Sen didn’t have a lot of qi to work with, so he decided that he wasn’t going to bother with complicated qi techniques. He wasn’t going to let Changpu use them either. Sen could feel the sect cultivator start to cycle qi as he bore down on the other man, so he let a little of his killing intent loose. It was just a moment, a flash really, but it shattered the man’s focus. Then, Sen was there. His fist connected with Changpu’s chest. The noise of that impact echoed through the empty town. The big cultivator flew away from the blow with his arms and legs flailing, right up until the moment the stone wall of one of the nearby buildings stopped his backward momentum. Sen was a bare second behind the impact with a kick that drove the big cultivator through the wall. Sen heard bones break as Changpu’s body proved inadequate to weather the blow and the resistance of the wall.

Stepping through the hole into the building, Sen found the other cultivator struggling to stand. Changpu was making another attempt to cycle his qi enough to perform a technique. Sen could respect the effort, but he wasn’t going to let that happen. He let his killing intent lash the other man’s mind again while plunging his jian into the man’s leg. Sen wasn’t sure if it was the stab wound or the mental assault that made the big man cry out in pain. In the end, he supposed it didn’t really matter all that much. Sen took a look at the man and realized that the fight was already over in all but name. With an annoyed sigh, Sen gave the man a halfhearted backhand that drove Changpu to the floor. Sen took a moment then to clean his jian on the sect cultivator’s robes. After a moment of consideration about how to get the most value from what had always been a pointless and one-sided fight, Sen grabbed a fistful of Changpu’s robe and bodily hurled the man back through the hole in the wall. Sen noted that his aim may have been slightly off, as the sect cultivator widened that hole on his way out.

Stepping through the hole, Sen could see the shock and fear on the faces of the other sect cultivators. Wu Meng Yao had a jian in her hand but seemed to have forgotten it entirely as she stared down Changpu’s limp form. Wang Chao held a guandao in front of him and had his wide eyes fixed on Sen. A rope dart hung from Song Ling’s hands, but she didn’t look any more ready to use it than Wu Meng Yao looked to use her jian. As Sen approached Changpu, Wu Meng Yao shook off her shock and held out a hand.

“You don’t need to do this,” she said.

“Like you would have stopped him if I were the one on the ground,” said Sen, not breaking his stride.

Wu Meng Yao looked like Sen had slapped her, but she didn’t deny the accusation. “No, I wouldn’t have. Not if you had challenged him the way he challenged you. Still, I’m asking you not to kill him.”

Sen did stop then. He stared at Wu Meng Yao while he took a breath and considered. “Why?”

“Politics. If he comes back injured, I can explain it away as the stupidity it was. If he dies, it gets complicated.”

“You mean your sect will declare war on me.”

Wu Meng Yao sighed but nodded. “Yes.”

“Those are the people you want me to trust with my life?”

Changpu saved Wu Meng Yao from answering that question. The big man had slowly started to regain consciousness and was pushing himself up from the ground. Sen walked over and slammed the big cultivator back down to the street with a foot on his back. Changpu let out a pitiful noise of pain and spat up a mouthful of blood. Sen was torn. He might already have one sect hunting him. He really didn’t need or want another one hounding his every step. On the other hand, Changpu’s choice to so blatantly challenge Sen called for something dramatic. Sen looked at Wu Meng Yao.

“Tell me. Your sect must have problems with thieves every so often. How do you deal with them?”

The sect cultivators exchanged uncomfortable looks and Wang Chao's face went a little green. It didn’t take much interpretation on Sen’s part to realize that it must be something absolutely none of them wanted to do or see done to someone else. Wu Meng Yao took a breath before she answered.

“We cut off one of their arms.”

Then, Sen understood. Damage a limb, and you could heal. Even if you never recovered full use of the limb, you could potentially keep cultivating if the qi channels remained intact. Remove a limb, and you could stop someone’s cultivation journey forever. There were qi channels in the limbs. Removing a channel was a blow that most people couldn’t recover from. It wasn’t an absolute law. As Auntie Caihong had explained it, a few people had learned to work around it. Yet, it was very rare that someone did it. Sen understood how his own cultivation worked well enough, and had experimented often enough, that he thought he would have even odds of doing it. Well, he thought he would have even odds of doing it given enough time and ideal circumstances. Still, it wasn’t something he was eager to try. If that’s how their sect dealt with thieves, though, they’d have a hard time objecting to Sen carrying out their punishment.

“Then so be it,” said Sen.

With a motion so fast that none of the other cultivators even saw Sen’s jian move, he severed Changpu’s left arm at the shoulder. Kicking the limb away, Sen cycled up fire qi and reduced the arm into ash. He didn’t know if the other sect cultivators would have tried to preserve the arm, but given the looks on their faces, he wouldn’t have put it past them. Depending on whether any of the young sect cultivators had a storage ring like his and how good the healers in their sect were, they might have even managed to reattach that arm. It wouldn’t have been a very effective punishment or lesson if their sect could simply undo what Sen had done. It was better to simply remove that temptation.

It took a moment or two for the pain or the horror of what had just happened to him to catch up with Changpu, but it finally did. He started screaming as the blood gushed from the open wound. Sen stepped back and looked at the pale-faced Wu Meng Yao.

“I’ve honored your wishes. He still lives. You should tend to him if you want to keep it that way.”

With that, Sen walked over to the spirit beast corpses and began the process of extracting the useful and valuable pieces from them. He didn’t speak to the sect cultivators again, just kept them in the periphery of his vision while he worked. Based on the level of care he was seeing, Sen didn’t give Changpu good odds of surviving. He found himself torn again. He could help ensure the man lived. He didn’t particularly want to help, but the same considerations were still in play. Keeping the idiot alive was, ultimately, more useful to Sen. When he was done harvesting pieces from the spider and lizard spirit beasts, he went looking for the weakest healing pill he had. The one he found was still more potent and probably more valuable than he wanted to waste on Changpu, but keeping the peace required sacrifices sometimes. He walked over to the other cultivators and tossed the pill to Song Ling. She caught it and then stared down at it with awe.

“Make sure he takes it, or he’s not going to make it back to your sect alive.”

With that, Sen walked away. As he retraced his own steps through the town the night before, he found more dead spirit beasts than he expected. He didn’t remember fighting that many. Then again, there had been a lot of fire. It only made sense that some of them might have fallen to smoke and flame, rather than his direct actions. For the most part, he simply added to his collection of cores. Even with two storage rings, he was working with a limited amount of space. While there certainly were other useful parts on most of the spirit beasts, the cores held the most value. So, he took those and left the rest. If the sect cultivators wanted to collect those other parts, they were welcome to do so.

As he worked, Sen tried to decide if he’d been put into this situation solely to bring him to terms with the realities of the Jianghu. He was willing to concede that maybe he had. While he wasn’t happy leaving Changpu alive behind him, he could already tell that he wouldn’t regret it the same way he regretted leaving those bandits alive. He’d left Changpu alive to, hopefully, prevent a much larger and less manageable problem from developing. Like it or not, he couldn’t challenge the might of most sects as he was. Even when he became a core formation cultivator, he’d need to tread with some care around sects. They had too many resources and too many people to keep making them angry everywhere he went. Maiming Changpu had been harsh but within the bounds of the Soaring Skies sect’s own rules. In a strange way, it had been a political answer to a personal problem. He just had to hope they saw it that way.

Sen’s mind was on sects when he first walked over to the spot where he’d made his made leap over the wall. It was only when he nearly tripped over part of the body of a spirit beast that he finally looked around.

“Hells,” he whispered.