Sen knew that there were a million things he should be doing at that moment, but exactly none of them were appealing. The servant girl was just standing there, beaming at him. Long Jia Wei looked like he was stuck somewhere between shock and bursting into laughter. A quick sweep with his spiritual sense told him that the servants were moving around the manor. They were probably working, not that he really cared all that much. He’d basically given them all one command. Make sure the children are taken care of. Sen also knew that he should talk to the children, but he didn’t want to face their frightened, confused eyes immediately after killing so many people. To say nothing of sending their parents out into the unforgiving clutches of the city. Sen turned to Long Jia Wei.

“A lot of house guards died. Find out who they were and if they had families. I will not turn their wives and children into beggars in this godsforsaken city. Beyond that, just manage affairs here as seems best to you for now if you would. I have things to tend to,” he said, before looking at the girl who seemed like she might follow him. “Assist him, please.”

Ignoring the unhappy look the girl gave him, Sen strode out the front door. He needed to do something that wasn’t violent. There had been too much pointless death and destruction lately. He needed to make something. Engage in an act of creation. It wouldn’t balance the scales, but it might help to balance his mind and his soul. Sen manifested a qi platform and rose over the manor. Looking down on it, he realized that it was much, much bigger than he’d expected. There was the main building, but also a number of secondary buildings ranging in size from nearly as big as the main building to ones that looked about the right size to house individual families. He pushed that thought away. He hadn’t chosen this fight. It had come looking for him. There was a shocking amount of land around the buildings. Some of it was devoted to large vegetable gardens, while other parts looked to house purely decorative gardens of flowers. There were also areas that looked designed for martial training and some places that were simple grass, ideal for rambunctious children to play in. It was quite as much space as some of the sects in the city, but it wasn’t far off either.

Surrounding it all was a, by mortal standards, formidable wall. But this isn’t just a place for mortals anymore, thought Sen. It will need better defenses. Sen still felt off-balance, so started simple. He cycled for earth and reinforced the walls that were there, hardening the outside until it could likely withstand blows from a late-stage core cultivator. As his sense of imbalance started to fade away, he let his qi stretch down into the earth. He didn’t want to disturb nearby buildings, so he needed to reach deep, to draw up stone from a place that wouldn’t affect the stability of anything else. Bit by bit, he thickened the walls and made them higher. He cycled for metal and drew away the impurities in the stone, reshaping them, forging them into razor-edged spikes that lined the top of the wall. Sen sank deeper into the process, letting his worries fall away, and finding a place of peace inside himself again.

He started building formations into the walls, leaning on years of practice in the wilds, and what he’d learned from Master Kho while crafting buildings for the academy. Layer by layer, he locked the formations together. Formations that would gather qi. Formations that would condense and hold qi. Formations that would unleash qi in waves of fire, lightning, ice, and shadow. Almost without realizing it, he summoned beast cores by the dozens. They floated around him like a constellation of unharnessed power, until they were sent down, lodged into the stone of the walls and into the formations. They acted as connections, as storage, as augments, and in his mind, Sen could also see the countless patterns of webs that he had watched Glimmer of Night create. He couldn’t understand them, yet, but he could feel what they were meant to do, brush against their intent, and he wove that nascent understanding of interconnection and meaning into his formations.If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

He could feel the formations building up into something else, something more than the fragile defenses he could consciously design. He leaned into his intuitions, letting them guide his hand and his qi the way he would when making elixirs. He felt imperfections in the formations that he hadn’t sensed there before, small but salient weaknesses that he began correcting. He felt pieces of the different formations start to fuse together in ways he hadn’t predicted, but he didn’t stop it, just reinforced the parts that felt weak. He lost himself utterly in the process, unconsciously mixing types of qi and forging them into things he did not fully understand but felt right. He didn’t know if he worked for minutes or hours, nor did he care. This was a balm to his soul that he would only relinquish when he had to.

The longer he worked, the more complex the effort became. At first, he was manipulating a handful of qi types in large tendrils. As he approached the limits of what he and his intuition could do, though, he was controlling dozens of individual threads of qi, some of which he didn’t even know he had affinities for. He pushed himself harder as he strove to achieve a goal, a destination, something he could sense on the horizon, like a blurry shape in his vision. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t bring it wholly into focus. It felt both tantalizingly close and infinitely distant. He hung suspended on the cusp of touching the elusive goal but fell short. Which was not to say that he had failed. He felt the formations he’d been working on snap into place. There was a sound in the air, a thrum that Sen felt in his bones, as the formations activated. Sen’s eyes snapped open an iridescent dome briefly flared over the entire area of the manor and its grounds.

Everything on the other side of the dome was briefly obscured even in Sen’s vision before the visual distortion faded away to reveal the city around them. It was only then that Sen felt the weight of the gazes on him. He looked down at the manor and saw the servants and children all looking up at him, their expressions filled with wonder. He saw Long Jia Wei staring at him in slack-jawed amazement. Sen’s eyes shifted to the streets around them. There were hundreds of people, maybe even thousands, standing there in utter silence, watching him. Finally, Sen lifted his eyes and took in the faces of the nascent soul cultivators who had apparently come to bear witness to his works. Master Feng’s brother wore an unreadable expression. The other patriarchs wore speculative expressions. Lai Dongmei gave him an amused little smile and nodded at him. He nodded back, even as his mind raced.

He could see other cultivators, presumably lesser cultivators, floating in the air at a distance. Unlike the nascent soul cultivators, their expressions were far easier to read. Some wore looks of amazement similar to Long Jia Wei, but far too many of them wore looks of tightly controlled fear. What have I done? Of course, Sen knew what he’d done. He’d let his need to act outpace his thinking. In doing so, he’d made a declaration to all with eyes to see. He’d also shattered a whole lot of cultivator fantasies about who had a realistic chance against him. That was a double-edged sword at the best of times. It would prevent a lot of stupidity, but strength always invited challenge. Nothing to be done about that now, he thought. If challenges come, they come. What he was less certain about how to handle were all the people still staring at him. It was like they all expected him to say something. Since he had no idea what someone was supposed to say at moments like this, he went with his gut.

Amplifying his voice with qi, he said, “Go home.”

Without another word, he descended to the courtyard of the manor. Mercifully, the servants and children were too stunned to approach. Long Jia Wei gathered his wits a little more quickly and came over to Sen. The man looked at the new walls and then embraced practicality.

“We’ll need to make something that lets people pass through those defenses.”

Sen blinked and let his senses touch on what he’d made in a near-trance. He almost physically recoiled from it. Those weren’t defenses so much as a poorly caged and hideously violent animal looking for something to kill. Sen swallowed hard. He’d have to spend a lot more time figuring out just what in the thousand hells he’d created here.

“Yep,” said Sen a little weakly. “That goes right to the top of the list.”

“On the bright side,” offered Long Jia Wei, “I think the children are probably safe.”