Sen gave Falling Leaf an amused look as she played with the natural treasure they’d collected. Just witnessing the casual way that she treated the shadow-attributed hawthorn berries would have made human cultivators cough blood. Some would have coughed blood because they were incredibly rare. Others would have reacted that way because such treasures were hideously expensive. He was confident that she appreciated the rarity of the natural treasure, if not the price. That understanding didn’t do anything to change her basic nature. Most of their recent experiences had demanded that she treat everything as deadly serious.
Before all that, though, this was the same being who had lounged for hours on warm rocks, or lazily batted at birds while sprawled on Uncle Kho’s courtyard walls. When left to her own devices, she was pretty playful. Except when she was hunting for food. That was when she got very serious. These days, though, she didn’t even need to do that. She had storage rings stuffed with food and not much else. Which largely explained why she hadn’t killed any of the spirit beasts they’d found guarding natural treasures. Falling Leaf had fought with them, but that only lasted until she got bored.
After that, it became Sen’s job to inform them that guarding those treasures was fine, but joining the war was not. Ignoring that restriction would lead to him personally hunting them down. He’d invented a lot of gruesome sounding threats to scare those spirit beasts into staying put. That part that he’d found funniest was that the ghost panther hadn’t even bothered to take any of the natural treasures until they’d “found” this shadow-attributed one. Even then, she hadn’t taken all of the berries. She’d taken two. Sen had taken one at her insistence since he’d helped suppress the shadow bear that was guarding it. The rest they’d left for the bear. Now they were sitting at the mouth of the cave where the berries had been slowly accumulating power for centuries. It was pretty high up on a cliff, so it gave them a good view of the sunset.
“You didn’t have to bring us here,” said Falling Leaf, breaking what had been a comfortable silence. “I don’t actually need these.”
“Right now,” said Sen, unsurprised that she’d seen through his ploy. “You don’t need them right now. But why waste an opportunity to make things easier for yourself later?”
“To advance is to struggle,” said Falling Leaf. “That’s as true for spirit beasts as it is for human cultivators.”
“Do you feel that you haven’t been struggling? I’ve seen you during those battles. You struggle plenty from where I’m standing.”
“Right now. I struggle right now,” she answered. “But if you succeed, there will be peace everywhere. Where will I struggle then? What will I struggle against?”
Sen frowned. She wasn’t entirely wrong. He’d talked to enough other cultivators to understand that insight and advancement were often stifled by peace. Achieving them often requires enduring those harrowing moments when the path to survival was no wider than a blade’s edge. In the empire he intended to build, sect wars would become a thing of the past. Conflict between nations would become a thing of the past. But he also knew that would only be on the surface. There would be discontent. Perhaps not from the mortals, or even the cultivators who came up under his new regime. But cultivators could live very long lives.
Among the oldest and strongest cultivators, the nascent soul and core cultivators who wouldn’t achieve ascension, many would yearn for the days when they held near-absolute power in the domains under their control. He would bind as many as he could beneath vows to the heavens, but he would never get them all. Some would go to any lengths to avoid him just to avoid those vows. He assumed that some already had, hiding themselves away and using formations to mask their very presence. When conflict came, as he knew it would, they would be the most likely source.
That was without even considering the inescapable truth that someone was always plotting in a kingdom or empire. No matter how fair he made his empire, resources were always going to be finite. There were only so many natural treasures, only so much food, and the world was unkind. Famines would come. Plagues would come. Some cultivators would go without. It was inevitable that people would suffer or believe they were suffering, and suffering was always a good excuse for rebellion. All it would take is one charismatic cultivator to take make it sound like the royal family or imperial family was hoarding needed resources. That would, like a kind of dark alchemy, transform discontent, misery, and even greed into hatred. What would Falling Leaf struggle against? Plenty.
“I don’t think you need to worry about finding ways to struggle,” said Sen, already frustrated that he wouldn’t be there to help deal with those problems. “There will always be people to fight.”
“Do you think so?” asked the ghost panther, sounding both hopeful and skeptical.
“I do. Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“What’s that?”
“You know that, if we survive this war, I won’t be able to stay for long. The world, maybe even the very heavens, won’t let me stay. I’ll be forced to ascend.”
Falling Leaf wilted a little at those words, but nodded.
“I know.”
“That means that I won’t be here to protect Ai, little Shui, and Zhi. I won’t be there to comfort them if it’s called for. They’ll need someone.”
“They’ll have the Caihong. The Kho. The Feng. Even the mad one,” offered the ghost panther.
“True. They’ll protect the girls for my sake if nothing else. I couldn’t ask for better… Well, I couldn’t ask for more terrifying protectors. They’ll even love the girls in their way, but you know what their love is like. They’re nascent soul cultivators. If a boy makes Ai cry someday, the best outcome is that Uncle Kho will murder that boy in a brutal, but swift, burst of rage. I shudder to even imagine what kind of horrors Auntie Caihong, Master Feng, or Fu Ruolan might inflict on that boy.”
Falling Leaf seemed to think that over before nodding.
“As a father,” Sen continued, “I’m probably a lot more comfortable with that than I should be. But that isn’t necessarily what the girls will need. What they’ll need is someone they can trust to confide things to. Someone who will only go on a killing spree if it’s called for.”
The ghost panther was quiet for a long time. Sen witnessed what might very well have been the first pensive expression Falling Leaf had ever had.
“I’m not human,” she finally answered. “I’ll do it wrong.”
There was a pain in her voice that he’d never heard before. Like she was confronting a failing that she hadn’t thought mattered, only to discover that it mattered a lot.
Sen sighed and said, “I’m pretty sure I’m not human anymore, either, and I’m definitely getting things wrong. You’ve seen me get them wrong, but I trust you more than anyone else. I don’t expect you to be perfect. It’s not possible, and it’s not fair to put that on anyone. So, I’d never ask of you. I just need to know that you’ll try to be there when they need someone. That’s the part that matters. Being there. The one thing I can’t do for them, no matter how hard I may try.”
“Being there,” murmured Falling Leaf before she brightened up a little. “I can do that.”
Sen had a very strong intuition that she would have been there for the girls anyway, but he’d needed to ask. It would have grown into a heart demon for him if he hadn’t. He also knew that she understood, probably better than most, what it meant to not have someone there when you needed them. It was why he’d chosen to ask her to watch over the girls over other, more powerful people. Feeling more settled, he looked out toward the sunset again.
“That’s pretty,” he said. “You wouldn’t know there was a war going on just looking at that.”
“It is pretty,” said Falling Leaf.
They sat there for a few more minutes before the ghost panther said, “We should get back.”
“Yeah, I guess we should,” said Sen before poking the shadow bear they’d been sitting on. “Is this thing still alive?”
“It’s still breathing.”
“Fair enough.”