As Master Feng went back to work at the anvil, Sen tried to focus on the manual again without much luck. Instead, he found himself turning over what his teacher had said about the last person he’d seen use that technique. It doesn’t matter. You’re not like her. He didn’t need to think for very long about what that had ant. Sen’s first thought about the technique had been about how useful it would be on the battlefield. He understood that he’d seen that application because those kinds of fights were what he faced most often these days. He was always looking for anything that would help him and as many of his people as possible survive those situations.
Now that he was considering how else the technique might be used, he could imagine how helpful it would be for an assassin. It would prove particularly lethal if he could get it to activate as fast as so of his other techniques. For all he knew, he could simply direct Heavens Rebuke into one shadow and have it erge from another. There wouldn’t be any fight after that for most cultivators. That line of thought forced him to think about his teacher in a new light. For Sen’s entire adult life, he’d been aware of Feng Ming’s reputation as Fate’s Razor. There had been a comfort in knowing that his teacher was feared as the most powerful cultivator alive.
Yet, the man hadn’t always been Fate’s Razor. He would have had to climb through the stages of cultivation just like everyone else. There would have been people along the way who tried to kill him and had a real chance to accomplish the task. As Master Feng’s reputation grew, it stood to reason that so people would have resorted to sending assassins to end the threat he represented. How often had that happened? How many blades in the dark had his teacher survived before he beca so powerful that no one dared to try again? Just as importantly, how had that affected the man?
Having recently been on the receiving end of such assassination attempts, Sen thought that he had so small insight into that. Even though the people who had co for him hadn’t stood a real chance, it was only because Sen was so wary and watchful. If he had been less attentive, they might have at least injured him. If they’d had access to a sufficiently exotic poison, an injury might have proven to be enough. That knowledge made it hard to trust people. It also made it hard to ever truly relax. And that was just after the two most recent attempts that he knew about. There had probably been other plans that failed for one reason or another.
Then again, he’d been targeted before. That trip to the capital when he’d first t Long Jia Wei had just been one assassination attempt after the next. The difference was that Sen had been thinking about them that way. He’d still been thinking about them like all of the other cultivator conflicts to be found in the Jianghu. For all that, though, Sen suspected that the number of attempts on his life paled in comparison to the number of tis assassins had been sent to kill Master Feng. Yet, there his teacher stood. Did that make his teacher the supre survivor? He wasn’t sure. What Sen did know was that, no matter how dangerous he thought Master Feng was, he probably wasn’t giving the elder cultivator enough credit.
“Do you plan to keep staring at that way?” asked Master Feng without even looking over his shoulder.
“No,” said Sen, looking away. “I was just lost in thought.”
“What was so interesting?”
“I was thinking about assassinations, which made wonder how many tis soone tried to assassinate you.”
“Hmmmm,” said Master Feng, seemingly unbothered by the question. “I’m honestly not sure. It’s a lot less clear-cut for cultivators than it is for other people.”
“I was thinking about that as well. Where is the line between assassination and soone just overreacting to a perceived insult?”
“Exactly,” said the elder cultivator with a nod. “Then there are tis when people who would have tried to kill you anyway get offered an incentive to do it. A rare ingredient they need for a pill or a special weapon. Is that an assassination attempt? Probably, but it’s not quite the sa as having soone who specializes in assassination co after you. Still, it tends to muddy the waters when you talk about it. Plus, as ti goes on, you start to take it for granted. Everyone rembers the first ti an assassin ca for them. Nobody rembers the fiftieth ti it happens.”
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Sen was about to object that it wasn’t the sort of thing that you’d forget, but he stopped himself. He rembered fighting that goat spirit beast on Uncle Kho’s mountain quite clearly. What about all the spirit beasts he’d fought in the last year or two? Did he rember any of those clearly? After a few monts of reflection, he could honestly say that he didn’t. The stakes were different now, which probably contributed, but that wasn’t the whole of it. Master Feng was right. Those early confrontations with spirit beasts had been harrowing. After years of fighting them, it had beco just one more thing that he did. Sothing that wasn’t worth particular thought or rembrance.
“I can see how that might happen,” answered Sen.
“As to your question about how many tis it happened, I can only estimate. A hundred tis. Maybe two hundred. Like I said, it isn’t always clear that’s what you’re up against.”
Sen had expected the number to be high, but not that high. He was stunned. It was only when he thought it over that it started to make more sense. If Sen had faced that many assassinations, it would have been appalling. The situation with Master Feng was a little different. Those attempts had likely been spread out across millennia, not decades. That didn’t make it any less terrible, but the elder cultivator had probably enjoyed years between attempts, rather than weeks or months. Still, taken all together, it was a wonder that Master Feng trusted anyone.
“How did you deal with that?”
Master Feng continued hamring for most of a minute before he said, “Co over here.”
Sen rose from where he was sitting and walked over to the anvil. There were two, still-glowing pieces of tal that had taken on the general shape of jian. It was odd for Sen to see what would eventually beco his swords in this unfinished condition. He smiled a little to himself and wondered if that’s how his teachers had seen him in the early years. An unfinished blade. Maybe they still do, he thought.
“Channel so of your lightning qi into them,” ordered Master Feng.
As Sen did what he was told, he asked a question.
“What will this accomplish?”
“I suppose I could give you a very technical explanation about the internal structure of the tal. Then, I could tell you about how that structure changes if you expose it to qi at this stage in the forging process.”
“But you aren’t going to do that?”
“I am not, mostly because it wouldn’t an anything to you. I guess that the best way to explain it to you would be to compare it to qi channels. They already exist in your body, so to speak, but that’s not true for swords. You need to create those channels. You can’t do it all at once, which is why you have to sit around here while I work. You’re going to need to do this a bunch of tis. You can stop now, by the way.”
Sen withdrew the qi he’d been gently pushing to the tal. He went back to where he’d been sitting. He’d decided that Master Feng simply wasn’t going to answer his earlier question when the man spoke.
“I didn’t handle it well. Especially at first. There’s sothing about knowing that you’re being hunted that eats away at you.”
Sen recalled how he’d felt when that cabal of demonic cultivators had been trying to find him. It had been one of the more awful experiences of his life. His paranoia then made his current concerns seem positively mild.
“I got angry,” continued Master Feng. “I wouldn’t get close to anyone. That, naturally, just made the problems worse. I developed a reputation for being standoffish and hostile. Ironically, the things I was doing just encouraged people to try to kill . I got even angrier and less trusting, and the cycle continued.”
“I take it that you eventually found another way?”
There was a long pause before Master Feng finally said, “I suppose I did find another way. Of a sort.”
“I take it this isn’t a thod you’d recomnd.”
“I would not. I eventually convinced Kho to co with , and we destroyed the assassin sect that most people were hiring to kill . On the one hand, it did work. It was a long ti before any sect would accept a job to assassinate . It took about five years, but I did eventually start to sleep soundly again.”
“But?” asked Sen.
“Well, you already know. Destroying sects has consequences. People tell stories about you. Once those stories take root, it can prove very hard to cast aside the picture they paint.”
“So, how did you do it?”
“What makes you think I ever did?”
“Oh,” said Sen.
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