and no convenient targets on which to vent it. If he’d still been on the mountain or even out on the road, he could have gone out and simply found some big rock to destroy. This close to the city, he didn’t expect that the guards would look fondly on him destroying things. Besides, something like that might draw more attention he didn’t want.

As he considered it, if he’d gone out into the wilds, it was possible that some spirit beast in an equally foul mood might have tracked him down. He found that idea less palatable. He’d let the sect girl, both of those sect girls go, precisely because he didn’t want to kill without a clear and pressing need. Monumental frustration, while certainly compelling in its own way, wasn’t actually a reason to kill a person or a spirit beast. So, he simply had to bear it until the anger and frustration died away or a situation where he truly had no choice but to fight presented itself.

Part of Sen knew that the frustration wasn’t just from the initial interruption. After he’d rendered them both all but unconscious, he’d hidden himself a short distance away and waited for them to leave. When he was sure that they were gone for good, he approached the ocean again. He had hoped that he might be able to glean that insight even with the disruption. Yet, whatever combination of factors that made it possible the first time was gone. He feared that the problem was inside of him. He’d been in a very specific frame of mind when first arrived on that beach. He had been calm, ready to greet whatever information or experience the world had sent him there to learn. After the confrontations with the cursed sect girl, he was leery and hyper-aware. It was not the right mental space for a moment of enlightenment.

As much as he was willing to shoulder that blame, though, he thought that something had changed in the environment as well. There had been an intangible something in the air, a feeling, a sense of expectation, and that was gone as well. Sen had one through the oddity of enlightenment often enough that he’d developed at least a few nascent ideas about the process. He’d also spent enough time with Auntie Caihong that he often fell back on plants as a lens through which to understand things. Plants didn’t spring from just anywhere. They needed just the right conditions. They needed the right kind of soil, the right amount of light, and water in just the right quantities and at just the right times. Oh, there was some give and take, plants could often survive a particularly dry or wet season, but they didn’t thrive.

Sen thought that moments of enlightenment were a bit like that. You could get close, maybe even achieve a semblance of true insight, even if the conditions were only fair. For the true experience, the qi-summoning, worldview-changing experience, though, it had to be perfect. He had had that perfect moment within reach and lost it. Perhaps, if he was very lucky, a similar moment might present itself to him in the future. In the meantime, though, Sen felt a little lost. Everything he’d done recently had been toward getting to that moment of understanding. He’d been relying on it to guide his next steps, to point toward the path that would let him grow in the ways he needed to grow. He hadn’t made a backup plan. It just hadn’t occurred to him that he might reach the ocean and fail.

Sen stood on that beach for a long time, listening to the waves and watching the occasional boat pass by. Are they boats or ships, he wondered. Uncle Kho had said that those were different things. When Sen asked how they were different, Uncle Kho said it mostly seemed to be a matter of size. Bigger boats were usually called ships. The vessels out on the water were far enough away that Sen couldn’t discern their size. His experience with things that floated on the water was limited to having occasionally seen the rowboats that some of the townspeople had used near the river. He’d heard kids talking about something called rafts, but he hadn’t ever seen one. At least, he didn’t think he had seen one. There were still strange gaps in his knowledge of the world. He would sometimes discover that he had seen things before and called them by the wrong name or just hadn’t ever learned a word for them.

As he gazed out over the water, he wondered about the people on those boats. Were they fishing? Were they traveling? Sen considered the idea of finding a boat to take him somewhere else. The continent was vast after all. He could simply leave this place and find somewhere wholly new to explore. The idea had a certain appeal to it. There was a kind of adventure baked into doing something like that. Yet, Sen struggled to see himself going on such an adventure. What resources he had, what support he could potentially muster in an emergency, were all located nearby. While he might one day travel to the distant reaches of the continent and visit that pastry shop that Master Feng had bought on a whim, Sen knew he wasn’t ready for that. He didn’t know enough about how the world worked or what waited for him in distant places.

In the area, at least, he had a working knowledge of the threats out in nature. He might not enjoy it, but he could reasonably survive in the wilds for a long time. What he did know about those kinds of threats elsewhere was theoretical and based on conversations with people who could, quite frankly, shrug off things that would crush Sen with ease. No, without a good working knowledge of those threats as they applied to himself, or a guide he could trust, Sen couldn’t know if he was advanced enough in his cultivation to even survive the experience of traveling elsewhere. Given that Sen’s supply of trust was running especially low, that left him operating in the general area for the time being.

“Where should I go? What should I do?” he asked the expanse of water before him.

The enormity of it all finally settled on Sen. He was out in the world. He was alone. More importantly, this is what his life would be for centuries to come. While cultivation mattered to him, he’d recognized that it wasn’t truly an end in itself. It was a process, a journey, to get someone to somewhere else. More importantly, it was a very long process. Sen needed to find something else, some other goal, or purpose, or even just a list of random tasks to give his day-to-day life some kind of focus. Just as importantly, he needed to decide where he would do those tasks or pursue that purpose. He looked over his shoulder at the walls of Tide’s Rest and actually felt the snarl that twisted his lips. It might not be the fault of the city itself, but Sen’s experience with the local sect had soured him on the place. It seemed almost inevitable that he would bump into other sect members, and he, unfairly or not, didn’t trust any of them to behave like people he wanted to know. Having decided that staying in Tide’s Reach wasn’t an option helped give Sen a feeling of momentum.

“If not here, then where?” he mused.

Pulling out the map that he had so carefully marked and the notebook with all those names in it, Sen focused on finding the next place he would go.