Chương 143: Death & Balance, I

Wu Hao received a few looks from the others as he split off from the group, and 726 stared at him the longest.

"721," he said loudly. The next group had arrived already, though, and Uncle was running through his rote script for the guidance again, so no one else took much notice of them.

"Where are you going? We were ordered to sleep." Turning to face 726, Wu Hao gave him a blank look.

"Uncle ordered me to fulfill other tasks after cultivation practice." 726 grunted, and Wu Hao knew two instincts had to be warring within him. On one hand, Wu Hao was bad at lying, and 726 knew that he was being lied to. The other boy gave no real outward reflection, but Wu Hao knew it to be true anyway. It hadn't been a good lie. The thing, then, was to tell one of the Uncles, who would investigate him for defects. But on the other hand, Wu Hao had phrased it as an order, and orders were absolute.

726 could no more break from that conditioning than Wu Hao would have been able to, before all this had started. Even now, the main reason that Wu Hao was able to resist the Uncle's order to head to the tent and sleep was because he had convinced himself that if he did that he would die, which could harm Father in turn. That would be a greater violation of his orders to never cause harm to Father or let any harm be caused to him.

"Go," 726 said, turning away.

"I will notify an Uncle about this later."

"Yes." Wu Hao turned again and walked up the path that he'd been standing on. His face had remained impassive but his heart had hammered in his chest. 726 would have been within his rights to punish him in Father's place if he'd called Wu Hao on the lie, but he hadn't. Feeling 726's eyes on his back as he walked, he made his way through the campground. Dusk was falling as he walked, painting the entire site a bloody red.

It looked like swathes of shining red had been draped over the tents and the ground, so thickly laid that Wu Hao thought he could almost pick them up. Thinking helped with the pain in his legs and the rest of his body somewhat, not relieving it but allowing him to ignore the hurt. Father's tent was easy to spot. For one, it was the biggest tent of the bunch. But then - as Father had explained - it had to be, because that was where all of Father's planning happened and where guests could be received.

There hadn't ever been guests, but it wasn't impossible there would one day be. It was a specific group of deathsworn, the Honor Guard, that had the honor of carrying Father's tent and other materials while on the march. Each of the boys in the Honor Guard had the rank of Brother, making them fully third-grade martial artists, and they all slept in a separate tent near Father's. They had bedrolls, whereas the rest of the deathsworn slept on thin tarps or the bare ground in their ramshackle tents.

To mark them as special, each of these boys had a white stripe incorporated in their otherwise black clothing, which they displayed prominently. They had earned a small measure of individuality, which the rest of them had been denied, and they carried daggers on their person. In a quiet moment, another boy who hadn't earned his number yet then had called these special deathsworn the bed servants, which he took some amusement in. Wu Hao hadn't understood what the boy meant by that then, and he still didn't.

The boy had died soon afterwards, pulled from the group for trying to make a joke of some kind. He hadn't returned and no one had ever mentioned him again. A few of the Honor Guard were standing at the sides of Father's tent, staring balefully at anyone who walked past and was ranked lower than them. This included Wu Hao, and he received a few glares as he walked up to Father's tent. One of the Honor Guard stepped in front of Wu Hao, holding out one of his hands with a blank look.

Nonetheless, he stood ready to fall into a martial arts stance and summon his qi. Wu Hao could feel it brew slightly under the surface of the boy's skin. He was handsome, the way all of the honor guard were, though it was hard to tell under the strips of cloth. He was also taller than Wu Hao, which meant he had to crane his neck up to look at the other boy.

"What are you doing?" the boy demanded. By the dogtag that hung from his neck, he seemed to have been numbered 648.

"I'm to see Father," Wu Hao said.

"On whose order?"

"I have something to tell him," Wu Hao said, instead of answering.

"On whose order?" 648 repeated.

"I have something," Wu Hao said, "to tell him."

"On whose -""Let him in," Father called from within the tent, voice tinged with irritation.

"I can't sit here and watch you two argue all night, especially when you're repeating the same phrases over and over again." Wu Hao stared up at 648, who stared back down, and then the other boy moved aside to let Wu Hao pass. Pushing open the flap to enter Father's tent, Wu Hao paused for a moment to take in the location the way he had been taught.

He could escape only through the front flaps, where he'd probably be caught by the honor guard, and the tent's fabric was too thick to try and tear through unless he had a sharp dagger. Which he didn't, unless he took one from Father.

"Father," Wu Hao said, bowing.

"721," Father acknowledged. He was dressed relatively casually and sitting at his writing table, working on a scroll of some kind with a brush in one hand, while ink and whetstone rested within access of his other. Father's hair had been tied back, and he didn't stop writing as he spoke to Wu Hao.

"What's so important that you have to tell me?" One of the Honor Guard was sitting, legs folded underneath him, next to the desk, holding a rag in his hands to clean the brush with. He stared at Wu Hao, but didn't rise to his feet. A long scar ran across his chest, disappearing into the strips of cloth covering his torso. His nameplate read 589 - in all likelihood one of the oldest deathsworn present in the camp, though he was no more than 18 by the look of him. Did you know this text is from a different site?

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"Tomorrow," Wu Hao began, "we go to the battlefield. You will have us try to take a hill." Father's hands paused in the middle of a brushstroke, then continued.

"That may be correct," he said.

"Why are you telling me this?"

"We will die," Wu Hao said.

"There will be an expert there who will cut us down easily. We will die, Father." Father's eyebrows had climbed all the way up. He set the brush aside, then handed it off to the Honor Guard next to him, who began to clean it carefully.

"How do you know this?"

"I - I have... seen it, Father," Wu Hao said.

"In my dreams." It felt childish to say, but what other explanation was there? Even now Wu Hao didn't understand what was happening to him. He had felt clearly and with his entire body the sensations that had occurred to him, but how to describe to Father what they had been? Father had already declared him defective once.

"Dreams?" Father said, disbelief clear from his tone. He half-rose from his desk, looking at Wu Hao with an odd expression.

"You are a hardened deathsworn. You may not be an elite, but you have undergone the training that it took me years to devise nonetheless."

"Father," Wu Hao said, with some desperation in his voice. Why wouldn't Father just listen?

"I have seen it."

"If you have," Father hissed, "then you dreamt. I have no need of dreamers. I require only puppets whose strings are in my hands. Dolls do not dream, and a doll that does is defective. I judge you defective, 721. You know what that means."

"But Father -""Shut up," Father ordered, then rose from his desk, raising himself to his full height.

"Hand me the bell," Father ordered 589, who complied instantly and took a small silver bell from the desk. Wu Hao watched, silent, as Father took the bell in his hands, rang it once, and then set it back down. The tone of the bell was clear and loud, made to be audible from a great distance with a cultivator's enhanced senses.

"Hear me," Father continued, as he walked around the desk.

"Even if you did dream, and if you saw the truth, so what? You'll die, you said?"

"I didn't mean that, Father," Wu Hao said, voice coming as a croak.

"We will die. Not just me, my entire group -" Father threw up his hands in disgust.

"For Heaven's sake," he muttered, massaging his forehead.

"How did you go under the radar for this long? As defective as you are, how were you not noticed earlier? All I want from you is absolute obedience, and you cannot guarantee me even that?"

"Father, I am obedient," Wu Hao protested. Father scoffed.

"Yet you argue against my words. An odd definition of obedience, and one markedly different from mine. Let's hear from your fellows. 589?"

"Yes, Father," the other boy whispered from where he had been sitting quietly, like Father's living shadow, listening to every word that had been said but not moving even an inch or letting a single sound be heard. His voice was oddly sweet, and Wu Hao had the absurd thought that at one point the other boy might have been a good singer.

"If I were to command you to die, what would you do?" Father asked, his tone light.

"I would ask how you wanted me to die, Father."

"And if I were to command you to kill your entire squad?"

"Then they would be dead, Father." Father turned back to Wu Hao, an expression of satisfaction on his face.

"You understand now? That is true obedience. He defers to me in all things, as is proper filial piety." Wu Hao said nothing. He had known, of course, that Father's orders had been absolute, and before all this had started he might not have blinked twice at what Father had just told him. Now, though, something inside of him was beginning to rebel against simply accepting his death.

"Know this, 721. Your lives are mine to spend. If I command you to die, you will die in whatever way I tell you to, in whatever numbers I tell you to." He stared into Wu Hao's eyes, searching from something.

"You have a spark of anger in your eyes," Father commented.

"You seem ill at ease at being told to die."

"No, Father," Wu Hao begged.

"I just -""I knew it," Father muttered.

"You truly are defective." This was a hopeless conversation. Even in the haze of Wu Hao's confused mind he knew, at that instant, that there was nothing he could do to convince Father that Wu Hao was not defective. This entire conversation had been a mistake. He took a step back, some part of him already searching for a way out. Again his eyes scanned the tent for any escape route, but all he spotted was to go through the flap, the same way that he had entered.

As if on cue, there was a scattered thump of boots landing on the ground outside. This time the honor guard made no noises, allowing the newcomer to walk in without a challenge to his identity. He pushed the flap aside, revealing himself to be the Uncle who had tested Wu Hao earlier with the palm print. His clothing hadn't been properly tied, his hair mussed to reveal his bald spot and his eyes still half-closed from being roused from his sleep.

"Father," the Uncle said, bowing.

"You called?" He noticed Wu Hao, and worse - he noticed Wu Hao looking. With a little smirk on his face as the situation sank in, the Uncle moved to block the entrance. And, with that, the only avenue of escape had been cut off. Wu Hao was well and truly trapped. This tent was where he would meet his death for the third time.