BOOK 12: CHAPTER 31: THE EASY PART OF MY DAY

Sen left the alchemy room, pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head. He also held the absolute certainty that he would have a terrible headache if he were still mortal. It wasn’t until the three Order members rushed up to him with expressions of worry that he realized he was muttering under his breath.

“Unbelievable,” he said for the third or possibly tenth time.

“Did the alchemy fail, Lord Lu?” asked one of them.

Sen stopped in place and blinked at the man in confusion before he asked, “What? What are you talking about?”

“I meant—” started the man.

“I know what you meant,” snapped Sen. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course, the alchemy didn’t fail.”

Sen held up the stone vial that contained the elixir. That elixir that had, up until he’d started talking with his daughter, felt very difficult and important. Now, it was swiftly falling down his list of concerns. He turned to look at Falling Leaf. She would understand why this would all prove to be one enormous, ongoing problem. One not helped in the least by the fact that he had this stupid war to keep him away from home. And Sen felt very strongly that he needed to be at home right now.

“Ai has a new bird,” he told the ghost panther.

Falling Leaf studied his face for a moment before she cautiously said, “Ai has many birds.”

“She certainly does, but she’s gotten herself a new one. She calls it her reallybig bird.”

The languid body language that usually served as a reminder of Falling Leaf’s feline origins disappeared. Her body went almost rigid as she straightened up. Narrowing green eyes told him that she was seeing the edges of what had him wanting to fly away that very moment.

“What has she found?” asked the ghost panther.

“Lord Lu, if the elixir is ready—” started the same Order member he’d been mostly ignoring.

“It’s a dragon,” said Sen, throwing his hands in the air. “Somehow, a heavens-be-damned dragon found my daughter while Auntie Caihong was distracted. Or so I assume. Ai was far too excited about her new bird to remember those details. Anyways, it found Ai and decided, for reasons that I cannot begin to comprehend, that it was going to pretend to be her pet!”

All three Order members let out cries of alarm as Sen waved around the elixir that might be their only chance at restoring their Matriarch. Falling Leaf looked alarmed for entirely different reasons.

“Dragons are not birds!” she shouted. “And they are never pets!”

“I know that. You know that. I’m half-convinced that my daughter knows that. But it’s big, it’s got wings, and it flies. Apparently, that’s close enough!”

The Order members let out gasps and choked-off words of terror as Sen continued waving his hands, and the priceless elixir, in impotent frustration. Falling Leaf had closed the distance with him. She’d gotten so close that she was almost pressed up against him, which gave Sen an unobstructed view of her very wide eyes.

“Are you sure? Are you sure it’s a dragon?”

“As sure as I can be without confirming it with Auntie Caihong. She was still talking with it when Ai decided to go back outside to see what was happening.”

“Why would a dragon do this? Is it some kind of threat from the spirit beasts?”

“That is a question I would very much like the answer to,” said Sen. “I can trust Auntie Caihong to handle almost any problem, but a dragon? That might be too much.”

Falling Leaf’s eyes were flicking back and forth, almost like she thought that the dragon might appear in the room with them.

“The Caihong is mighty,” she said slowly, “but I don’t think even she could face a dragon. Not one of the true ancients.”

“I wish Master Feng were here. I doubt even one of the dragons is a match for him. I’d feel a lot better about this if I could send him there to see what this is all about.”

“Yes,” said Falling Leaf, nodding enthusiastically. “The Feng would be perfect for that. One dragon to keep the other in check. He has one of the talking cores, doesn’t he? You should contact him.”

“I almost did,” admitted Sen, before he started waving the hand with the elixir again. “But he could be anywhere this side of the Mountains of Sorrow. I also don’t know that it’s necessary, yet. I just need to trust that Auntie Caihong can keep the situation under control long enough to tell me if I need to do something drastic.”

“Lord Lu,” said one of the Order members in something suspiciously close to a sob, “I beg you. Please stop.”

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Sen eyed the three cultivators, who all looked like they were ill, and asked, “What’s with them?”

Falling Leaf glanced at the three and shrugged.

“They’re human. Who knows what madness has taken them?”

“That’s probably fair,” said Sen.

He allowed himself the mercy of leaning his head back and squeezing his eyes closed for a few seconds. There was nothing, literally nothing, that he could do to change the situation with the dragon. Whatever its reason for being there, it clearly didn’t mean to harm Ai immediately. If it had, he suspected that he’d have had a very different conversation when he contacted the sect. That was assuming he could have reached anyone at all. He suspected that dragons acted a lot like Uncle Kho when they decided to engage in violence. There might be survivors afterward, but probably not very many. Opening his eyes, Sen looked at the Order members.

“Oh, right. I guess I should go deal with this,” he said, holding up the elixir.

“You say that as though it’s trivial,” whispered one of the order members.

Sen gave the man a flat look.

“Right now, my daughter thinks a dragon is her new friend. A. Dragon. Meanwhile, I’m here. So far away that there’s nothing I can do about it. This, it turns out,” said Sen, waggling the vial, “is going to be the easy part of my day.”

“Easy?” asked Falling Leaf, doubt clear on her face.

“Easier,” admitted Sen. “Make sure they don’t interrupt.”

“Why would they interrupt?”

Sen looked at the vial in his hand and said, “Because there will probably be some screaming involved.”

That set off a round of frantic questions from the Order members that Sen wholly ignored as he walked to the Matriarch’s room. Closing the door behind him, he sealed the stone. It wasn’t a perfect solution. Galehouses could take some abuse, but they weren’t indestructible. Sealing the door was more of a symbolic point. If those cultivators decided to break through the stone, they probably could. He hoped that they wouldn’t. That would only work against their own interests at this point. After a few seconds of consideration, Sen disabled the formation that had been steadily concentrating fire qi around the Matriarch. It wouldn’t be necessary anymore if the elixir worked the way he expected it to. While he could work around dense fire qi, it would add difficulty to the process. There was no benefit to making his work harder. He looked at the face of the Matriarch. She seemed largely unchanged, save for the absence of a subtle expression of underlying pain.

“I wish you could tell me if this is something you actually want,” he muttered.

He waited for her eyes to open. They didn’t. I guess that was an empty hope, he thought. If she were going to wake up, she would have already. With nothing else to do, Sen pushed aside his uncertainties and fears. The elixir would work, or it wouldn’t. This had always been a gamble. If the elixir failed, the Order of the Celestial Flame wouldn’t be in a worse position than it had been. He used a thumb to open the woman’s mouth. Then, he massaged her throat to encourage swallowing as he slowly poured the elixir into her mouth. With his spiritual sense and qi examining everything that was happening inside the Matriarch, he felt it the moment the elixir hit her stomach and went to work.

For one brief moment, her eyes snapped open. She let out the scream he’d been all but certain was coming. He doubted it would be the first. After that, he didn’t have the attention to spare for what was happening outside of her body. The elixir behaved mostly the way he’d expected it to. It spread out through her body, but there were places where the elixir tried to build up or where it didn’t want to go. There were dozens of possible explanations for that, exactly none of which Sen had the time to explore. To work, the elixir had to do certain things in certain ways, even if he had to make things happen in those ways.

Much as he did when making an elixir, he started adjusting things. It was hard. It was so much harder than working on an elixir. When he created an elixir, he was guiding and adjusting the processes, but those processes didn’t actively fight him. His was the only will involved. The Matriarch’s nascent soul body tried to fight him at every turn. The worst part was that he didn’t even get the impression that it thought it knew better than him what should happen with the elixir. It was fighting him just because his will and his qi were foreign to it. It was more like a wounded animal snapping and snarling at everything that approached.

Sen focused harder, pushing past the resistance to force the elixir to stop condensing in a specific area or make it stay in others. However, as he did that, he began to notice oddities in the Matriarch’s body. Things that cultivation and advancement should have fixed. He couldn’t tell if they were flaws caused by flaws in the Matriarch’s foundations or the results of injuries. What he could tell was that they were hampering what he was trying to do with the elixir. It was an open question whether he should leave them alone or try to repair them. For all he knew, he would damage her cultivation by trying.

After pausing for what was probably no longer than a heartbeat to a mortal, Sen decided to trust his intuition. He began to unknot snarls in the Matriarch’s energy and to repair the physical flaws he found. At any given moment, he was forcing the elixir to suffuse organs and muscles, applying wood and water qi to a dozen physical defects, and struggling against an ever-growing resistance. He could feel the strain building up in his mind, his body, and even his soul. It was just pain, and he knew how to manage pain. He moved on from tissues to the bones, driving the elixir into them with what felt like nothing but sheer force of will.

There was a pain in his head now, sharp and needlelike, that was growing by the second. It was intense enough that even Sen’s will stuttered for a moment. Grinding his teeth, he fought against the resistance in the Matriarch’s body and his own. He was almost there, almost done. He had to finish what he started, or this was all for nothing. The blood was all that remained. It had carried the elixir, but hadn’t absorbed it. Not the way he needed it to. He pushed harder, but there was something in the way. Something he didn’t understand. There was too much resistance coming from too many places. He needed some kind of an edge. Some way to relieve the pressure, if only for a few seconds.

It wasn’t a conscious thought, just an instinct. He summoned a particular beast core. He’d once stored divine qi in beast cores. Most of it had been used up at one time or another, but there was a little left in that one. Not a lot, but maybe enough. He drained the core and let it sweep through the Matriarch’s body. For a moment, one precious moment, the resistance in her body vanished. Sen didn’t waste his chance. With a last, monumental burst of focus and will, he forced the elixir into her very blood. He slumped to the floor. Part of him wished he would pass out, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he just sprawled there while he tried to work up the energy to summon a chair. Eventually, he managed to wipe his face with a hand. It came wet and bloody.

“Yeah, that can’t be good for me,” he said.

“You madman,” came a weak voice from the bed. “You impossible, mad child. What have you done?”