Sen wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened. Yet, at some point on their third day out from the town, they had transitioned from the forest onto the mountain. It wasn’t that there were fewer trees. Much of the lower part of the mountain was covered with them. Rather, it was the transition from relatively flat ground that Sen could jog on to relatively steep ground that Sen spent time either scrambling up or outright climbing. Sen had done his best but ultimately had to beg Feng to find an easier path. The cultivator frowned a little, took in Sen’s sweaty, exhausted face, and nodded. After that, Feng didn’t simply walk in a straight line. He took more detours. He was always headed in the same general direction, but Sen often looked back and saw where the cultivator had deftly navigated them past something Sen could never have traversed.

Sen had also started noticing the ghost panther more often. It was a wily beast, routinely vanishing for hours at a time. Yet, every once in a while, he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. Despite those long absences, the beast seemed to have a sense for when Sen would get hungry. It invariably showed up at mealtime. At first, it just hovered near Sen, looking at whatever food was in his hand. By the time they stopped for lunch on the mountain, the cat had taken to putting its huge head on Sen’s legs and staring up at him imploringly. While an ill-defined uncertainty about the beast still lingered in the back of his head, Sen was fairly confident that the beast wasn’t about to attack him anymore. He would sigh, then dole out a portion of his meal to the cat. It wasn’t like Feng was stingy with the portions. The man only seemed to have a vague notion about how much food people actually ate.

Even Sen, coming off years of semi-starvation, was a bit staggered at the mounds of food that Feng casually handed to him at every meal break. Despite the grueling pace, Sen felt better than he ever had before. He felt stronger every morning and seemed to do a little better at keeping up each day. If Feng noticed the change, he didn’t mention it. Sen was flicking little pieces of a plum to the cat, who seemed to take enormous pleasure in snapping the bits of fruit out of the air, when Feng spoke up.

“I think we’ll stop here for the day.”

Sen looked up at the sky. There were still hours and hours of light left. He looked over at Feng. The man was stroking his chin and looked lost in thought. Sen shrugged. If his master wanted to call a halt to the brutal trek early today, Sen wasn’t going to complain. A thump against his arm nearly sent Sen toppling off the fallen log he sat on. He looked around wildly before realizing that the cat had batted at him. For a second, he got angry. Then, sense reasserted itself. If the beast wanted to hurt him, it would have used its claws. Instead, it was staring at him with expectation in its eyes. It wasn’t until Sen remembered that he still had part of the plum in his hand that it made sense.

“I’m spoiling you,” he muttered to the cat.

Still, he resumed their game. The cat bounded and leapt, never once missing a bit of the fruit until only the pit remained in Sen’s hand. He showed it to the cat, who immediately lost interest and flopped onto the ground. It still took an effort to keep the beast in sight once it settled down somewhere. The cat huffed a breath and went to sleep. Sen looked at the pit for a moment before tossing it out into the forest. Who knew? Maybe a tree would grow from it. Sen idly imagined coming back to this spot in a few years and finding a plum tree heavy with fruit. He was still fantasizing about all of the plums when his master thrust a water skin into his hands. Sen jerked out of his wandering thoughts and looked up. Feng was holding out a pill to him. Sen took the pill but wasn’t sure what to do with it. It smelled like medicine to him.

“You should take that,” said Feng.

“What is it? I don’t feel sick.”

“It just helps clean impurities out of your body. I imagine you’ve accumulated quite a lot of those over the years.”

Sen thought back to some of the things he’d eaten before he nodded. He went to put the pill in his mouth, but Feng stopped him. “Master?”

“You should probably take off those robes first. Lay down on this,” said Feng, handing Sen an old, worn blanket. “Then, take the pill.”

Sen shrugged and did as he was ordered. He stripped out of the robe, stretched out on the blanket, and took the pill with a big gulp of water.

“Now what?” Sen asked.

Feng considered the question for a moment. “It might be a bit uncomfortable. Don’t fight it.”

Sen sat up in sudden alarm. “How uncomfortable?”

Before the cultivator could answer, Sen’s inside caught fire. At least, that’s how it felt. The fire roared inside his stomach, but soon it engulfed his entire middle. He collapsed back onto the blanket with his teeth and fists clenched. The initial explosion of pain soon refined itself into different kinds of agony inside of Sen. The fire in his middle wasn’t actually in his stomach. It was closer to his navel, a living star of suffering that pulsed to a rhythm that Sen didn’t understand. As bad as that was, there were scorching lines searing their way throughout his body.

Those lines burned upward through his chest, down into his legs, out into his arms, and finally up into his head. Sen wasn’t sure if he screamed or just thought he should be screaming, but he was certain that the fire would leave nothing but scorched holes where his eye should be and a charred hunk of meat in place of his brain. The energy in those flaming channels seemed to move, traveling out into his extremities, then back to that star in his middle, where they could renew their strength and make another pass. Even that wasn’t where it ended.

Around the time that he realized that he wasn’t simply going to burn away from the inside out, the heat moved out from those lines of fire into his organs and muscles. The lessening of the heat was a momentary, ephemeral relief. The heat immediately transformed into pressure. It felt like his muscles would rip themselves apart, simply shredded under that pressure. His lungs couldn’t find air anymore. His heart was beating so fast that Sen knew it burst. For some reason, the cultivator had brought him all the way out here to murder him. He didn’t know why the man had chosen such a painful way to do it. He could have just stabbed him or broken his neck. This suffering seemed so unnecessary. Unfortunately, to Sen’s mind, he didn’t die. He simply hovered in a state of such complete physical anguish that rational thoughts stopped forming.

He wasn’t Sen anymore. He wasn’t anyone. He was just empty, floating in space, lost to everyone and everything. He was aware of the pain, the suffering, but at a distance. It was too much, too terrible, so he had retreated from it. Yet, he was also abstractly aware that he wasn’t dying, wouldn’t die, from what was happening. It would end, but until it did, he would just stay where he was and hover like a ghost.