Book 12: Chapter 4: It’s Just Death
“So, we just wait?” asked Falling Leaf.
Sen looked up from the scroll he was reading. The Lunar Tiger Sect members were still sprawled on the ground. He turned his head toward Falling Leaf, who was sitting next to him in a comfortable chair he’d summoned for her from a storage ring.
“There isn’t much else we can do until they wake up.”
“We could go somewhere else. We could do something other than just waiting. This isn’t interesting.”
Sen gave her a sympathetic look and said, “I did warn you that a lot of this would be boring.”
Falling Leaf sighed.
“You did say that. I just didn’t expect that it would quite this boring. There aren’t even any regular humans to look at. You scared them all off.”
That last was met with an accusatory look.
“I did scare them off, at first. Now, though, I think they’re staying away because they think all of these people are dead,” said Sen with a vague wave at the unconscious sect members.
She gave him a puzzled look and asked, “Can’t all the regular humans tell they’re still alive?”“Probably not. You have to remember that most people don’t see that many dead bodies in their lives. They can’t tell at a glance whether someone is alive or dead the way we can. And, well, you probably won’t understand, but this many people sprawled out on the ground looks really bad to mortals. They’ll jump to the conclusion that I slaughtered them, which would also scare them. They probably think we’re being ghoulish or reveling in my murders by sitting here.”
“What is ghoulish?”
Sen frowned in thought as he tried to think of how to explain it in a way that would make sense to the ghost panther.
“A ghoulish person is someone who is fascinated by death.”
Falling Leaf leaned back in her chair with a thoughtful expression. Sen went back to reading his scroll until she spoke again.
“Humans are strange.”
“That’s certainly true,” Sen agreed absently.
“Death isn’t fascinating. It’s just death. It happens all the time.”
Sen considered the scroll he was reading. It was a fairly complicated treatise on alchemy that Auntie Caihong had given to him. Even with all his experience and insight, it still required almost all of his attention to understand what he was reading. He put it back into a storage ring. It seemed that Falling Leaf was in the rare mood to talk.
“That’s different for you than it is for the mortals or even cultivators. Humans tend to isolate themselves from most kinds of death. Up on the mountain or out in the wilds, sure, death is constant and unavoidable. You can’t help but stumble onto carcasses and signs of violent death. For mortals, one of the reasons they form villages and cities is to avoid death for as long as possible. It lets them exert more control over their surroundings, which means they face fewer threats. Most mortals don’t butcher their own meat. They don’t even know how. Doing that kind of work is a profession in a place like this. There are some benefits to that, but it also means that most humans have very limited experience when it comes to death.”
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Falling Leaf’s frown grew ever deeper the longer Sen talked. When he finished, she looked around at the city.
“Humans make these places just so they can deceive themselves into thinking the world is safer than it is?”
That idea brought Sen up short.
“It’s not the only reason they do it, but—” he hesitated. “I suppose that they do build places like this so they can lie to themselves. All the stone and the walls make them feel safe, even if you and I know that they aren’t.” ꞦâΝô𐌱Еș
“No wonder so many humans are bad at fighting. They pretend death isn’t always waiting, so they think they don’t need to learn.”
Sen wanted to come to the defense of humans, but he mostly agreed with her. If people weren’t working so hard to convince themselves they weren’t in danger, he suspected that they all would have been better prepared when it finally arrived. Even the ones who were supposed to be practiced at violence seemed to have let that illusion lull them.
“You’re not wrong.”
“So, how will you fix it?” asked Falling Leaf.
“Fix it? Why is it my job to fix it?” asked a baffled Sen.
“You lead the humans now, don’t you? Isn’t that what the Feng and the Kho have been telling everyone?
“I mean, yes, that is what they’ve been saying. I guess I’m in charge.”
“Exactly,” said Falling Leaf, as if that settled the matter entirely.
“I’m still not sure how that means that I need to fix this problem.”
“If you lead, it is your responsibility to make those who follow you ready. Just as you did in that village and with your sect.”
“If you’ll recall, I did very little of the actual work to make them ready for anything.”
“But you arranged for them to be made ready. A leader cannot teach everyone.”
The prospect of trying to replicate that feat on the scale of a city the size of the capital was enough to make Sen want to groan. For one thing, the people in that village he’d more or less adopted had wanted to learn how to protect themselves. He wasn’t at all certain that the same held true for people in the capital. Nor was he especially convinced that making everyone learn would yield good results. A lack of talent could be overcome to a degree with raw enthusiasm. An absence of enthusiasm would likely mean that any talent would never manifest.
Sen himself had overcome a basic lack of talent with both the jian and spear through pure diligence and relentless practice. When he tried to imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t been committed to learning those skills, all he could see was disaster. You simply couldn’t make people try if they were committed to not trying. Even so, he had access to a group of people who did possess those skills to a greater or lesser extent in the army. Since he meant to leave General Mo in the capital, he could theoretically place that task in the general’s hands. Doing so wouldn’t be any great kindness, but it would give some of the soldiers something to do other than patrolling and standing on the walls.
“I might be able to arrange something before we leave,” Sen finally said. “I don’t know if it’ll do any good. But it probably is worth trying if it means there are more people ready the next time an attack comes.”
“Good,” said Falling Leaf before she nodded. “One of them is waking up.”
Sen looked to where she’d indicated and, indeed, one of the Lunar Tiger Sect members was slowly getting to their feet. It was even someone that Sen recognized.
“I wouldn’t have thought that Bey Peizhi would be the first one to wake up. Maybe, I’m not giving that man enough credit,” said Sen, more to himself than Falling Leaf. “It seems that it’s time to put my scary face back on.”
“Why is that?” asked the ghost panther.
“Because I may still need to kill some of these cultivators before the day is over.”