There was chaos in the throne room after the prince’s rather decisive to, in effect, claim the throne. Guards and servants were summoned. The guards took the queen away in chains, cursing her unfilial child all the way. The servants were tasked with taking away Chan Yu Ming’s hysterical sisters and rousing all the people Sen rendered unconscious. In the midst of all of that, Sen tried to fade away into the background. It was almost a successful venture. He’d gotten as far as a side door...
2023-09-19 08:23:55 +0000 UTC
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Sen lounged on the throne, feeling both bored and uncomfortable. While security around the royal palace was probably very tight for any malicious mortal trying to find a way in, it had been stupidly easily for him to infiltrate the place. It had also been absurdly easy for him to subdue the various guards and servants who found their way into the throne room. He’d made a pile of them in a corner. Sadly, at least one of them was snoring loudly, which was aggravating at the best of times. Yet...
2023-09-18 18:44:32 +0000 UTC
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Sen stood outside in the small courtyard of the house that was theoretically his. He mostly thought of it as Lo Meifeng’s house. It wasn’t a home he’d have chosen. It was just a place to sleep and work while he was stuck in capital. He intended to give it to Lo Meifeng when he left. She seemed comfortable in the city and, Sen presumed, that her work would bring back to the city in the future. It would be convenient for her to have a place that was legitimately hers. He supposed that he ...
2023-09-17 21:11:05 +0000 UTC
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A murderous headache was pounding in time with the increasing pace of Choi Zhi Peng’s heart rate. He did his best to maintain a calm façade, but the headache had been a constant companion ever since that bastard Tong Guanting had shown up and murdered nearly everyone. In doing that, Tong Guanting had accidentally elevated him to role of house patriarch. House patriarch, sneered Choi Zhi Peng internally, what a joke. He had always assumed that he’d assume that role one d...
2023-09-17 04:36:11 +0000 UTC
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“You should be able to move freely in the city again,” said Sen, “Although, I recommend being a little cautious. There are a few Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate members floating around. If they’re smart, they’ll pack up and go or work very hard to find something else to do. But people aren’t always smart.”
Lo Meifeng gave him a searching look. “You really pulled it off.”
“Yes.”
Shi Ping caught up with the conversation then. “You killed that nascent soul ...
2023-09-16 05:23:54 +0000 UTC
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This chapter wasn't part of the original game plan. I'd intended to leave a lot of this in the background, but I get the impression that people think I came out of left field in the last chapter. I generally try to play fair and make sure all the clues are there for a reveal, but I think I may have buried them a little too deep across too many pages, so I'm including this. Since it wasn't part of the original plan, it took me a lot longer to write than I expected. Hence the extraordinaril...
2023-09-15 03:06:39 +0000 UTC
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The first few moments of screaming were so loud that Sen suspected that anything made of glass or fine pottery in the immediate area probably broke. Even at a bit of distance, the sound hurt Sen’s ears. He was just glad that there weren’t many people living nearby. Bit by bit the screaming reduced in volume to something more like what a normal human being would do. When Sen heard a noise that was probably something breaking through a door a wall, he made his way back over to the building....
2023-09-14 05:05:03 +0000 UTC
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For all that Tong Guanting was doing to keep that one building out of mind for everyone, Sen didn’t believe for a moment that it wouldn’t be defended. In fact, he expected heavy resistance. That meant that he needed to either needed to work very quickly or very quietly once he got inside. Otherwise, he ran the risk of someone getting away to warn Tong Guanting. While Sen was confident that he could kill the man, he had zero confidence that he could accomplish that goal while also trying t...
2023-09-14 01:36:25 +0000 UTC
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“I’m just saying that you could have sent a message,” said Lo Meifeng.
Sen held his tongue for three seconds, making sure he wasn’t about to make things worse, before he answered. “And what should I have said in the message?”
“That you hadn’t been kidnapped. That you were fine. That you were,” Lo Meifeng trailed off.
“Yeah,” said Sen, “that was the part that tripped me up. I wasn’t going to tell you what I was really doing in a message than anyone c...
2023-09-13 06:40:10 +0000 UTC
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Sen made sure that he kept a neutral expression as he walked through the Golden Phoenix sect compound. He didn’t imagine for one minute that anyone in the place was ignorant of how he’d spent his time there. Still, he thought sauntering around was bad form. Plus, it seemed likely to trigger an act of violence from at least one of the dozens of angry, heartbroken men and women who glared at him as the matriarch of their sect escorted him to the gate. While Sen was working hard to ...
2023-09-13 01:20:48 +0000 UTC
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It took every last bit of Sen’s considerable self-control not to burst into laughter at what followed those words. Every last one of the cultivators who had originally approached Sen were staring at him with expressions that ranged from simply aghast to, in the case of the leader, furious and aghast. It was like they couldn’t comprehend how he had dared to utter such words to their honored matriarch. As for the matriarch herself, her mouth moved soundlessly once or twice before she seemed...
2023-09-12 07:32:45 +0000 UTC
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“Did you do something?” demanded the prince.
Sen squinted at the man. The prince was agitated, frightened, and gesturing wildly. Sen had never the man like that before. What he couldn’t understand was what could have possibly left the usually calm and collected man in such a state. Nor could he understand why the prince thought that Sen had done whatever it was. Sen had certainly done plenty in recent weeks, but nothing he hadn’t explicitly told the prince he planned to do.
<...
2023-09-12 00:18:17 +0000 UTC
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Tong Guanting hadn’t felt this kind of rage of centuries. It was one thing to, however unwillingly, accept that demands put on him by other nascent soul cultivators. That was a matter of mutual survival if nothing else. He had seen nascent soul cultivators battle once, nearly a thousand years before. It had leveled a kingdom. Not a city or a region, but an entire kingdom. That event had left an indelible mark on his soul and guided his actions. He was aware of just how dangerous it...
2023-09-11 04:03:30 +0000 UTC
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Sen considered the wreckage of what had once been a gambling den run by the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate. In the wake of his interrogation of, Sen thought back, he hadn’t bothered to get her name. He reminded himself that he really needed to do a better job of covering the essentials when he was asking people questions. In the wake of that interrogation, the group had done it’s best to move the operations they could. Unfortunately for them, there were just a limited number of available sp...
2023-09-10 19:49:17 +0000 UTC
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Two days, several healing elixirs, and a lot of sleep later, Sen felt more like himself again. Shi Ping seemed horrified at even the possibility that a nascent soul cultivator might attack them, while Falling Leaf seemed ready to storm out of the inn to find someone to kill. Sen told them both to just sit tight while he ran an experiment or two. His first stop was to see the prince. He was, not surprisingly, aware of Sen’s recent adventures and not particularly pleased.
“Do you know...
2023-09-09 19:59:54 +0000 UTC
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“You not going to pass out again, are you?” asked Lo Meifeng in an extra-dry tone.
Sen gave her a death glare from where he lay sprawled out on the floor. “Just give me a minute. That wasn’t as easy as I made it look.”
“You didn’t make it look that easy.”
“Exactly! And I’m telling you, it still wasn’t as easy as I made it look.”
Lo Meifeng frowned and a sliver of genuine concern crossed her face. “Are you alright?”
“No. Not really. T...
2023-09-09 03:17:31 +0000 UTC
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Sen was vaguely aware that this situation would have sent him into a panic not so long ago. Before Emperor’s Bay and before the beast tide he’d faced in that abandoned town, the idea of careening toward a wall at high speed would have seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. Now, having passed through one crucible after another, those situational factors were just information. He was moving faster than he wanted to be moving toward something that would injure and Lo Meifeng badly if he did...
2023-09-08 17:51:58 +0000 UTC
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“You don’t have to do this,” said Sen.
Lo Meifeng shook her head. “I realize that, by and large, you’ve done most of your fighting alone. That’s probably skewed your perspective a bit. Helping you fight is actually what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“There’s just three of them,” said Sen.
“You do realize that Shi Ping would probably spit blood if he realized that you were talking about two middle-stage core cultivators and a late-stage core cultivator. H...
2023-09-07 23:02:06 +0000 UTC
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The instructions that Monsell had given them to find the forger took them deep into the bowels of the station and well away from the publicly accessible areas. Not that it proved much of a challenge for Kalan to get them past the minor obstacles they faced. Most of it simply involved waiting for the opportune moment, and Kalan was a patient man. The deeper they went, though, the more nervous Cera became. She gave Kalan more and more nervous looks as they went until Kalan thought she might act...
2023-09-07 12:55:26 +0000 UTC
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For all that Sen was braced for near-immediate retaliation from the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate, it didn’t happen. In fact, as near as he could tell, every cultivator in the city that he didn’t know personally was doing their level best to stay at least half a mile away from him. Sen didn’t necessarily consider that a bad thing, but it did run counter to expectations. He got nervous when bad things didn’t happen the way he expected, which was how he ended up getting a murderous look ...
2023-09-06 19:38:26 +0000 UTC
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“So,” said Sen, “how do you feel about helping me burn a criminal organization to the ground?”
Lo Meifeng gave him a narrow-eyed look. “What did you do?”
“I told the Foggy Falcon Toe Club to get out of the city or else.”
Lo Meifeng closed her eyes and took three deep breaths before she spoke again. “Why?”
“Because they keep sending people to kill me, obviously.”
“How long has that been going on?”
“Pretty much sinc...
2023-09-05 22:41:14 +0000 UTC
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Sen resisted the urge to roll his eyes, and darted into a narrow space between buildings. It wasn’t even really wide enough to qualify as an alley, but it was big enough for him to fit and wrap himself up in shadows. Then, he climbed the wall, and rolled over the edge of the roof. He waited there as people frantically searched the alley below. Sen had grown increasingly tired of this nonsense. Ever since he’d killed the four cultivators in the park, the Shadow Eagle Claw Syndicate had bee...
2023-09-05 18:53:42 +0000 UTC
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“So, let me get this straight. He just went to the park, sat on a rock, and, since he wasn’t busy or anything, decided to advance his cultivation. Just like that. Oh, and, incidentally, he also fended off and then killed four other cultivators while advancing.”
“Yes,” said Lo Meifeng. “That’s about the size of it.”
Shi Ping was certain that, if he wasn’t a cultivator, he’d be getting a terrible, terrible headache. Every time he thought he was getting a...
2023-09-05 14:54:27 +0000 UTC
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Kalan made his way back to the cutter and did his best to put his many frustrations under wraps. For all his suspicions about Cera’s possible status as some kind of spy or agent, she had actually done the things he asked her to do. Even if she really was an agent, the fact that she hadn’t made his life harder in the last few days made him feel a deeper level of gratitude and even a touch of mild affection that probably wouldn’t have existed under normal circumstances. At the ve...
2023-09-04 19:50:17 +0000 UTC
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Sen made an unhappy noise as he jumped down off the rock. It seemed like he was always surrounded by corpses of one kind or another. He knew that cultivators lived violent lives, but he couldn’t help but wonder if these kinds of things happened to other cultivators as often as they seemed to happen to him. Yet, for once, he couldn’t help but feel like this one really hadn’t been his fault. The only way he could have been less actively pursuing conflict would have been if he were sleepin...
2023-09-04 16:27:28 +0000 UTC
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The other thing that Sen spent his time on was something that he’d been neglecting at least partially on purpose. He’d return to the park each afternoon and sit on large rock by small pond. Sen suspected the pond was artificial, but he decided that didn’t bother him. The spot was shaded and buried in a well-maintained but densely packed group of trees. It was nearly a forest in miniature. While it didn’t fully dampen the constant noise of the city, it muffled it enough that Sen could ...
2023-09-03 18:33:08 +0000 UTC
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For the next few weeks, Sen found that his life took on a disquietingly calm quality. He wasn’t attacked or even accosted by anyone. However, the pile of scrolls and letters he’d been ignoring were replaced by newer versions of the same ones. He’d consulted with the prince on what to do about them, and the prince had said that simply ignoring them was the best course of action in this case. It would help reinforce the idea that Sen was a cultivator first and foremost. That would help hi...
2023-09-03 04:47:59 +0000 UTC
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“You did what?” asked the horrified prince.
Sen didn’t think that the prince was actually asking him, since Lo Meifeng had reacted in exactly the same way the evening before. On the one hand, he understood their reactions. Core formation cultivators didn’t usually stare down nascent soul cultivators and then, essentially, blackmail them. On the other hand, Sen hadn't gone looking for that confrontation, let alone planned it. He been reacting on instinct, rather than som...
2023-09-02 06:17:27 +0000 UTC
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Sen and Falling Leaf descended the stairs into the common area. While it wasn’t quite as empty as it had been when the prince had been there and the employees weren’t kowtowing, the common area was silent. The people who were there were hurriedly finishing meal or drinks and exiting. The cause for that reaction stood in the center of room, projecting arrogance in every direction. The woman was tall and, like so many cultivators, unnaturally attractive, with sleek black hair and catlike ey...
2023-09-01 13:31:39 +0000 UTC
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The prince summoned a servant to lead back out to the gate. Sen was pretty sure he could have found his own way, but he supposed that the prince and his guards weren’t comfortable having a stranger wandering around the building. Sen knew that he wouldn’t want strangers roaming his home if he had one. He’d barely left the prince’s compound before he sensed the cultivators start following him. Sen briefly wondered if they intended for him to notice, then realized that he was ho...
2023-08-31 19:53:16 +0000 UTC
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