“Finally got tired of lurking?” asked Sen.

Fu Ruolan’s eyes went wide with outrage. “I was not lurking!”

“Really? Because it looked a lot like lurking. Hovering just out of sight all of the time while watching me,” said Sen as he made a stupendous effort to keep a straight face.

The nascent soul cultivator pointed at him and started to say something before her eyes narrowed. She slowly lowered her pointing finger and fixed him with a glare that promised vengeance.

“You aren’t funny,” said Fu Ruolan in a very even tone.

Sen couldn’t help the smile that cracked his lips.

“I’m a little funny.”

“Do you make a habit of taunting nascent soul cultivators? You know, that select group of individuals who actually can kill you.”

Sen thought it over. “On the whole, I’m probably going to have to go with yes. It’s not always taunting, but I definitely make a habit of defying them.”

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you manners? Or the basic order of things?”

It was Sen’s turn to give her a look. A look that said, are you really asking me, of all people, the orphaned street rat raised by three old monsters, those questions? They locked gazes for a moment before Fu Ruolan shook her head.

“Right,” she said. “I forgot who I was talking to there for a second. Your master never knew his place either.”

“I get the impression that holds true for most people who make it to the nascent soul stage.”

Fu Ruolan pursed her lips. “That’s true for wandering cultivators, as far as it goes. The part no one talks about is how many core cultivators get killed trying the same thing. Don’t delude yourself. There is a real element of luck involved. Meet the wrong old monster, and they will kill you out of hand for too much insolence.”

Sen couldn’t really argue that point. First, he thought she was almost certainly right. Second, there was no advantage in thinking she was wrong. If anything, he’d probably be well served to at least keep that warning in mind when dealing with nascent soul cultivators. He didn’t tell himself that he’d follow that advice because he knew himself too well by now. There was something in him that just couldn’t accept it when someone assumed he owed them obedience because they’d started out on the path of cultivation a little earlier than him. He could respect that someone was more powerful than him, be wary of it, but never subservient. It just wasn’t in him. And there was the distinct possibility that sooner or later he’d come across someone who wouldn’t tolerate some lesser cultivator not being impressed with them and all they said. He’d just have to hope that on that day, the gap between him and that person would prove smaller than they assumed. Sen nodded at Fu Ruolan to at least acknowledge that he’d heard her words. She rolled her eyes.

“Not everyone is afraid of Feng Ming,” pressed Fu Ruolan. “You can’t assume that his reputation will get you out of every bad situation.”

“These days, I find that my reputation is often sufficient. I’ll grant you that I’m not sure that’s a good thing, but it is definitely a thing. Besides, I try to avoid leaning on his reputation whenever humanly possible. I’m not looking to bring trouble to his door,” said Sen before he directed a quizzical look at Fu Ruolan. “Are they really people who aren’t afraid of him?”

“There are.”

“Are their minds functioning properly?”

Fu Ruolan hesitated at that before she said, “Probably not, which is my point in a roundabout way. The kinds of people who don’t fear him are also the kinds of people who will find your particular brand of disregard for them intolerable.”

“I can’t control that,” said Sen. “But I won’t fake respect or obedience because someone else never developed a sense of self-worth.”

“How about self-preservation? A failure to develop that is an excellent way to die young.”

“I get the sense that you’re worried about me for some reason. Are you expecting a visitor? Someone with no sense of humor and a terribly fragile ego?”The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“No,” said Fu Ruolan with a visible shudder. “I hate people. Especially visitors. But you will leave here very soon and once more inflict yourself on the wider world.”

“I still have a few years.”

“Like I said, very soon. I don’t want to see my investment in you wasted because you never learned how to just do what you’re told.”

“If I’d learned how to just do what I was told, I’d have long since ended up the whipping boy in some crappy sect or been sucked into a particularly creepy cult.”

“Oh please. That might have been the case when you first started out. Now, sects would fall all over themselves to have you join. They’d bury you in resources, training, and probably all the sect princesses you wanted if they thought there was even a remote chance of getting you into the fold.”

“That would only last until they had a conversation with me and realized exactly how little I care about things like sect hierarchy and their absurd notions of honor,” said Sen.

“Well, yes, obviously, but you could milk them for resources before they figured that out.”

Sen gaped at the nascent soul cultivator. “Are you suggesting that I play some kind of game with the sects to get natural treasures and cultivation manuals? Isn’t that, I don’t know, sort of dishonest if I know for sure that I’m never going to actually join their sect?”

Sen gaped even more when Fu Ruolan gave a disinterested shrug to his words.

“Do you really care about that?” she asked. “I’m not saying you should do that to every sect. Just ones that you don’t particularly like. It’s not like every sect is evil. There are some that you might not hate. There are even a few that you might benefit from joining. For a while at least.”

“No thanks,” said Sen.

“Don’t dismiss the possibility out of hand. Sects serve a function.”

“Auntie Caihong said the same thing. I don’t see it, though. As near as I can tell, all sects do is breed unearned arrogance.”

Fu Ruolan barked out a short laugh. “Well, you’re not entirely wrong on that score. Sects do excel at that. That isn’t what I meant, though. The other thing that sects excel at is concentrating information and talent. For all that garbage about facing the heavens alone, most cultivators who reach the point of ascension get a lot of help along the way. Even your master, who has always charted his own course, benefited from lucky encounters and occasionally interacting with some sects. Joining the right sect as a visiting elder, which is what most sects would consider you at this point, gives you access to both of those things. It’s worth exploring.”

Sen did his best to push against his near-instantaneous rejection of the idea. He’d had so many bad experiences with sects or at least their members that he struggled not to lump them all together in a big pile. Of course, at this point, he was fast-approaching if not already beyond the point where most sect members would willingly bother him. Even without his body cultivation, his spirit cultivation had evolved to somewhere around the late stage of core formation. He didn’t think he was peak yet, but that extra-thick layer he’d made during his last advancement had muddied the waters for him. Either way, only someone supremely skilled, supremely confident, or supremely stupid was likely to accost him at this point.

That didn’t exclude the potential situation of several core formation sect lackeys coming after him at the same time, but the odds of that kind of trouble had gone down a lot. His rapid advancements had simply outpaced the kinds of trouble that most wandering cultivators dealt with for centuries. Of course, he was still harboring a lot of mixed feelings about that rapid advancement. Every attempt to slow it down had met with dismal failure. Still, he did have a nascent soul cultivator right at hand to clear up at least one minor mystery in his life.

“In terms of core cultivators,” said Sen, “where would you place my advancement? Late-stage core formation?”

There was an uncomfortably long pause as Fu Ruolan studied him. “Assuming that I knew absolutely nothing else at all about you, that is approximately where I would judge your advancement. Not that you have any business being at that stage of advancement given where you were when you left to see Elder Bo. You should have had to toil for decades to make that kind of jump. I’m honestly still trying to decide whether it’s hideously unfair that heavens just heap divine qi on you the way you described, or if it's something that I should be deliriously happy isn’t happening to me.”

“You should be happy,” replied Sen in a tone of abject weariness.

Remembering all of that divine qi pouring into him and not being able to funnel it off to somewhere else, the sense that he might be ripped apart by it, was one of the things that woke him in cold sweats. He knew that other cultivators would kill and die for chances like that but only because they didn’t truly grasp what it entailed. It was impossible to convey the overwhelming helplessness that came along with the heavens doing what they wanted to him and offering no chance of escaping it. He didn’t have the words to explain how profoundly desperate he became in his attempts to find a path to survival only for them to be closed off one after the next. Sure, he’d come out the other side of it stronger, arguably better, but it was just the latest in a long string of experiences that had scarred him in ways that didn’t show on his skin. He would have immediately, unquestioningly, joyously traded that experience for decades of toiling toward advancement the way others did it. Sen did his best to mentally shrug off those memories and focus on the now.

“As for your advice about sects, I’ll try to keep it in mind. Although, I like the idea of tricking them into giving me resources a lot better than the idea of joining one.”

“Do both,” said Fu Ruolan. “I did.”

“You did?!”

“Of course. You didn’t think I filled that storage treasure with nothing but my own hard work, did you?”

Sen gave her a sheepish look. “Yes. I did think that.”

“There is such a thing as being too straightforward, Sen. A little subterfuge can go a long way in life. Now, you’ve been distracting me into giving you sage advice for almost half an hour. It’s time to get down to the actual business I came over here for. Tell me what you’ve learned about shadows.”