On previous days, Sen had been making only half-hearted attempts to avoid the Soaring Skies sect members. While he hadn’t especially wanted their company, he also hadn’t worried that they were going to try to harm him. Wu Meng Yao was simply too earnest in her talk of honor. If nothing else, he believed that she would warn him if the other meant to do something to him. Well, if one of them planned on doing something violent anyway. Following the fallout of his decision, Sen decided it was high time to put some real distance between him and the sect members. Then, there would be no accidental encounters when it was time to set up camp. Although, ideally, Sen could find an inn somewhere. While the road was dominated by long stretches bereft of civilization, there were occasional villages and towns. He’d just keep going until it grew too late in the day, or he found one.

Just as importantly, he hadn’t been making use of his qinggong technique while walking. It soaked up more qi than he liked to use, but it was the ideal solution to the problem behind him. If the Soaring Skies sect members and their prisoners could all use qinggong techniques to travel, he suspected they would have been. He’d seen no evidence of that, so he put the technique to good use. He didn’t use it to the technique’s maximum capacity. He reserved that for fights. He didn’t even use to the level he had done when fleeing Tide’s Rest. There was no one pursuing him that he was aware of. Instead, he only used it enough that his passive intake of qi matched the amount he was using.

He didn’t have a good way to measure those amounts, and every small improvement in his cycling technique changed the math a little bit. Still, it gave him something to occupy his mind with as the landscape flew. After an hour or two of travel, he thought he was probably using the qinggong technique to somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of the maximum speed it allowed him. While it was accomplishing the goal of leaving miles between him and his very short-term companions, there was more than a little perfectionist living in Sen’s soul. Like most techniques, Sen had initially settled for just getting it to work. That was often a massive achievement in and of itself.

He’d been especially proud of getting that qinggong technique to work, though. Master Feng had said that most cultivators didn’t even bother with them until core formation, citing the ridiculous qi consumption using the full-blown technique demanded. Now that he had nothing better to do than attend to that technique for hours on end, Sen put his mind to work on making it work better for him. Sen felt he’d been relying too much on raw force and not enough on precision since leaving the mountain. It just wasn’t a winning long-term strategy. It was fine for when someone at his own stage challenged him, but he couldn’t depend on every cultivator he met being at his stage. It was only pure dumb luck, or perhaps some kind of intervention from the heavens, that had kept him out of the way of higher-stage cultivators so far. Although, once he reflected on it, maybe it hadn’t been as unlikely as he’d initially thought.

There were progressively fewer and fewer people in each major cultivation stage. There were lots and lots of people in the qi condensing stage running around out there. People at that stage formed the bulk of most sect memberships. They were outer disciples and the ones most likely to be sent out of the sect on tasks. That made the odds of running into one of them comparatively high. People who made it into the foundation formation stage were much rarer. Master Feng hadn’t known specific numbers, but Auntie Caihong suggested that the vast majority of cultivators reached a bottleneck at or near the peak of the qi condensing stage. She estimated that only ten percent of people made the transition into foundation formation. That was still a lot of people, and they made up the inner sect membership of most sects. Again, they were more likely to be sent on tasks, so he could expect to routinely come across people at that cultivation stage.

Auntie Caihong had said that she thought the failure rate to break through from foundation formation to core formation was even higher. While that didn’t make core formation cultivators impossible to find, they weren’t just running around everywhere. If sects sent them out, it was for very specific reasons. So, Sen reasoned, he probably didn’t need to constantly worry about higher-stage cultivators getting in his way constantly. Even so, spending as much time traveling as he expected to meant that he would, inevitably, stumble across core formation cultivators at some point. Raw power wouldn’t win him a fight with those people. In fact, the odds were good that nothing could win him those fights except running away. Except, running away was no guarantee either, unless they decided to let him go. Most core formation cultivators could run a foundation formation cultivator to ground if they wanted to. The power level difference was just too large in most cases. Sen’s body cultivation could help him level that playing field, but it couldn’t bridge the gap entirely. No, if he wanted to stand a chance, he needed to be using his resources more efficiently than anyone else.

So, he spent most of the day looking for ways he could refine that qinggong technique. It was mostly an exercise in frustration. Constant use did expose a few ways he could improve his approach, but this was one case where the problem wasn’t his execution. His problem really was his cultivation stage. He was just underpowered to use the technique the way it was meant to be used. Sen supposed he should just be happy he had the technique to use at all. It was making his life easier that day. Not everyone had the option to literally run away from their frustrations with so little comparative effort. As the sun started to sink toward the horizon, though, Sen started to resign himself to the idea that he’d be camping again. He’d passed through a village earlier in the day, but it was close enough that the Soaring Skies group could have reasonably gotten that far by sunset. So, he’d continued forward.

With evening imminent, though, he needed to make a choice. Sen was perfectly capable of setting up camp at night. He’d done it before. Darkness just didn’t obscure his vision the way it once had. Plus, in a pinch, he could always use shadow qi to get a near-perfect sense of what was in an area. What Sen really wanted, though, was a place where he could shut out the world using a door. Not that a simple door or lock could really stop someone like Wu Meng Yao or Song Ling from barging in, but politeness would likely exert power over them where wood and metal would not. Then, much to Sen’s joy, he spotted the upper edges of a wall ahead. His map wasn’t large enough to do more than note the locations of relatively sizable cities, so this place wasn’t on it. Still, if he could see the wall from where he was, it probably meant a town big enough to have an inn.

Throwing a bit of caution to the wind, Sen increased the amount of qi he was pushing into the qinggong technique. It wasn’t balanced with his qi intake anymore, but he covered what would have been an hour of normal walking in five or ten minutes. A fair trade in his estimation. Yet, when the town proper came into view, Sen drew a swift and complete halt. He’d grown up in a town and spent years out in nature. His senses were finely tuned for what should and shouldn’t be in both environments. An unnatural silence hung over that town and the entire surrounding area. At least, that was what had initially raised Sen’s suspicions. Now that he was studying the town, though, the other problems became apparent.

The gates to the town were open but unguarded. Granted, this town probably didn’t face spirit beast attacks as often as some places, but no town left its gates unguarded. If nothing else, the guards served as an early warning system if someone hostile showed up at the gate. There was no woodsmoke. He couldn’t see any rising from behind the walls, which wasn’t always a problem, but he couldn’t smell any smoke either. Even on the hottest days of the year, people needed to cook. That woodsmoke smell hung over every town without fail, except this one. Of course, the lack of people was the true warning sign. Even if Sen couldn’t see them from where he was, he should be able to hear people moving around, talking, laughing, shouting, or simply encouraging animals to get a cart from one part of the town to another. Yet, all that Sen heard was nothing.

He debated with himself about what to do. There was obviously something very wrong with the town. Part of Sen burned with curiosity. What could have left a town in such a state? Was it a monster of some kind? An illness? Had the wells simply run dry, and people moved on? There could be a challenge in that seemingly abandoned place, something that might let him move his cultivation forward. Although, Sen doubted that. He didn’t seem to get much benefit from physical confrontations. While part of him really wanted to know, Sen was less thrilled by the idea of a brand-new problem. Much like Changpu’s broken heart, the trouble in the town wasn’t his responsibility. Unlike so many things in life, whatever was happening behind those walls was something that he could simply walk away from.

Of course, if there was something truly dangerous in there, he probably had a better chance of surviving it than some random caravan drivers and guards. If it was too much for him, he could simply leave and alert the authorities. Let them hire some sect to deal with the problem if it was beyond Sen. While some other cultivators might feel like they had to stay and finish every fight, Sen didn’t subscribe to that idea. He firmly believed that if someone couldn’t reasonably win a fight but could escape, they probably should. Staying to die for honor alone was an idiotic way to end one’s life. Realizing that he’d already made his decision, Sen summoned his spear from his storage ring. He walked through the gate and into the eerie, silent town.