Unintended Cultivator

Sen was still distracted when the woman came into the room, so it took him a little while to realize two things. One, he knew her. Two, something was wrong with her. She looked sick. She was pale but not the intentional paleness that many women seemed to strive for. This was the kind of paleness that he’d only seen in people who had been bedridden for a time. There was a sheen of sweat on her face. It even looked as though she’d chewed her lip bloody not too long before. Even if he’d managed to miss all of that, he couldn’t miss the fact that her hands were trembling violently. He’d seen reactions like that before, but only in people who were deathly afraid of something. He sighed internally. It was usually him that they were afraid of but that didn’t make any sense here. As far as his memory served, he’d only met this woman a few times and those meetings had been polite enough. Did I do something scary in front of her? Nothing sprang to mind. He searched those memories and came up with a name.

“Tiu Li-Mei,” said Sen with a little nod.

He’d thought that showing her that he had at least some vague memory of her might help to calm the woman down. The exact opposite thing happened. Her eyes went wide and, if anything, her hands started to shake even more. Stranger still, every time he moved one of his hands, her eyes fixated on the hand. It was like she expected him to do something terrible to her with them. He almost said something but feared that would only make this—whatever this was—even worse. With no other obvious options, he just lifted an eyebrow at her and waited. And waited. He put his eyebrow back down since it was clear that she wasn’t seeing that silent prompt. He gave it most of a minute before he rolled his eyes and, in a louder voice than would normally be necessary, asked a question.

“Can I help you?”

“What?!” Tiu Li-Mei almost screamed.

“I asked if there’s something I can do for you. Or do you plan to simply stand there all day? Honestly, I don’t care if you do. I’d just like to know so I can plan appropriately.”

The look of fear partially gave way to confusion, and then to something that vaguely resembled embarrassment, although it also sort of resembled being nauseated. Sen wasn’t confident enough to venture a firm guess about which it was. Tiu Li-Mei gathered herself and stared at a point somewhere on the wall behind his head.

“The king sent me to ask you a question.”

“Go ahead,” said Sen.