Book 9: Chapter 27: Old Wounds
“So, where were you while all of that was happening?” Sen asked.
Uncle Kho looked up from the scroll he was reading. They were waiting for Auntie Caihong to finish up with Li Hua. Sen was confident that the woman would be fine, so it was mostly just waiting around. Uncle Kho had joined him in waiting, although he had pulled out one of his seemingly endless collection of scrolls to read. Sen honestly didn’t know how the man could pick things up and put them down and still get anything out of it. If Sen didn’t give a scroll his full attention for long periods of time, he tended to lose track of the details. That might be fine for scrolls about history or agriculture, but the details mattered a lot with cultivation.
“About one hundred feet in the air directly above those fools.”
“You were?” asked Sen, startled that he hadn’t so much as felt the man’s presence.
“I was. I saw it as your challenge, so I didn’t want to intervene unless lives were truly at stake,” said Uncle Kho, answering Sen’s next question. “Although, if you hadn’t killed the one who was waving that poor little girl around like a sack, I would have. I almost did.”
While Sen wished that the elder cultivator had intervened as soon as it all started, he understood why he hadn’t. It was the same reason that Sen and the teachers at the academy didn’t intervene when students came into conflict unless it reached a certain threshold. People can’t always believe that someone is going to step in and save them. It was honestly one of the things that bothered Sen most about the sects. It gave cultivators a false sense of power when they were in one. Unfortunately, that kind of borrowed strength didn’t mean much when put up against true power. After all, even if a sect would avenge you, dead is still dead.
Although, Sen wasn’t sure he had much room to judge there. He had done his best to avoid leaning on the borrowed strength of his teachers, but he also knew it had sheltered him. He doubted the sect leadership in the capital would have been quite as gentle with him when he was dismantling a criminal organization and publicly murdering a nascent soul cultivator if he hadn’t been Master Feng’s student. Well, maybe Lai Dongmei would have still been nice to him, but that was for entirely unrelated reasons. Still, he understood Uncle Kho’s reasoning. Sen had brought this problem down on his own head and the heads of the townspeople. It was his mess to clean up.
And, he had been shocked to discover that while there were injuries, there hadn’t been any deaths. That suggested either shocking incompetence or clear intention on the part of the Twisted Blade Sect. He was leaning in the direction of the latter. He suspected that they had been told he had a fondness for mortals, so the best way to get him to engage was to harass the nearby mortals. They just hadn’t understood who or what they were provoking. Of course, that was damning in its own right. It wouldn’t have taken much effort to learn that provoking him that way was going to trigger an extreme and violent reaction. The kind of reaction that led to a sect war. Except, there wasn’t going to be a sect war. Not the way that anyone expected there to be, at least. He wasn’t going to hurl his small collection of cultivators at a larger, more experienced sect. Doing that would be no better than killing them himself. No, he was going to have to deal with the problem another way.
“I know that look,” said Uncle Kho.