35 – An Understanding
I found the other witch only a few paces from the door when I left. She was leaning against a gnarled old tree, her body partially shrouded in a veil of mist rising from the floor of the forest. I stared at her, my jaw set tight.
I was still annoyed from her attacking me, but more than that... I was even more irritated by that old woman reading me like a book.
She took a breath, closing her eyes, and seemed to be deliberately ignoring how Smoke growled at her. The hellcat’s raven fur stood on end, his tail looking to be almost twice its usual width.
“I wanted to apologise,” she said, but it sounded like it took a lot of effort for her to even say that much. “I... acted rashly, driven solely by what I sensed from you.”
I sighed. “I can’t blame you too much. Back home they would have sent an army my way if they’d seen me walking the road so brazenly.” And had, more than once.
Still, there was some comfort in knowing that my power had not waned. I had shrugged her magic aside as easily as I would have in the old days. Eastern magic wasn’t as different as the locals liked to pretend it was, as it happened.
Though they did like to use their hands a lot more than the wizards back home.
“So... you truly don’t mean anybody any harm?” she asked. She looked at me, one brow raised high.
I let out an irritated grunt. “If I did, we wouldn’t be talking right now. Believe me, in the past I have killed people for far less than what you did. But,” I sighed, pressing my palm against the trunk of a nearby tree. “But a good man doesn’t kill folks, unless there’s a good reason to. And I want to be a good man. Or... at least not the kind of man I was.”
Sometimes I thought about it. How far I had fallen, how I’d let hate and anger drive me step by step across a whole damned continent. When I did die, and it was simply an inevitability even for an immortal, my sins would form a long damned tally.
In truth, nothing I did now would ever compensate for the man I had been.
So, why even bother?
The truth about that was, well...Whatever happened after I died didn’t matter. All that really mattered was being to tolerate how I lived.
“I suppose,” Sakura eventually said. “Apologies, again, for all that. I... have had bad experiences in the past.” I saw her grimace, folding her toned arms. “So perhaps I prefer to act before I think, for as foolish as that may sound.”
I knew that look in her eyes well enough. The look of a woman who had endured some great pain and cursed herself over it. After all, I was much the same.
“Whatever the case,” I told her, “try not to attack me again. Next time I won’t be so reserved.”
“Next time,” Smoke chuffed, raising a paw her way His claws glinted in the stray sunbeams that poked through the canopy of the treeline. “We kill you!”
“Yes, Smoke, that was the implication.”
To my surprise, Sakura offered us a wan smile. “I understand. But know that even though you bested me, there are witches and cultivators far stronger than I on Tsukio. In fact... this southern region is perhaps regarded as weak, in the grand scheme of things.”
“Oh?” I asked. I had no interest in fighting strong opponents, but it would be handy to know where the greater powers of Tsukio lived. If the Snake Flower Sect were anything to go by, the other stronger sects would be the kinds of lunatics looking for trouble.
Sakura nodded at me. “The further north you get, all the way to the Cathayan Strait, the more dangerous Tsukio is. With Cathaya across a thin stretch of sea, where their own strong cultivators regularly make excursions to our land... well, the people of that region need to be strong enough to meet them head on. Plus the Demon King once reigned in the north, and all the qi from that area saturates the region.”
“I see... Good to know.” I turned from her. “Watch yourself, witch. And be mindful of who you accost.” With that, we took our leave.
“The same to you. You might be trying to be a good man now, but... there are people on Tsukio who can stop you if that ever changes.”
Sakura stood back to watch them go, her jaw clenched tight. A few beads of nervous sweat ran down her brow, and he allowed herself to suck in a shaky breath. Even though he had vanished into the treeline, well out of sight, she could still feel his presence.
Maybe he was being honest. Maybe he truly was trying to be a better man.
Yet Sakura could not forget the ice cold abyss of negative karma that had flowed off of him. The spectre of a black iron colossus, walking in step behind him. The razed villages, slaughtered armies, shattered fortresses... This man had left graveyards in his wake.
Could someone like that... truly change?
She leaned against a nearby tree for support, her legs feeling as if they’d turned to mochi.
In her mind’s eye an old memory surfaced, one she had tried to bury for years. The grinning man in the straw hat and ragged robes, his shamisen upon his back.
She’d sensed it off of him, at the time, that miasma of wicked cruelty. But his smile had been kind, his eyes easy, and Sakura had willed herself to believe that her Third Eye was wrong.
“I simply seek an inn to rest my weary head, that is all.”
And she’d believed him.
And her village had been burned to ash because she’d chosen to doubt her own senses.
Sakura’s breathing became ragged and harsh at the memory, and she thumped the tree behind her had enough to make it shudder all the way to its tallest branches. A great chunk of broken bark tumbled away as she pulled her fist free. She’d tried to pull her punch, to spare the tree from total annihilation, but the memory of her own foolishness made her foolish in the present.
She sighed, turned to the tree, and laid her hands upon it. Qi flowed through her, into the tree, and gradually that wound of warped wood began to regrow and repair in shimmering flourishes of jade-hued light.
Figures rose from beneath the fallen leaves, and the tangles of branches. Spectral beings, each no bigger than a mouse. And even with her senses Sakura could only barely see the indistinct outlines of their stubby bodies.
“Apologies, noble kodama,” she told the spirits. And the benevolent yokai nature forgave her, as they did to all noble beings who sought to restore the balance of nature.
“Amon the westerner,” she murmured under her breath. Maybe he wasn’t the same as that man. Perhaps he was sincere in changing his ways, but... whatever the case, his arrival in Tsukio was a herald of strange times ahead.
And she had a distinct feeling their paths would cross again.