Book 9: Chapter 46: Infiltration (6)
If Sen were able to physically sweat, which he was pretty sure he wasn’t able to do anymore, he would have been soaked to the bone. He’d moved on from the zone of authority that was given to the inner sect and core members and moved into the elders’ domain. Life got a lot harder at that point. There were fewer people around, which was a blessing. It seemed that no one wanted to be found around the elders’ homes without an exceedingly good reason. That made moving between the buildings infinitely easier. He was able to move around during the day and not just at night. Getting into the buildings undetected, however, had been an almost nightmarish prospect.
Unlike the rest of the sect, the elders were like Sen. They might choose to sleep, occasionally, but they didn’t require it the way less advanced cultivators frequently did. That meant that he could find a building occupied by an elder who was awake at any time of the day or night. Worse, there were almost always servants or direct disciples around. Working around them and the individual defenses had pressed Sen to his limit. He couldn’t drop his guard for a second. Tasks that had taken seconds in the buildings for the outer disciples took hours. Inserting the vials of insanely dangerous poisons and toxins into the walls had to be done with excruciating slowness. That ensured that the movement of qi and the establishment of the massive formation Sen had set up looked like the normal movement of environmental qi.
It was a task that he had assumed would take a night. Instead, he spent three days and nights creeping and crawling, sometimes quite literally, around the elders’ portion of the sect. He’d had so many close calls that he was getting numb to them, which he recognized was a bad sign. Granted, that apathy had actually turned out to be useful since it prevented him from acting rashly, but it was still an indicator that he was dangerously worn out on a mental level. Premature action could get him killed, but so could failing to act appropriately when it was warranted. There were benefits to the extended foray into secrecy. He was far more adept at using his shadow qi to mask himself from sight. Even shadow walking was ever so slowly becoming a less jarring experience. Still, he’d known that he needed to leave the sect soon.
The moment of truth came when he started to approach what he assumed was the patriarch’s residence. It was the largest and most opulent home in the sect. it was also located in the very center of the compound. That was all he ever learned. While the formations and defenses of the rest of the sect were of variable quality, the ones around the patriarch’s home were on an entirely different level. He took one look at them and knew that he was out of his depth. If he had six months to study those defenses, he might be able to get around them. As things stood, Sen didn’t even dare try. He wasn’t even sure what some of those formations did. It just wasn’t worth the risk.
He knew it could well mean facing the patriarch in combat. If it came down to that, though, Sen wasn’t too proud to ask Uncle Kho for help. Sen wanted to keep the elder cultivator’s hands as clean as he could but not at the cost of his own life. Uncle Kho would not understand or thank him for that dubious kindness. In fact, he’d likely be furious at Sen for not properly analyzing the risks. Sen could look back and see the method in Uncle Kho’s madness. He’d given Sen all those scrolls on history as a kind of primer for how battles could go right and horribly wrong. One of the ways they could go wrong was by not employing your resources wisely. Sen understood that it was easy to see those things in hindsight. The fury of battle did not lend itself to cool calculation. But he’d had days and days with nothing to do but think about the situation he’d gotten them all into. In this situation, as much as Sen didn’t like to think of Uncle Kho that way, the elder cultivator was a resource.
As all of that passed through his mind in an abstract calculation, another part of him, a more primal part of him, continued to stare at the patriarch’s home. It was a challenge. Even when he’d been living on the street, he’d viewed the world as a kind of challenge. Granted, those challenges had the highest possible stakes. They were challenges like finding enough food not to starve and securing sufficient shelter that he didn’t freeze to death. He’d risen to those challenges. He’d risen to them when many others failed. He hadn’t been smarter than all of them or stronger than all of them. He’d just wanted it a little more badly than they had. He’d risen to the challenge again when Master Feng took him up the mountain. He knew now that the stakes hadn’t actually been life-and-death, but he hadn’t known it then. He’d survived, thrived even, by accepting challenges. And all of those odd formations and mysterious defenses were a challenge like he hadn’t faced in a long time.
He wanted to throw himself against that wall of uncertainty and demonstrate that he could rise again. He desperately wanted to prove that he could do it by filling the patriarch’s home with a tide of poisons that even a nascent soul cultivator couldn’t survive. He almost took a step. He almost let himself stop hiding. He forced himself to stop and think. This isn’t what I came here for, he reminded himself. If I could have done it easily, it would have been worth the time and effort, but this will just get me caught. It took entire minutes to walk himself back from that cliff of stupidity, but he did it. Then, he slunk back deeper into the shadows.
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“Nothing?” asked a male voice that Sen didn’t recognize.