Chương 36: Talking to Death, I

Before he was even consciously aware that he'd come back, Wu Hao seized up, coughing, retching as he did. Several of the others gave him looks as they passed by him. Still he coughed, trying to get the taste of ash out of his mouth and failing. He imagined almost that he could still feel it, still trapped within him and tearing at his insides, devouring whatever it could get its hands on and - He tried to breath in, as deeply as he could.

His shivers didn't stop, and his panic didn't fade, but gradually he began to be able to think again. Part of his qi was gone, all of a sudden, wasted in a spasm of lost control, and he felt cold and completely hollow inside.

"Get up," someone commanded. It was 726, standing over him.

"You have not been given permission to laze around." Wu Hao sniffled. It was such an embarrassingly human thing to do so, but he couldn't stop himself. He didn't feel able to stand, felt sick to his stomach. Ash still seemed to linger on his tongue. 726's foot slammed into his side, threatened to send him careening off the side of the mountain where they'd stopped. Oddly enough, the dull ache of pain helped tear him out of his thoughts, which had been continuing to loop themselves into a knot.

"You are wasting my time," 726 hissed.

"If Uncle sees, I'll -" What would happen to 726, he didn't get to finish, because Wu Hao's fist caught him in the thigh, a wild uppercut thrown as Wu Hao rose to his feet. 726 grunted something, tried to throw a punch, and then Wu Hao's fist slammed into the other boy's fist. There was an audible crack of bone hitting bone, but Wu Hao managed to get up to his feet in the silence that followed.

"Uncle forgives lateness if it's for challenges," Wu Hao said, breaking the silence of the misty mountain morning. He wiped his mouth. 726, standing back up across from him, eyed him.

"You're challenging me? Here, now?"

"Here," Wu Hao said, and raised a hand. He took up the Heavy Fist stance, right fist in front like a shield, the left cocked back to deliver quicker strikes. Then he opened up his right hand, turned it palm up, and wriggled his fingers at 726.

"Now." 726 rushed forward, and Wu Hao met him with an equally wild charge. A fist slammed into his upper arm and would probably leave a bruise, but Wu Hao turned into the blow and stepped into 726's guard. His left fist flew, like an arrow launched from a bow, and crashed into 726's solar plexus. He gasped for air, once, then tried to raise his fists again even as his face blanched and his eyes went wide.

Wu Hao slammed his other fist into 726's face, feeling the other boy's nose crumple under the ridges of his fingers, and then pushed forwards, throwing the other boy down to the ground. Then he kicked him in the chest, in the same way he himself had just been kicked. Then, allowing himself a few more seconds to breathe in deeply, he walked off to 726, ripped the Brother pin from his clothes, and stuck it onto his own rags.

He wiped his mouth once more, then turned and walked while 726 was still twitching on the ground. There. That felt better. Maybe the other boy would get up again. Maybe he wouldn't. Wu Hao had bigger problems, like the screen twitching in the side of his vision. You have been killed by a Heaven-tier Demonic Art for the first time. Obtained Heaven-tier Demonic Art Fragment I as a reward. Ah, he thought as he stared into nothingness. So - that had been a demonic art that had killed him, huh?

He shivered again, then continued running to catch up with the rest of the herd. They didn't say anything, but he felt several eyes focus on the fact that he now had the pin on him. But they couldn't ask questions, so after a while he felt their attention wane and he turned his own focus more internally. Before, when he'd died, he'd had knowledge blasted into his skull, like shoving furniture out of the way to make place for more stuff.

It had been unpleasant and headache-inducing, but he'd been able to get over it. The Demonic Art of the Flayed Body was different. It wasn't poured into his head so much as he felt it slither into his brain, like he'd always known it. It began, as any Demonic Art probably did, with promises of power. It claimed to make his skin invulnerable to wounds, giving him natural defenses that would match those of the famed Indestructible Vajra Body of the Shaolin.

All he had to do was flay several people alive and take their skins to replace his own, piece by piece, after soaking the skins in a particular medicinal solution. Wu Hao wasn't going to bother, and not just because he didn't have the required ingredients or because it'd reset if he got killed. So that was what Demonic Arts were, he thought. They let you gain power, if you offered the right sacrifice.

In theory, the sacrifice could be yourself, and in that sense the filter that blocked his heart was oddly close to being Demonic. But it was far easier - and far more profitable - to sacrifice others, willing or not. It didn't escape his notice that this had been the first Heaven-tier art that he hadn't need to understand in order to be able to use. With a sudden insight, he realized that demonic arts were probably how Huo Shanliang had planned to pull off the reconstruction of Wu Hao's core.

Wu Hao spat on the ground as he walked, the spit coming away red. He was still expecting it to have been black with ash, but it wasn't. Mixed blessings. So. He knew a little more about the prisoner, now. He possessed a Heaven-tier Demonic Art, and though Wu Hao had no idea what the man's identity was, what his cultivation might have been, or what had been the deal with that cluster of tens of qi that he'd felt, he knew one thing. The prisoner was extremely dangerous.

He hadn't hesitated to kill Wu Hao, and the look in his eyes made it clear that he didn't consider anyone other than himself worthy of being alive at all. Freeing him was out, then. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. So what then? He turned the problem around a few times, finding only a single conclusion that came to mind. He was going to have to actually talk to the martial artists from the Diancang Sect. Damnit. Dying was easy, talking was hard.

"Brother?" Wu Hao snapped out of his thoughts, and he turned to 732, who'd been marching besides him. The other boy had a curious expression on his face, like wondering what was happening. They were working their way up a hilltop, which offered a view that might have been breathtaking if Wu Hao hadn't seen it too often. Every day, it felt like he was seeing it again.

"What?" he asked.

"We're nearly there," 732 said.

"I can see ahead. Several of the first troops are settling down to build the camp."

"Good eyes," Wu Hao said idly. 732's eyes widened, then he nodded quickly and fell back, leaving Wu Hao to march first. He might have been lost as to why, but then he saw several figures peel off from the rest of the herd and head in a specific direction, each with pins on their rags, so he gave 732 another grateful nod and followed the others. It was the first time that Wu Hao had to report in with the rest of the Brothers.

Fortunately, Uncle Liu had been first, and he seemed to care about the deathsworn to about the same degree as Uncle Bai did. Wu Hao's report was simple: they'd marched, there'd been a challenge, it hadn't been a problem. Uncle Liu rubbed at his eyes under his glasses.

"You're sure?" he asked.

"Yes, Uncle." The older man made a note and then moved on with handing out tasks to Wu Hao's group, which were the same as would have been handed out to 726. They dug ditches, foraged through the mountains, set up their tents, scrounged together firewood for the fires. He did receive an extra helping of slop, though. It didn't taste any better, but it was one advantage of Brotherhood that he could actually appreciate.

The extra cultivation guidance wasn't exactly much, either - they were given instructions for how to spread qi to specific parts of their body, but he already knew that. Sleep that night felt short and like he had slept for only minutes, but hours had supposedly passed. The speech from Father he could recite in his sleep by now, the words from Uncle he knew like the back of his hand, and even the run had down the mountain had begun to lose some of its luster.

And, like the last time, when they arrived at the path the next morning with sweat running down their backs and panting from the exertion, Wu Hao volunteered himself again, running out through the forest before Uncle decided to complain and then settling not too far further to catch his breath and try to think. He wondered what would happen when he actually came out and met the carriages on the way, though.

But before he'd figured anything out, he heard the sound of other feet walking down the trail in front of him. He fought down the impulse to hide or to report back to Uncle. Instead, he stood his ground, trying to fight the way his fingers itched to take hold of his knife to reassure him. Maybe it was a stroke of luck, but the first porter who saw him and stopped was the same man who'd tried to talk to them, though Wu Hao hadn't known what he'd been asking for. He wondered if the porter himself had.

But his weathered skin, his crows' feet and salt-and-pepper hair were easy enough to recognize, at any rate. He had a rough voice, a back that seemed permanently bent, and calloused hands, but he didn't seem unkind. Wu Hao had thought before that he might have been someone's grandfather, and that still seemed apt. Had he been the Boss Lu that Du Linglong had talked about? Wu Hao supposed he probably was.

"What're you doing here, kid?" Wu Hao took a breath, exhaled. It was a nervous tic that they'd tried to beat out of him, but he was doing it more and more often.

"I'm here to warn you all." The porters shared a look at this among them. It irritated Wu Hao slightly that they didn't seem as worried as when Uncle had shown himself, but he knew that was an irrational feeling at best. The old porter sucked air through his teeth, looking at Wu Hao.

"About what?" he asked.

"Up ahead," Wu Hao said, trying to make it clear that he wasn't joking.

"There's an ambush."

"An ambush?" the porter asked. His tone was serious, but... Wu Hao frowned and was about to make things clearer, when suddenly he heard the noise of a window sliding open.

"Porter," a voice called from the carriage, pompous and high. The window had cracked open just enough to let it through, but the speaker chose not to show themselves. It was a man's voice, or more specifically, a boy's voice.

"Chase him off." The head porter's mouth twisted into a resigned grimace.

"Sir," he said, but his tone suggested that he knew arguing wouldn't get him anywhere.

"I don't know if -""Chase him off, I said." With the loud clack of wood against wood, the window was closed again. A muffled, whispered argument had broken out inside, but Wu Hao couldn't make out any of the words. An awkward silence spread through the clearing. More than one porter seemed to want to argue, and so did Wu Hao. Ke Jiazhong was undoubtedly a gifted martial artist. He was, on the other hand, as gifted at being an ass as he was at martial arts.

The old man shook his head, looked down at Wu Hao, and dragged the back of his hand over his right eye.

"This is a mess," he muttered, so low that Wu Hao doubted he'd been meant to hear it, but then he sighed.

"But if that's what the young master wants..." He turned to Wu Hao again, firming up his spine and trying to tower over Wu Hao. It didn't work.

"You heard him," the head porter said.

"Go on. Get." Wu Hao stared at the carriage, wondered if maybe he could just let whatever happened happen, and decided no. He needed answers. Planting his feet, staring resolutely forward into the porter's eyes, he tried to find the path that'd give him the best shot of running through the men and reach the carriage.

"Get out of my way," Wu Hao said.

"Or I'll make you."