Sen’s first impulse was to leave the bandit herding to other people. Auntie Caihong put a stop to that idea, although she did look regretful about it. She knew very well what he wanted to be doing at that moment.

“You have to stay,” she told him.

“Why?” he demanded, already suspecting the answer.

“It’s so they’ll all see you.”

He hated this additional delay but grit his teeth and nodded. She was right, of course. Not everyone who had been assaulting the walls had been within hearing of his one-sided conversation with the bandit leader. Seeing him would confirm to all who were forced to walk past exactly who had put a stop to this little exercise in futility. For all that, he couldn’t avoid an obvious question. He glanced at Auntie Caihong.

“You could have put an end to this in as little time as I did. Maybe less. Fu Ruolan could have as well.”

“True,” she agreed. “So, you want to know why we didn’t?”

“Yes.”

She eyed him with a considering gaze for several long moments before she said, “You’ve been playing politics recently. Why do you think we didn’t?”

Sen watched the passing mortals and cultivators as he considered the question. The mortals just looked shocked at the abrupt turn of events, but the cultivators wore aghast expressions when they passed not one but three nascent soul cultivators. Well, two that they could feel. Auntie Caihong was still doing something to mask her presence. Sen was confident she wasn’t hiding the way he did, but she had found some way to improve her method of muting her presence. She didn’t feel like a cultivator at all. However, she did still look

like one in his spiritual sense, if a much less powerful one. If any of the passing cultivators had dared to activate their spiritual sense, they likely would have imagined she was a weak core cultivator with an odd talent who had been sent from the sect to pass along messages.

“There are a couple of obvious reasons,” observed Sen. “This was an opportunity to test the formations in the walls against those sane enough to withdraw if they took too many losses. It was also a chance to test how the sect members and mortals handled themselves against an organized enemy.”

“Both valid reasons,” said Auntie Caihong. “Anything else?”

Sen noticed that Lai Dongmei was observing this exchange with a kind of focused attention that seemed unwarranted. He lifted an eyebrow at her, and the woman just gave him an enigmatic smile. He sighed a little. His belief that he lacked any true capacity to understand women having been once more confirmed for him by the harsh crucible of conversation.

Setting those concerns aside, he said, “It would have been a chance to test how quickly and how well the sect could repair any damaged formations.”

“Also true.”

“None of that is what you’re fishing to see if I’ve picked up on, though. Is it?”

“No,” she admitted with a faint smile.

For a moment, Sen felt a little overwhelmed with the possibilities. There were so many things that were untested about the city and about the sect. Yet, he knew Auntie Caihong well enough to recognize that she wasn’t trying to draw his attention to minor things that simple practice would fix. Those matters didn’t need his attention. Practice could be arranged by others. For that matter, the need for practice after an altercation like this would almost certainly be identified and addressed by others. That meant that Auntie Caihong hadn’t intervened because she wanted to test something she saw as more fundamental and important. Before he went too far down that line of thought, he did need an answer to one question.

“Why didn’t Fu Ruolan intervene? This is exactly the kind of event that I would have expected to make her do something—” Sen searched for the right word. “Drastic.”

“Oh, I suspect she would have if I wasn’t here,” said Auntie Caihong with a roll of her eyes. “I convinced her that it was best to let things take their course until we saw how things were going to play out.”

“Convinced?” asked Sen, almost dreading what she’d say happened next.

“I spoke firmly to her.”

Sen decided that was probably more answer than he needed or wanted. It was also Auntie Caihong’s way of saying that the always mercurial nascent soul cultivator hadn’t done something drastic, and he should just be happy about that. So, Sen decided to just be happy about it and ask no more questions. Turning his attention back to her original question, the answer seemed obvious now that he wasn’t focusing so hard on it. There had even been a hint in her original question when she’d mentioned that he’d been playing politics.

Stolen from NovelBin, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“You wanted to see how Sua Xing Xing would handle all of this,” said Sen.

“I did,” agreed his teacher.

“And were you satisfied?”

“I didn’t feel the need to remove her.”

Sen wasn’t sure that was the same thing as being satisfied, but at least Auntie Caihong hadn’t been so disappointed that she felt a need to change the sect’s leadership. Still, that had been faint praise at best.

“You think she could have done better?” asked Sen.

“There’s always room to do better. That’s as true for me or you as it is for her, but there are levels of doing better. That being said, yes, she could have done significantly better.”

“In what way?”

“She doesn’t like open conflict.”

“I not sure that I see that as a failing. Some would argue that I’m too quick to embrace open conflict.”

“It’s not a failing in and of itself. And, if you were here all the time, the two of you would probably balance each other out. But when the enemy is literally at the gates, a dislike for open conflict is a liability. It can make you less willing to commit to things that need to happen.”

Sen considered that in silence as more mortals and cultivators trudged by them. He felt like Auntie Caihong was hinting at something. As he considered the bedraggled state of many of the mortals and the relatively small number of cultivators that were passing through his spiritual sense, it became clear. It became even more clear when he considered how poorly trained the cultivators in the north seemed to be.

“You think she could have won this fight by herself with the resources she had?” he asked.

“I know she could have. She just didn’t want to instigate that level of aggression. To be fair, though, I think it had more to do with the mortals. I don’t know this for sure. It’s just an educated guess. I think she believed you would react badly if sect members killed mortals in the fight, and they would have had to do that.”

“By the thousand hells,” said Sen, shaking his head. “She has access to those communication cores. Why didn’t she just tell me this was happening? She could have asked me about any of this.”

“That I truly don’t know,” said Auntie Caihong. “But it’s not as though it’s a terribly vexing puzzle to work out. It was almost certainly—”

“Fear,” Sen finished for her in a tired voice. “It was fear.”

“Fear of what?” asked Lai Dongmei, finally choosing to enter the conversation.

“Me. My disappointment. Losing her position. Take your pick. It might be all of them,” offered Sen with a shrug.

“And will you remove her?” asked Lai Dongmei.

Sen didn’t answer immediately. It had been his initial mental reaction to learning about all of this only by coming home. Then again, he knew that a lot of that was pure anger. No matter how trivial the actual danger to Ai had been, it had existed. He should have been told. Understanding why he hadn’t been told didn’t do anything to quell that anger. Knowing that it would have been foolish to race home in a fury to go on a killing spree also did nothing to soften those feelings. What he did have right at hand were two people who were far older and far more experienced than him. One of them was even a current sect matriarch who seemed to be doing a good enough job to hold her position uncontested. It would be folly not to at least ask them the obvious question.

“I haven’t decided, yet. Would you remove her?” he asked Lai Dongmei before turning to Auntie Caihong. “Would you if you were in my position?”

Lai Dongmei looked to Auntie Caihong, evidently checking to see if the other woman wished to answer first. A vague hand gesture gave Lai Dongmei permission to go first. A frown briefly marred the woman’s face before she spoke.

“That’s not a simple question. I also don’t know all of the details or what her reasoning was. You wouldn’t be the first sect patriarch to remove someone from a position of authority for such behaviors. However, fear of one’s seniors or even their reactions can prompt a truly stunning degree of idiocy from cultivators. It even happens with cultivators who should be experienced enough to know better.

“I also don’t know what kind of advice she was getting. For all we know, everyone was telling her the best thing to do was to turtle up behind these ridiculously well-fortified walls and let the enemy exhaust themselves. It can be difficult to ignore that kind of advice. It’s even a valid strategy in a case like this, although it becomes very expensive and resource-intensive the longer the siege goes on. For my part, I’d hold off on any decision until after I’d had a conversation with her and gotten all the details.”

It was a reasonable, measured response that didn’t align all that well with Sen’s usual kick-it-until-it’s-dead method of resolving problems. Of course, he’d seen enough in the capital already to know that method wasn’t good for generating long-term fixes to most problems. It was best as a crisis response when things needed an immediate resolution. Plus, he liked feeling that he was doing something, and talking almost never felt like taking action to him. In fact, it usually felt very intentionally and explicitly like avoiding doing something in favor of doing nothing. He knew, deep down, that wasn’t always true, but it felt true too much of the time for his liking. He turned his gaze to Auntie Caihong. She smirked at him.

“You want me to tell you to remove her immediately. It’s obvious on your face. I’m sorry, but Lai Dongmei just gave you a very short but meaningful lesson on being an effective leader. You don’t have to take her advice. It’s your sect, and it’s up to you how you want to run it. For what it’s worth, though, I’d give you the same advice that she did.”

“Fine. I will at least talk to her before I decide. But I’m doing that tomorrow. I swear that the next person who puts some obstacle between me and my daughter will be courting death. That reminds me,” said Sen, looking at Auntie Caihong, “if you’re here, where is Ai?”

“Oh, right now, she and little Zhi are spending some quality time with Uncle Jia Wei and his little pack of hunting dogs. I had my doubts about them at first. But, for a bunch of merciless killers, they’re all rather sentimental about those two little girls.”

That pronouncement and Auntie Caihong’s apparent glee at Ai and Zhi having charmed a bunch of assassins left Sen with profoundly mixed feelings. Yes, they were almost certainly safe from any threat short of a nascent soul cultivator, which was good. He just wasn’t sure that said pack of assassins was good company for two mortal children. Or any children for that matter. Since he was apparently stuck where he was for the moment, he decided that it was just going to have to be one of those things he’d have to live with.