It’s soft, so soft.

  A robe of linen is draped over her bed, it’s a deep purple with one sleeve on the left arm. There is embroidery on the sleeve, a golden snake wrapped around and around, coiling as snakes are wont to do. She’s impressed, the skill required to complete delicate embroidery alongside intricate array scripts is great indeed.

  It must have cost a practical fortune.

  All so she could hide the shame of her left arm.

  She grabs the robes and hugs them tight, so close to her chest where all she feels is a deep pain. They did this on a whim, because they loved her, because they cared for her. Now all of it is gone, just…gone.

  She’s just Tantra now, exiled.

  Not really, they’re keeping her close supposedly to use her as some sort of caravan guard, probably for cheap to, such is the way of merchants, can never overlook an opportunity.

  She can see what they’re doing, it’s pretty blatant, dangling the opportunity to be brought back into the fold if she does her job just right.

  Even if she can see the trap, she can’t help but let it clamp on her leg.

  It’s almost funny, she knew this might happen, it was dangerously likely, but she did it anyway.

  Would she do it again?

  She doesn’t know, she’s not in the right headspace for that kind of contemplation.

  Everyday she pushed herself to the brink, and sometimes beyond it, all for the hope that someday she’d see her family again, and she did, for a little while.

  But they’re not family anymore, now she has no one.

  She hugs the robes so tight.

  -

  It’s a long time before someone comes to visit her, old hinges creaking on a door of plain wood. The estate she and her friends are staying at now isn’t nearly as luxurious as the main estate, but it’s a place where they can rest and train, and that’s all that really matters for cultivators now, isn’t it? Because that’s all she is now, just a plain old cultivator, no more merchant girl Tantra, now it’s just the brute with a big ol’ club who happens to know a thing or two about financing.

  How quirky.

  “I told you all I wanted to be alone,” Tantra says sharply, a little too sharp, considering they’re probably just checking on her.

  “I’m sure you do,” Kisrin says as he sits next to her, “but I don’t really care for leaving you by your lonesome.”

  “I don’t want platitudes Kisrin, please, I…I just want to be left to grieve.”

  Kisrin hums, “that’s generally a bad idea, keeping yourself holed up, with only your thoughts as company for so long.”

  “What if I like my thoughts, hmm?”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  Tantra actually manages a chuckle and Kisrin gives her a small smile.

  “We’ve really had a bad run of things huh?” Kisrin says.

  “You definitely have it worse.”

  “not really a competition, you’ve suffered just the same as I have.”

  “Do you think Rakan would be happy?” Tantra whispers as she hugs her knees.

  “Dunno, didn’t know him all that well despite how long we traveled together, he doesn’t seem like the vengeance type, but I doubt he’d be unhappy.”

  “He didn’t have a last name either, think he got expelled from his family as well?”

  Kisrin grunts, “who knows, can’t exactly ask him,”

  “Yeah…”

  “But I know he wouldn’t want you wasting your time moping,”

  “I’m not moping,”

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “You’re definitely moping.”

  Tantra grumbles at him which causes another smile to grace his features. She hates to admit that what he’s doing is actually working, she doesn’t want to feel better, she wants to feel shitty and be shitty and go to sleep.

  Then maybe she’ll feel little better the next day.

  “So?” he says, “what’re your plans?”

  “Hm?”

  “Well you’ve got a lot of free time now that you're done plotting, just wondering what you plan to do with it.”

  “Beyond training? I haven’t really thought of it.”

  He snorts, “going all in on the cultivation?”

  She shrugs, “it’s all I have now.”

  “What about being a merchant?”

  Tantra scoffs, “do you even realize how hard it is to build a company from scratch?”

  “We’re cultivators, we can afford it, given enough time.”

  “It’s not about that, running a business requires knowledge. Knowledge I don’t have, and was hoping to get by apprenticing under some of our more experienced merchants. Now the best I can hope for is being a glorified guard.”

  “So you’re giving up?”

  “No…I…I don’t know, I don’t really want to think about it.”

  He nods, “fair.”

  They sit in companionable silence for a bit, and Tantra muses about how lucky she is to have friends that are so caring. Out of everything she got from the sect, it would be the relationships she made along the way.

  “So,” Kisrin says, “can you hurry and get out of your funk before Yorin does something drastic?”

  Tantra raises a brow, “drastic how?”

  “Breaking into the estate and demanding they reverse their decision kind of drastic.”

  “He can’t be that stupid.”

  “You really wanna test that?”

  -

  She brings her Kanabō up to her shoulder,

  She swings diagonally and resets it on her other shoulder, swinging again.

  There isn’t much training she can do with her weapon now that Rakan’s gone, other than with the others, but she has to hold back significantly because of how fragile their bodies are. Kisrin can take more damage than the rest but it’s still not to the point where she can feel comfortable with giving him severe brain damage. So she swings her Kanabō in a figure eight, repetition breeds mastery after all…maybe?

  She doesn’t know, this is just what was on her self assigned training schedule.

  You know, the one she makes when she doesn’t want to think.

  Which is proving to be not as effective as she hoped, considering the current thinking going on, but she can’t slack. Cultivation is all she has for now, so she’s going to excel, and she of all people knows how bad she is with the martial aspect.

  Can’t substitute skill with brute force forever.

  Not that practicing a single motion will make her more skilled, but it’ll make her great at that motion, which is a start.

  Besides, this is the first motion Rakan taught her, so she might as well start here.

  Rakan…when they first met she thought he was some kind of eccentric, taking her on as his student so randomly when there were other candidates that’d prove much more talented. She thought it was because the masters approved of her knowing the blood infusion technique, and perhaps it was a factor, but she’s beginning to doubt that’s all it was.

  The longer they travelled, the more she appreciated his pragmatic side.

  They didn’t talk much about his view of life, but his outlook always seemed so bleak, yet he still seemed to be enjoying it.

  She doesn’t know how.

  She wishes she had more time.

  It was just so sudden.

  She could do nothing about it, and she has a feeling that even if she spent a few more years training her contribution would be minimal, at least if she keeps respecting her limits.

  That was a big thing with his training, always going hard but never too hard, can’t train something broken after all.

  She’s been considering her technique for a while now, Sensory Overload proved that she’s ready. If it works on the same principle as the technique it was inspired by it should make her stronger with significantly less Qi.

  But she’s been stalling, because she’s afraid.

  Her control barely passes the five thread mark, and she only assigned that goal arbitrarily, for all she knows, manipulating Qi with that kind of precision could require mastery over a dozen threads.

  But…

  She needs to be able to survive, now that Rakan’s gone, and she can’t do that by being weak.

  As she swings her kanabō she pulls a thread from her core and directs it towards her heart, slowly, as a test. She asserts her will on reality demanding/requesting that it changes the nature of her blood from something that feeds to something that also enhances.

  Then she boosts.

  The world expands, and she almost loses her flow from the sheer amount of information inundating her brain. The sound of the grass rustling in the wind is like the footsteps of a titan, she can smell the meat buns cooking from the kitchen, the crowd walking outside of the estate, but her focus is brought on from the sharp intake of perfume right behind her.

  Tantra whips her body around at a speed that mortals wouldn’t be able to follow.

  About a dozen feet behind her sits a girl with violet hair and an obsidian black dress, beside her is a man that exudes the smell of wet earth to a rather tepid intensity.

  “Oh don’t mind me,” Synthia says, “I was just enjoying the view.”