Chương 131: A Death in Winter, II

Not for the first time Wu Hao stared blearily at the books that had been laid in front of him and felt his head throb with the strain of learning. All of his advantages and yet he was still left to wonder if maybe just allowing himself to die by smashing his head into a book until he died would give him something more useful. Or somehow make this process any more interesting. He'd underestimated the sheer difference between understanding the principles and actually knowing arrays.

He could admit that now, though the first few days he'd stubbornly thought that these were just small patches, little extras that people had devised while they were attempting to intuit the principles that he'd had given to him. That wasn't true. There was an intense amount of knowledge that was required to make a proper array. That was another difference he hadn't quite understood earlier, frankly. He now knew just how much he'd wasted in terms of qi.

He was learning entire new modes of thought to beat himself up about not just thinking of. He could now not just explain why each brush that he had in his possession drew slightly different lines or what the hair on the brushes had been plucked from, he also knew why it mattered. He had drawn arrays onto actual paper and been quietly baffled at how much more effective it all was. If he'd known all of this earlier... Well, not much would've changed, now that he thought about it. But he'd have felt less stupid now.

There had been puzzles, too. Wang Bin had given him a few arrays and ordered him to explain what they did, on paper that hadn't been treated at all so that he couldn't simply read the qi. They were fun challenges sometimes when he got it, and horribly frustrating riddles the rest of the time, which was the usual feeling he got from them. Each had been meant to teach him some particular concept, test his mastery of earlier things that he'd learned. He didn't always get it, but he told himself he was improving.

One thing he did take some small pleasure in was that, while Bai Yiju knew more arrays and could recite several important books from memory, his arrays simply weren't as good as Wu Hao's. More intricate, yes, and sometimes doing things Wu Hao hadn't thought of, but in terms of sheer quality he lost out every single time. One of these days he'd get Bai Yiju to agree to a duel of some kind. The other boy must have known that he'd get wrecked, though, because every time the conversation went that way he scurried off.

It had become an easy way for Wu Hao to avoid Bai Yiju's presence. In short, he was learning a lot. That didn't stop him from wanting to get away from it all. In fact, it just made him more desperate for an escape. His mind ached and his usual training in the gardens wouldn't be enough to clear it out. He needed to get away from this place entirely. Wu Hao studied his room, wondering what he should take. The knives - yes, those went onto his belt.

The gold pouch, steadily shrinking each time he went on one of these excursions: a couple of coins from that too, in case that he needed to bribe a beggar for some information. Or just in case he got hungry. The clothes he had on, the pouch that he'd had sewn into his shirt, was empty of anything that would be too horrible if it got stolen. He left the spear up - wouldn't be much use right now, where he was going. He'd stayed away from sabers and he hadn't bothered with claws at all.

The words of Ye Ouzi had stayed with him: claws were actually pretty stupid, as far as weapons went. Decisions made, he slipped out of the room. The basement rooms had been heated with arrays that let a gentle stream of warmth flow through the room, and though he'd been told that in a few months more the arrays would all get shut down and he'd have to create his own, that seemed like a challenge he was actually capable of passing, now. The difficult part was moderation, anyway.

Making heat was easy enough, making only just enough heat was the hard part. He'd found that out by experience also a few times, trying to add warming arrays to his clothes over the last few days. The ashes of his shirt were still lingering in the garden. The mansion was quiet and dark, though it wasn't empty. A few of the upstairs rooms were probably still in use, but Bai Yiju always ran off early to go have dinner with family or something, and Wang Bin had his regular dinners to go to.

That left Wu Hao and a few of the older masters, who didn't seem to realize he existed. They'd traded a few words with Wang Bin occasionally, when trading tips or discussing concepts that soared above Wu Hao's head, but otherwise they didn't seem to actually care who he was or why he was there. He eyed the front door - locked, with an array that ran across its entire surface, and quietly walked over to a storage room, where he'd left a window open for these sorts of occasions.

A quick hop, pulling himself up easily with just a little usage of qi, and then he was in the gardens. They'd been beautiful in the summer, though they didn't really compare to the gardens of the Jin. Or the gardens of the Tang, which he'd been told repeatedly were the most beautiful of all gardens ever conceived.

Still, the chapter house's gardens had had immense flowers that stretched up to the sky, easy chairs that had been set up with tables to set cups of tea on, and a zen garden sectioned off into little bits so that each of the masters had their own little slice of rock terrace to mow if they wanted to. None of those had been used, the Array Masters generally being inside people by definition, and Wu Hao was pretty sure he was the only one who'd actually seen every corner of the gardens during his time here.

He'd discovered a little training ground that he'd made his own, where the stone had been gauged out by his spear strikes and where a wooden board lay resting against the far wall, punctured and pockmarked by his knife throws. Several similar boards, each broken in different ways, were scattered in a small pile. In the winter, though, the gardens weren't quite as beautiful.

They were still tended to by professional gardeners and everything, but the flowers had all closed and the parasols had all been shut, the chairs dragged inside. He crossed his training area with unhurried steps, before he ended up at a particular piece of wall. He reached down with his fingers, ignoring the bush that was standing in his way, and when he tapped a particular section of the array, the bush parted and he watched the tunnel appear as if out of nothing.

"Right," he whispered into the frigid winter air.

"Time to go see what's going on in town." This wasn't his first excursion, not by a long shot. Escaping had been hard at first, though. Obviously the fence that surrounded the estate had arrays on it, applied by several generations of masters and apprentices, as Wang Bin had told him. Wu Hao had the eerie sense that the man had known why he was interested, but as long as the master didn't put any effort into actually stopping him, that was fine by him.

The arrays that he'd seen were ranged from the incredible to the slapdash. Though for reasons that he didn't quite understand at the time, the more slapdash ones had been the ones that were more brutal. He'd asked Wang Bin, who had laughed and explained that making an array that blasted everything into shrapnel and went into overkill meant those were made by apprentices. Real masters calculated exactly the amount force required and used no more than that.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Wu Hao had died a couple of times getting shredded by those various arrays, so made by apprentices or not he could confirm they worked. It'd gotten him the last of his knowledge of the principles of arrays, at least, but ever since he'd decided that it'd be quicker and cause less pain to simply go by the tunnel. He shimmied on his back, moving down the tunnel.

Qi had allowed him to shape the rabbit warren into something he could fit into, more or less. It was a good thing that fear of small spaces had been beaten out of him, or else he might have freaked out... There were several bits where he had to be careful so that he didn't push against the bits of array that had, accidentally or not, been expanded to extend down into the earth, and there were other bits that prodded into his back and annoyed him.

The knives on his belt shifted with every movement, but now that he'd bought combat-grade knives they'd stopped stabbing into his legs, at least. And then there were the spots of ice, frozen puddles from dripping water and rain. There was a reason he hadn't worn his best clothes for his night on the town. He had a regular set for these trips, which he'd been keeping in a chest in his room.

He'd slipped out of his rooms fairly often, actually - some weeks he was out more often than not, though the cold had stamped out part of that desire. He might have been a martial artist, but that didn't make him completely immune to frostbite or the chilling, absolute-zero frigid winds that came whistling down the mountaintops of Mt Song. A small push of qi, and then he was crawling out of the tunnel, lodging aside the array-bound cover that he'd made.

Another push and then he was finally free, flitting through the twirling snowflakes as he landed with a quiet thump. He shoved the cover back over the hole and ran just enough qi over the arrays that he'd carved into it, making it look like any other part of the wall. Qi kept his movements steady, and he didn't waste any more time at the mansion. Another small push saw him skating over the ice, flying over the snow without touching it.

He'd never been found out yet, but that didn't mean he was going to stop taking these precautions. As he made his way back to the more fun parts of town, he wondered at how long it'd been. A week or two, maybe? He'd been kept busy rushing materials over to the automated grinders, since the masters all needed vast quantities of fresh ink all of a sudden. Every morning he'd been awoken by Bai Yiju stomping around to gather the materials.

There were more lights than he'd expected, though, even on the relative outskirts. Usually streets like the Marrow Road or the winding alleys of the Shopping District were ill-lit even during the day, but now it seemed people had gone through the effort of lighting lamps. It almost looked cheerful. Wu Hao looked at it, cocking his head. This was new - it hadn't been there the last time he'd gone out. Interesting. With the cold, though, there weren't many beggars around.

He sniffed the air and he could barely make out the scent of qi, drifting over from several of the more popular hangouts nearby. At a nearby bar there was a pitfighting ring in which he occasionally participated. It'd taken some effort and a significant helping of luck, but Wu Hao was now the proud owner of every Earth-tier art that he'd been able to think of and then some. He could fight now with maces, staves, swords, open palms, spears, shortstick, long stick, wind-and-fire wheels, axes, and whips.

He'd even gone so far as to try and gather a bunch of Sky-tier martial arts, though those were a lot rarer than he'd assumed at first, and the problem was finding someone who'd actually use them to kill him. Still, he'd managed to obtain a motley collection of different Sky-grade arts as well. Most of them he'd never used, instead sticking to the weapons he'd actually bought so far, which were the spear and the saber. Swords were still too expensive, as it turned out.

He snapped out of his thoughts and dodged past one of the carts that sold alcohol and occasionally food. There was an entrance to the Red Lantern District nearby where he could wander if he wanted to. He did want to. He still hadn't conquered that barrage of feelings that he got whenever he saw one of the prettier working girls smile at him, and he hadn't actually mustered up the courage to accept one of their invitations.

He knew their prices and they were affordable enough, and it wasn't that he wasn't interested in that sort of thing or that he considered himself above that, it was just... well, he didn't know what it was, but it just was. But business before pleasure. First he would find out what was going on, and then he could gawk. Wu Hao went deeper into town, walking further away from the slums. There were more lights still until it seemed a bright-lit lamp was hanging from every house.

He blinked, not just in surprise but also because his night-adapted eyes had to adjust. Finally, though, at Five Square - so named because five roads all crossed there - he found a couple of people, wrapped up in warm clothing but still shivering as they worked by lamp-light. They were older men and, while some of them possessed some measure of qi, none of them were more than halfway reaching third-grade. He walked closer, watching one particular man work.

He was hammering posts into the ground, creating a large sort of square, while other men around him heaved large stones nearby which they laid carefully into place, pushing them together after applying some sort of glue to the sides.

"What're you doing?" Wu Hao asked. A bit of the Mt. Song dialect had slipped into his own speech, though he'd come to learn that there were actually two dialects: one for the upper slopes, where he didn't bother going, and one for the lower parts, the ones where the slums and the like were. He preferred the slums. There was simply more to do, more than the deathly quiet nights of the upper half.

"Preparing," the worker said, hammering another post into the ground.

"Obviously."

"For what?" The worker spared him an amused glance.

"Don't you know what time of the year it is, son?"

"Winter," Wu Hao said.

"Right," the worker said. He rubbed his hands.

"Which means?" Wu Hao stared expressionlessly at him until the older man got annoyed and let out a breath that misted in the night air, reflecting the light of the lamps by which the men were working.

"It means the Winter Solstice Festival, kid," he said.

"It's starting tomorrow, in case you hadn't heard." Wu Hao had not, in fact heard.

"Is there anything to do?"

"It's the Mt. Song Valley," the worker said. He might've given a smile, but from the look of his face and the fact his speech had slowed somewhat suggested that he thought Wu Hao was another village idiot who'd escaped his village to instead land in the big city.

"There'll be the usual for the festival, of course. Food, drink, all that, and then there's the big show." He hammered another post into the ground, looked at Wu Hao again, and grunted.

"I mean that there'll be a tournament."