Ma Caihong had never bothered much with the little town at the bottom of the mountain. There had simply never been anything there to interest her. Plus, it was tedious to deal with mortals as a nascent soul cultivator. While she hadn’t been a great beauty in her youth, she had been fair enough to turn a few heads. The miracles of cultivation refined her modestly appealing appearance over the last several thousand years. Now, like most other nascent soul cultivators, she possessed an almost unearthly beauty that had a peculiar effect on the minds of many mortals. Simply walking among them was enough to start riots in some places. The people in Orchard’s Reach weren’t quite that bad, but they were close. Yet, since Sen had departed, she had found herself visiting that charming little shop owned by the woman who had helped him as a child. While she’d never admit it to Jaw-Long and most certainly wouldn’t admit it to Ming, she’d visited much more often than was necessary.

It was a disappointment on most visits. Sen did write, but it was sporadic. The delivery of scrolls and other missives was also notoriously unreliable, and that was taking into account the outrageous sums that she had learned Sen often paid to try to improve the odds that they arrived. At least the workers at the shop had stopped bursting into tears whenever they had to tell her that there were no parcels, letters, or scrolls for her. They seemed to have finally realized that she wasn’t going to strike them dead or burn the shop to the ground if they offered her bad news. She could be as petty as any other cultivator in the right circumstances, but there was a difference between being petty and being petty. Those mortal workers had literally no hand in how frequently or infrequently her wayward student chose to put brush to paper. She wasn’t going to punish them for something they couldn’t hope to control.

Yet, every once in a while, a letter did arrive. Most of them were frustratingly short and even more frustratingly short of details. They served more to say that he was still alive than impart any news. When he did mention some new minor miracle he had worked, there was never any of the salient information about how he had accomplished such a feat. If someone else were doing it, she’d think they were intentionally trying to make her angry. Yet, it was so quintessentially Sen to simply overlook the impossible as something that was, in terms he would use, kind of hard until he figured it out. When the improbable was an everyday occurrence, and the inexplicable rained down around you like the heavens were determined to make you a figure of myth, what was one more master-stroke of cultivation insight that would make you the darling of any sect? It was nothing, which was exactly how he treated it when those things happened. So, she was left to sigh, shake her head, and try to work on her own how he’d done something.

So infrequently it nearly qualified as a holiday, that young man would seemingly feel the pull of some kind of qausi-filial duty. He would write out long letters that provided detailed retellings of his recent, to him at any rate, adventures. It was with no small measure of excitement that she raced up the mountain with one such dispatch in hand, massive explosions of snow erupting in the wake of her footsteps. She had been greedy in her initial excitement and read through the beginning before making herself stop. Jaw-Long deserved to see it at the same time she did. She burst into the house and went directly to the library where she could sense her studious husband.

“Put that nonsense away,” she ordered, as she strode into the room.

Jaw-Long gave her that indulgent, loving smile that still made her heart beat a little faster.

“And why should I do that, dear heart?”

“Because I have a letter from Sen. A real letter,” she said, summoning the scroll from a storage ring.

She smirked as Jaw-Long carelessly thrust the book he’d been reading onto the nearest shelf.

“You have my complete attention.”

They stood together reading the letter. Sometimes, they shook their heads and laughed at some youthful folly. Other times, they shook their heads at just how much and how fast he’d grown into a frighteningly ruthless cultivator. A few times, they had to restrain one another from immediately setting out to use a rain of lightning or rivers of poison to explain to one fool or another exactly how not pleased they were with the way Sen had been treated. Not that such options were off the table. Far from it. They were just temporarily set aside for future consideration. There was a letter to finish reading if nothing else.

Then, they had gotten to the very end of the letter. Sen had explained in terse terms what had happened at the mortal village. She could almost feel his lingering fury over the events and the casual mistreatment of that child wafting up off the scroll from those characters. He went on to explain that he had taken the child in and reassured Jaw-Long that he was teaching her to read and write. Mostly, though, he just talked about the girl, Liu Ai. He described the things that made her smile or laugh. The kinds of foods she liked, and the things that made her scrunch up her face. When she saw that little girl’s inexpert, painstakingly written name signed at the bottom of the letter, Caihong felt like someone had reached out and seized her heart. She turned to give her husband a firm look.If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“We’re going now.”

The gods bless him, Jaw-Long didn’t so much a miss a beat.

“I’ll get our things.”

***

They were sitting around a table and laughing together. He knew them of old, those foxes. Old friends, sneered Laughing River mentally. They looked like they felt safe. Secure. Untouchable. Yet, here he was, mere feet away, and they had not recognized him. He’d left Sen behind, for now, recognizing that he had crossed some line in the cultivator’s mind. It wasn’t ideal, but so few things in life were. If life were ideal, his people wouldn’t have suffered so much, or faced such a staggering failure of leadership. He didn’t exclude himself from being painted with that particular brush of shame. You couldn’t live as long as he did without carting around a mountain’s worth of mistakes and regrets. He’d just like to make sure he didn’t ascend before making sure that the disciple of Fate’s Razor didn’t follow him into ascension with a grudge in his heart. Having seen what the boy was capable of in core formation, he shuddered to imagine what kind of unstoppable monster that young man would be as a peak nascent soul cultivator. However, that was a problem for future Laughing River.

The Laughing River of right now had more immediate problems that were simply aching for solutions best delivered with tooth, claw, and blade. Any leader worth a damn knew that you couldn’t suffer traitors to live. And for all that he had been an absentee leader, he was still the oldest and strongest of the nine-tail foxes. He was their leader by right. It was high time he reminded them of why it was that the name Laughing River was one to conjure fear by. Laughing River let his mind settle for a moment. He was angry about what these foxes had done, the lies they had told about him to advance themselves. He knew he couldn’t let that anger rule him, though. Fuel him, certainly, but not rule. When his emotions had finally settled into a kind of dull background noise, he rose from the table he’d been sitting at. He took half a dozen calm steps, and then the sword at his hip was suddenly in his hand and passing through the neck of Summer Vale.

It had happened so fast that the other three at the table looked on in confusion until Summer Vale’s head dropped away from her body. Laughing River idly noted that she had a vaguely confused look on her face. He kicked away the chair containing the now headless corpse and snagged a less bloody chair from a nearby table. He placed it with deliberate care and sat down, giving the other three foxes a big smile. The aptly named Mountain Stone looked positively livid, his face going red right down to his massive neck. He was the single biggest fox that Laughing River had ever met, and there had long been rumors of some kind of dalliance outside the fox bloodlines. Moon Behind Clouds wore a wary expression, but she usually did. The waifish woman had one hand under the table, no doubt gripping one of the many daggers she kept on her person. The final fox at the table was the calmest. Pines in Winter wore a bland, almost bored expression that suggested he’d seen worse and been just as uninterested in it.

“If you wanted to court death, fool, you should have just said so,” said Mountain Stone.

“The four of you—” Laughing River shook his head like he couldn’t believe he’d made such a foolish mistake. “I mean the three of you have done quite well for yourselves. Although, I suppose I made it easy by not being around to deny your lies.”

“Who are you?” demanded Moon Behind Clouds.

“You don’t recognize me? After all those nights we spent together?” asked Laughing River in a mock tone of sadness. “Were you just lying to me all those times you said I was a better lover than your husband? I mean, I expect everyone is a better lover than he is, but I thought I was more memorable than that. Such is the folly of ego. Although, maybe I shouldn’t take it to heart. It turns out that you’re an accomplished liar.”

That finally drew a reaction from Pines in Winter who couldn’t seem to decide if he should be angry at his wife or the stranger throwing out insults and accusations. Laughing River decided he’d played the mysterious stranger for long enough, so he continued.

“Oh, maybe it’s this silly disguise I’m wearing,” he said, wiping his hand across his face and dispelling the technique that was half-illusion and half-transformation.

Mountain Stone looked like he had just taken a hard shot to the groin. Moon Behind Clouds went deathly white. Pines in Winter just swallowed hard before he rallied.

“Laughing River. It’s been some time. We all thought you were dead.”

“Well, I’m sure you hoped I was dead or at least gone for good,” said Laughing River in a cheerful tone before his voice lost any trace of kindness. “No. Such. Luck.”

“We did what we had to do,” said Moon Behind Clouds.

Laughing River gave her a look of infinite pity. “Are you under the false impression that this is a trial? Do you imagine defending yourself well enough will mean I spare you? This isn’t a trial, lover. You are all guilty. This, my boon companions, my dearest, most trusted old friends, is the execution.”

Mountain Stone surged to his feet. “You old fool. Do you really think you can take all three of us?”

Laughing River looked up at the towering fox and shook his head. “You always were stupid.”

All it took was a momentary effort and the illusion that he had kept them all trapped in for the last two hours vanished. Where there had been the common room of an inn filled with boisterous locals and buxom girls handing out drinks and food, there were now only two dozen hooded figures, blades in hand. While most people would have considered the armed figures the greatest threat in the room, the three foxes at the table with Laughing River stared at him in terrified awe. They were all masters of illusion in their own right. They had thought themselves beyond the reach of such trickery. In one act, Laughing River had shown them how laughably inconsequential their skills were in the face of his power. He slowly stood and regarded the three of them with cold eyes.

“I just came to say goodbye. It’s what you do when old friends are dying,” he said before he looked at one of the hooded figures. “Kill them.”

It was a fight, but not a very long one. One of the hooded figures came over to Laughing River when the grisly work was done.

“What now?” they asked.

“We’re going to the old stomping grounds of a recent acquaintance of mine. A place called Emperor’s Bay. We have some extended kin there who require a bit of reeducation.”