As Sen left the market, he did his best to ignore the people who had taken cover and watched the brief fight instead of fleeing the market entirely. The expressions on their faces disturbed him a little. Some of the people looked at him with intense wariness or outright fear. Of all the possible reactions, those surprised him the least. Those reactions made sense. They were an appropriate response to a sudden outburst of violence, most of it carried out by him. It was the other looks he got that gave him pause. There was plain awe on some people’s faces. They looked at him like he was something powerful and otherworldly. Sen sighed at that. He supposed that he was a bit of both of those things. Yet, the degree of awe on their faces seemed outsized to anything he’d actually done. He hadn’t summoned fire or lighting. He hadn’t cast the market into false night with a lake of shadow. What he had done just wasn’t that impressive.

The other expression he saw was a kind of greedy envy. That was the reaction that disturbed him the most. If he had flown through the air the way that Master Feng could, or crafted some pill that could wash injuries away the way Auntie Caihong could, or even set up a formation that drove dangerous beasts away as Uncle Kho could, he could understand that envy. Yet, all he had done was hurt some people. On reflection, he felt confident that the outcome had been utterly inevitable. The mayor’s son had come looking to right some imaginary wrong. If Sen hadn’t struck first, that fool would have talked himself into doing it. Yet, to feel envious of being able to inflict pain and injury seemed somehow petty to Sen. Why would anyone want that, or aspire to that, he wondered. Sen believed that he’d had more reason than most to desire that kind of power, but he didn’t feel any accomplishment from having it.

He felt a sense of accomplishment from developing the discipline necessary to master those skills. He felt a sense of accomplishment from having mastered the forms and techniques. Sen was honest enough with himself to know that he’d even taken some satisfaction in teaching those specific people a lesson. Yet, that satisfaction was tempered by the knowledge that he’d vastly outstripped them in both raw power and skill. It was a relief to him that he hadn’t lost his temper. It would have been all too easy to kill any of them or even all of them. He believed that all of them had likely deserved what they got. He’d been on the receiving end of enough beatings from them to know they weren’t innocents. He wasn’t confident at all that any of them deserved death. No, he’d pushed it as far as it should have gone.

Of course, that didn’t mean that everyone would feel the same way. All those cultivators he’d brutalized but left breathing had families. He knew the mayor was at least a minor noble. He suspected that the rest were children of wealthy houses in the town. He worried that this might be the thing that pushed them from passively trying to undermine Grandmother Lu to actively trying to push her out of town. It shouldn’t happen that way. By rights, the whole thing was part of the Jianghu. Everyone involved had been a cultivator. Yet, the mayor’s son had acted like a fool from the moment he arrived. If the father was anything like the son, Sen couldn’t expect him to brush off the whole thing as a lesson learned about picking the right fights.

Sen decided then that he’d need to stick around, at least for a little while, to see how things played out. He wasn’t about to leave with the possibility of someone trying to get back at him by attacking Grandmother Lu hanging over everyone’s heads. As he walked, he tried to imagine what he would do if someone did try to harm Grandmother Lu. The intensity of violence that his imagination poured forth was enough to bring him up short. He saw the mayor’s house as little more than a pillar of flame. He saw a trail of bodies, some of them only barely recognizable as human. He saw businesses crushed into piles of useless rubble. The vision was so palpable, so real that it made him shudder.

Even worse, Sen was relatively confident that all of it was within his power. It would take time and effort, but he could do it. Unless someone managed to find a more powerful cultivator to intervene on their behalf, Sen didn’t think that anyone in town had the means to stop him. Sen’s steps slowed and then stopped. No one could stop him if he walked down that path. It became abruptly, jarringly clear to him why so many stories painted cultivators as forces of chaos and destruction. If no one could stop you, then why restrain yourself? Why hold back? Do what you want. Take what you want. Kill who you want. The rules that restrained most people didn’t apply, so why observe them? In another flash of understanding, those looks of greedy envy on peoples’ faces made sense. It wasn’t skill or ability that they wanted. They wanted the power to do whatever they felt like without worrying about the consequences.

Sen searched inside his heart and soul. Is that who I am? Is that what I am? Am I the kind of person who simply treats the world as some kind of storage ring filled with things for me to take? Sen shook those questions off. Those were the wrong questions. He didn’t know how or why he knew that, but he knew. Yet, they were close enough to the right questions to have some resonance. There were too many things clamoring for attention inside Sen’s mind. Too many competing concerns vying for dominance. He took a deep breath and focused on the cycling pattern that was always hard at work gathering environmental qi into his dantian. The persistent, predictable pattern calmed his mind and let him focus.

With less clutter in his thoughts, the answer gradually unfolded in Sen’s mind. Sen had been so caught up in the question of what he was now, that he’d forgotten he was barely started on his path through life. Yes, there were parts of him that craved the kind of responsibility-free life where he could do what he wanted and take what he wanted. It was a compelling vision, but it was also a life that would push Sen into places he didn’t want to go. While some level of violence was unavoidable in the world of cultivators, that approach would force a much greater level of violence onto Sen. He realized that the question of who he was now mattered, but it was the wrong question because Sen wasn’t just charting a course for right now. He was setting the direction for every choice to come. The question he needed to ask himself was…

“Who do I want to become? What do I want to be?”

When he considered the problem from that perspective, the answers became much simpler. He did not want to be someone who did nothing but take. He did not want to become someone who only left destruction in his wake. He would defend what was his if he had to. He would protect those he loved. But he would not mindlessly wander the world as an agent of destruction. That might be the right path for some, but it was not the right path for him. If a man could choose who he became, and Sen believed that he could, then he would choose to be something better. Sen was so inwardly focused at that moment that he’d briefly lost track of what was happening around him. When he made that decision, truly committed to it, though, the massive surge of qi around him intruded on his conscious awareness. As the qi flooded his body, Sen had the horrifying realization that he was about break through, on the street, alone.