Sen was pleasantly surprised to discover that Bigan was far less chatty the next day. It seemed that the young man was struck by an unusual case of reflectiveness. It didn’t have the same kind of lost-to-the-world quality that his former daydreaming had, which gave Sen some tiny shred of hope that Bigan might make a breakthrough of his own. It wouldn’t be a cultivation breakthrough, for the young man truly was beyond any real hope of that. A small touch of enlightenment, though, that was always possible so long as body held breath. Sen didn’t push the boy to discuss his thoughts. In fact, Sen fervently hoped that Bigan would continue to remain abstracted and quiet. Yet, that reflectiveness did translate into a few minor benefits.

Bigan was up early and had the ox hitched to the wagon by the time Sen took down the tent and formation flags. Sen did take a moment to restore the soil that he had artificially raised to its former position. He wasn’t above making his own life a little more convenient, but that was no justification for permanently disrupting the local environment. Granted, it would be a small disruption, but Sen had an intuition that small disruptions had a way of cascading into larger disruptions. Assuming he had the opportunity to do so, it was better to leave things as he found them.

Bigan also pushed much harder on the road than Sen had expected. It was as if the young man were determined to catch up with his uncle that very day. It seemed unlikely to Sen. They simply had too great a lead barring some accident or disaster of their own on the road ahead. What did worry the cultivator was the well-being of the ox. In his experience, oxen were good at maintaining a steady, plodding pace. They could do it all day, provided sufficient water and food. Anything faster than that, though, and they were likely to tire or injure themselves. When it became clear that the young man wasn’t going to ease up, Sen finally spoke.

“You can’t push the ox that hard all day.”

Bigan snapped out of his reflective mindset for a moment. “What?”

“The ox. You’re pushing it too hard. It’s going to end up injuring itself.”

Bigan looked like he wanted to tell Sen to mind his own business, but then the young man turned his eyes forward and studied the ox. He grimaced a little and pulled back on the speed.

“Sorry,” Bigan muttered.

Sen offered the boy a sympathetic smile. “You weren’t hurting me, but I suspect you’ll want that ox in good health later.”

Bigan nodded. “I will. They’re expensive, and this one is still young. He could pull wagons for years yet.”

Bit by bit, though, over the next hour, Sen noticed Bigan reflexively encouraging the ox to greater speed. Sighing a little to himself, Sen thought about how best to do what he wanted to do. It took a bit of trial and error, but Sen eventually found that he could apply his qinggong technique to the wagon and the oxen. It wasn’t like when he did it for himself. He could cover distance at frankly frightening speeds. The animal and wagon were far too heavy for that kind of manipulation, at least for any length of time. Sen discovered that he could reduce the overall load. He maintained a bit of qi where the wagon wheels made contact with the road and bit around the ox’s hooves.

Sen actually relished the challenge of splitting his concentration in so many different ways. It became a sort of game to see how long he could maintain it, although it was a game with a deadly goal. The longer and more efficiently he could split his concentration, the more dangerous he would be against any future opponents. It also became an exercise in efficient qi usage. He didn’t want to drain himself dry just to make the ox’s life easier. A second night inside a qi gathering formation had done a lot to refill his dantian, especially with the storm scattering extra kinds of environmental qi all over the place. It had, of course, been heavy on water qi, but there had also been air qi, lightning qi, and something related to air qi that he suspected was thunder qi. All in all, it had been a boon for his cultivation.

While helping the cart along with his qinggong technique, he needed to keep it on a level of qi use that approximately matched what he passively drew in from the environment. Sen knew that was ultimately hopeless, the demands of qinggong techniques being fundamentally greater than his passive draw, but it was useful to see how close he could get the two and still provide the ox some relief. It also served as a kind of refining exercise for his passive cultivation. Most of the time, it simply happened in the background while he did other things that didn’t put any demands on his qi. This constant draw and pull helped him to see and correct little flaws in his passive gathering technique. The total gains were minor in the moment, but Sen had long ago learned not to discount the value of small improvements. Those improvements added up over time until, one day, the overall effects became something truly profound. He had seen it with his unarmed combat, his jian mastery, and even with reading. Master Feng had told Sen that most cultivators treat the process like a kind of race. They were always pushing to get to the next breakthrough as fast as possible, using cultivation aids as soon as they could afford them.

Yet, despite the often breakneck pace of his own advancement, Sen preferred the slower path. He knew that some of the speed of his advancement had been Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Auntie Caihong pushing him to catch up to where they considered his peers to be. Some of it had come from lucky moments of enlightenment that pushed him along. For all the advantages that speed might have brought him, it was also a lot like running on a narrow board, blindfolded, over a pit filled with deadly vipers. Catastrophe was always a single misstep away. While Sen shouldn’t and wouldn’t ignore opportunities to advance if they presented themselves, he didn’t need to chase them. Not yet. Auntie Caihong had warned him that there was a threshold after which advancing to core formation would become substantially more difficult. Yet, that threshold was nearly a decade away. He could slow down a little and take fewer risks.

It was as if the universe had heard that thought and decided that Sen needed an object lesson in the dangers of, he didn’t know exactly what. Being alive, maybe? A group of men emerged from the woods on either side of the road, wielding a motley assortment of weapons. They were less ragged than Sen might have expected for men without a proper home. Then again, perhaps they simply stole other people’s clothes to replace their own. Sen withdrew his qinggong technique from the wagon and the ox, who let out a dissatisfied moo. Then, he let his spiritual sense sweep the area. There were two archers badly hidden in the woods, and a couple of the bandits were very low-level body cultivators. The leader of the bandits, one of the body cultivators, stepped out and held up a hand as though his wish were an absolute command to bring the wagon to a halt. Bigan gave Sen a desperate, questioning look. Sen looked at the lead bandit, gave him a cold smile, and spoke loudly enough to be heard.

“Run him down.”

The bandit leader gaped in utter shock at Sen for a moment. Apparently, there was some protocol to all of this that Sen was flagrantly disregarding. The bandit leader opened his mouth to give some order, which was enough for Sen. While the bandits had been posturing, Sen had been cycling up a couple of useful qi patterns. He didn’t intend to kill all of these people, although a part of him knew that the bandits probably had stolen from, injured, and killed countless people along this stretch of road. Yet, for him to simply butcher them would be no better. He would instead impart a lesson. Two wind blades shot out to either side of him and hurtled into the woods where the archers hid.

A pair of nearly simultaneous screams sent the bandits on the road into a panic with cries of, “Cultivator!”

Sen encouraged that panic by unleashing the tiniest bit of his killing intent. The handful of bandits who hadn’t simply panicked when Sen revealed himself as a cultivator let out terrified screams and fled into the forest. The only one Sen had, with a great deal of effort, excluded from his killing intent was the bandit leader. The man’s face showed disbelief, outrage, fury, and, when he turned to glare at Sen, an ugly hatred. Sen had no idea what that hate signified. Was it hatred for Sen for disrupting the robbery? Hatred at a more powerful cultivator for interfering in the affairs of mortals? Or, maybe it was simpler than that, and just the pure envious hatred of someone with little talent for someone else with more talent. Sen decided that it didn’t really matter.

He reached over and gently pulled back on the reins. The ox was happy enough to comply and drew to stop just short of the bandit leader. Sen hopped down off the cart. He walked toward the bandit, stopping for a moment to pat the ox’s head on his way. When he faced the bandit, he didn’t say anything, just stared at the man. Sen wasn’t surprised by what happened next. It all happened far too slowly to come as a surprise. The bandit leader jerked out a knife and tried to stab Sen in the chest with it. Sen watched the dull blade approach with an almost clinical disinterest before he reached out, wrapped his hand around the knife, and stopped it. Sen felt the knife’s edge trying to cut him but finding no purchase on his cultivation-hardened skin. The bandit leader snarled and tried to push the blade forward. He might as well have been trying to move a mountain.

“This is over,” said Sen.

“The hells it is!” roared the bandit leader.

“Are you so determined to die today?”

The bandit stared at Sen’s calm face, then his eyes drifted down to the immobile knife grasped in Sen’s hand. The bandit seemed to struggle with himself for a moment, then, with a look that suggested he didn’t quite believe what he was doing, released the hilt of the knife. The bandit stepped back.

“No. I can wait to meet King Yan.”

“Wise. You should join your men,” said Sen, gesturing to the forest.

The bandit took one last look at the knife Sen held, then ran into the forest. With a sigh that was part relief and part annoyance, Sen looked up. There was still enough daylight left for them to travel a bit farther. He climbed back onto the wagon, ignoring the flabbergasted expression on Bigan’s face, and gestured down the road. Bigan hurriedly urged the ox into motion again. As they moved away, Sen tossed the knife over to the side of the road.