After she got over her coughing fit, Sen decided to take a little pity on Lo ifeng and Long Jia Wei. He’d wanted everyone more or less on the sa page about his intentions, and he felt that he’d achieved that. After all, Long Jia Wei and Lo ifeng already knew what he was going to be doing.
“I expect that there are things that you two need to be looking after,” he said.
Long Jia Wei shot to his feet with a relieved look on his face. Sen was montarily baffled until he realized that the man didn’t want to risk doing or saying anything that might offend Grandmother Lu. The less ti he spent with her, the less likely it was that he’d inadvertently take so action that would make Sen murder him. The man offered another bow and left the room just slowly enough that it couldn’t be rightly called running away. Lo ifeng was slower to rise to her feet. She knew that Sen wasn’t just going to kill her out of hand. It seed like she wanted to be in on whatever discussion ca next, but couldn’t quite figure out a way to invite herself to stay. She finally offered a polite bow and made her way to the door. Right before she could open it, Grandmother Lu spoke.
“It seems like we’ll be working together quite a bit. You should co find later so we can have a chat. Just the two of us.”
It was brief, but Lo ifeng froze in place. Then, she smoothly turned and, her face a mask of perfect calm, bowed again.
“Of course, Lady Lu.”
“Ugh. That Lady Lu nonsense is already getting old,” grumbled Grandmother Lu.
Lo ifeng smiled a little at that and said, “Well, I suppose I know where he gets it from now.”
Before anyone could say anything more, she slipped out of the room. Sen turned to look back at Grandmother Lu and found her scowling at him.
“What?” he asked.
“You destroyed one of the great noble houses and always planned on sticking with the work?”
“Oh,” said Sen, his cheeks coloring slightly, “that. Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what I did.”
“Did it, at any ti, occur to you to ask if I wanted this responsibility?”
Sen's cheeks went a little redder as he said, “It didn’t.”
“Do you have even the slightest clue how expensive it’s going to be to prop this house up while securing control of all of the properties and business ventures?”
“I don’t,” Sen admitted, “which is why I sent for you. You’re the only person I know and trust who has experience managing an empire with concerns spread out across the kingdom. As for the expense, I’m not that worried about it.”
“And why not?”
Sen stood up and moved away a little before bags of money, beasts cores, and natural treasures started dropping from a storage ring to form a pile on the floor.
“The money can be used as is. The beast cores can be sold off. I hadn’t intended to do this quite yet, but I’m told that I can make a vast fortune auctioning off so of my natural treasures and even so of my alchemy work,” said Sen before turning a questioning eye to Grandmother Lu. “Wait. You didn’t think that I expected you to pay for this madness, did you?”
It was clear that Grandmother Lu hadn’t even heard his question. Her eyes were fixed on the pile he’d just made, a look of deep concentration on her face, as though she was trying to calculate the total value of what he’d just dumped on the floor. She shook off her fixation and turned incredulous eyes to Sen.
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“I take it you sohow got in contact with Li Fang?” she asked.
Sen searched his mory. The na sounded distantly familiar like soone might have ntioned it to him once. He couldn’t seem to dredge up any information about the person connected to the na, though.
Sen shrugged and asked, “Who?”
“He’s the manager at my shop in Emperor’s Bay. You left him with so money to invest.”
That brought it all back, along with the knowledge he owned an interest in an alchemy shop there. So much had happened since then that it had all just gotten buried under the mountain of new responsibilities and problems he’d been up against.
“Heavyset guy?” asked Sen.
“He used to be before you ruined him,” complained Grandmother Lu. “He’s as thin as a blade of grass and as healthy as an ox now.”
“That sounds like a good thing,” said Sen in honest confusion.
“Oh, it’s a fine thing for his life expectancy, but he’s a terrible manager now. He spends all of his ti managing your fortune, not my shop!”
Sen blinked a few tis and asked, “What fortune?”
“Well, to start with, that little alchemy business you invested in is doing very well for itself. By the way, what in the world did you leave with those people?”
“I honestly can’t rember. It couldn’t have been anything too special at that point. Just so stuff from the mountain. A few things I found along the way. Beast cores, maybe.”
“Well,” said Grandmother Lu, “whatever it was helped them go from a little shop that was on the brink of failure to the premiere alchemy shop in the city.”
“Really? I don’t rember them being that good at alchemy. They seed competent but not especially gifted. Huh. Well, good for them,” said Sen.
“Good for you, too. And then there was that obscene amount of gold you left with Li Fang. He did what you told him to do, and he invested it. He invested it all over that city. Then, he took the profits and invested them. You basically own half that city now, which is to say nothing about the rivers of money coming back to the pair of you. He had to get into banking to protect it.”
“He put the money in a bank? I’ve heard about those, but never got a chance to really investigate them.”
“No, you ridiculous, heavens-kissed boy. He built a bank so he’d have sowhere safe to store all of your money. The part you told him to set aside for you.”
Sen considered all of that and then said, “I guess there’s plenty of money to prop this place up for a while.”
“You’re not even going to ask how much?”
“I don’t really care that much about money. I an, it’s good for buying food and getting shopkeepers to do what I want, but that’s about it. I expect it’ll make life easier for Ai, though, so that’s always good.”
Grandmother Lu looked aghast and said, “Oh, I failed you, Sen. Don’t you understand? Money is power in the mortal world.”
“I believe you. I just don’t spend that much ti doing things in the mortal world. Most of what I deal with these days is the Jianghu. Except for my academy, but that’s mostly paying for itself these days.”
Grandmother Lu looked like she wanted to give him a lecture, but she took a few deep breaths instead.
“I can see that we’ll need to have a few long conversations,” she said, “but you never answered my question. While I’m here, what is it that you’ll be off doing? Because I’m not planning on working myself to the bone while you go off and have a good ti.”
“I won’t be. While you’re running things here, I’m going to be building a sect.”
“A sect? Based on all of the stories, I got the impression that you don’t particularly like sects, and that they feel the sa way about you.”
“I don’t like them, but I ca into so information recently that has… I guess you’d say it softened my view of them a little. Which is a conversation for another ti because my sect isn’t going to be like other sects. My sect will exist to do exactly two things. Protect Ai and protect the interests of the House of Lu. I’m going to build you and Ai an army, Grandmother. An army of cultivators who are fanatically loyal to us and our goals.”
Grandmother Lu leaned back in her chair and gave Sen a long, assessing look.
“You’ve co a long way in a short ti, Sen.”
Sen had to forcefully push away a cascade of bad mories about what it had taken to get to where he was. The desperate fights, the bad choices, and so much pain.
“Not by choice,” he said.
He saw the empathy in her eyes. Grandmother Lu knew better than most what kind of hardships life could put on a person. He offered her a wan smile, then took a few monts to put the fortune he’d left on the floor back into a storage ring.
“Now that I know that you aren’t planning to simply go be irresponsible while I’m here doing your job, I’m,” she paused in thought, “eighty percent less annoyed with you.”
He looked back at her and lifted an eyebrow.
“Why only eighty percent?”
“Because you adopted a daughter and didn’t have her here to et .”
Sen’s jaw dropped, and he spluttered, “What would you have done if I had brought her here?”
“I’d have beaten you senseless for putting her in so much unnecessary danger,” said Grandmother Lu without a trace of humor in her voice.
“So, there was no right answer?”
“That’s family for you,” she said with a pious look. “Unreasonable to the core.”
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