Chương 105: The Road To Death, IV

Wu Hao's time turned into a long sequence of days spent walking the roads and occasionally walking through a small village, while his nights were spent trying to find a place to sleep in the wilderness. He didn't get as much sleep and he had to regularly steal food from people he passed on the road, but he kept at it. He'd make it to Chongqing if he just kept enduring, and in that at least he was confident that he could do more than anyone else. Who else had endured death as often as he had and come back for more?

No one, as far as he knew. He might have been slightly delirious at that point from hunger, but he didn't let that stop him. Still, that didn't mean that he didn't look for opportunities to try and make life even a little easier. Occasionally people had seen him walk around and tossed him a coin. Presumablythat they'd mistaken him for a beggar and felt pity for him, at his age.

It wasn't like he'd earned a fortune, but he'd saved those coins and pretty soon he might even be able to buy himself some food, rather than stealing lunches from inattentive caravan followers and the like. But he felt a deep flush of shame that hurt, deep in his core, every time those pitying eyes looked at him. There was a small part of him that insisted he could still return to the Jin clan, just by killing himself a few times.

It'd be over quickly and he'd be back to regular meals and sleep and having real weapons. He refused to do so, though. The real stroke of luck was that he'd set out early last morning and had managed to steal a few vegetables from a farmer who seemed to be heading to market. Wu Hao didn't feel too bad - with the ramshackle way the cart had been constructed, the man'd be bound to lose a few of his produce anyway. Besides, he hadn't stolen meat or anything that expensive.

Raw cabbage didn't taste great, though, he'd discovered. The rest of the vegetables had been more or less fine, if somewhat grimy, and for once he'd felt almost full after a meal. He drank more water than he'd meant to and found new strength running through him. It was a feeling that he hadn't felt in a while and, in all honesty, probably wouldn't for another while, he knew. One thing he'd discovered, though, was that qi seemed to be influenced by his condition.

Ever since he'd left the Jin clan, he'd noticed that the rough living meant that he gathered less qi and that he was using more for every technique he tried to use. His comprehension had gotten less good, too. Again, he thought back to one of the things he'd discovered. The body influenced qi, but qi also influenced the body. That made sense. It wasn't an earthshattering revelation or anything, but like the coins he'd saved up he stored this little bit of information carefully, too.

As the day turned and Wu Hao kept trudging along the road, he found a small group of people around a caravan. Not a robbery, though, just the porters having been allowed to take a short break for lunch. Wu Hao hadn't realized that it was that time already, but he supposed it made sense. He caught up with the caravan, taking a moment to inspect its sigil. He'd seen a few - the Golden Lotus Company was one he recognized, obviously. And he'd been trained, in a sense, to recognize those of the Nine Great Sects, too.

The Five Families didn't run their own trading companies, he knew, but got their money from other kinds of wheeling and dealing. But this wasn't one he recognized. That meant they weren't a major player, which was good. His experience with bigger players hadn't been all that positive, really. Porters were usually decent people in his experience, though. Wu Hao made up his mind: he'd try to talk to the people here.

He walked up to one of the porters at the edges of the group, sitting quietly holding his food in his hands while he watched Wu Hao near.

"Hey," he said, trying to seem respectable. Considering he was more dirt than clean skin, that wasn't easy.

"Which company is this?" The porter, a man in his late forties with a scraggly beard and a hairline that was receding and graying, frowned at Wu Hao, then took a swig of his water.

"No beggars," the porter snapped before Wu Hao could even so much as mention his request.

"I'm not a beggar," Wu Hao said, voice souring.

"If you're not, then you're either a runaway or a thief. We don't have any use for the first and we'll beat the shit out of a thief."

"I'm neither of those, either," Wu Hao muttered. The porter looked him over, then took another swig of his water before wiping his chin with the back of his arm.

"Fuck off."

"Can I see the head porter, at least? I think I could -""I am the head porter," the man responded. He didn't bother to offer any proof.

"Again, kid. Fuck off." Wu Hao breathed in, breathed out. So much so for his confidence in the general goodness of porters.

"Fine," he said. The porter's eyes followed him as he turned and split from the group, keeping his distance from the caravan. Then, on a sudden spiteful impulse, he sent qi to his feet and launched himself forward. He'd made some improvements, and the effect now wasn't simply that he was sent hurtling off his feet but instead that he rocketed forwards as if he was slipping on ice, straight forwards. With repeated steps he could almost manage to look elegantly striding along a path like a real martial artist.

He strained his ears to hear if the head porter made any sudden noises of surprise or regret, but he heard nothing and it felt foolish and immature to try and look back. Even in that, though, this head porter disappointed him. No reaction. Wu Hao cut off the qi after he felt more or less out of sight and sighed. There was no reason to feel bitter, he thought, but nonetheless he did. He'd never thought before about the importance of appearance, but now he was getting several lessons in why it was.

He glanced down bitterly at the rags he was wearing. They'd once been good quality robes but the forests had utterly ruined them. He didn't have the money for new clothes, though, not unless he wanted to spend the money that'd been thrown at him. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. And that wouldn't be enough, anyway. Instead of those thoughts, he tried to focus on the movement technique.

Little by little he was getting the hang of the Dragon Ascending Gate Art, the way it required him to move. He'd had to do a lot of guesswork on where the specific acupoints were that the art kept mentioning, reconstructing parts of the art from the little he could read and apply. The result probably wasn't anything like what the art was supposed to be, but Wu Hao was growing increasingly familiar with it.

The most major improvement was the ability to simply take steps and use the movement art a few times in a row, allowing him to traverse far larger distances than he could with a leap. Besides, it allowed him to stay lower to the ground, which was useful because when he leapt into the air he'd need to expend a lot more qi to change direction, slow himself down or speed himself up. Also, it hurt less and wouldn't tear his shoes apart. Probably.

He'd been barefoot for a while now and the bleeding on his feet had more or less stopped, so that was good. He wondered if maybe he should come up with a new name for his own technique, though. He'd just left it nameless, but if it was becoming something more respectable, didn't it deserve a name of its own? Every technique that he'd gotten from his deaths and from books and so on had had names.

Neither did he know if the techniques dying gave him were techniques that had existed in the world and had been gathered somewhere, or if maybe there was something inventing the technique at the moment he died and stuffing it into his skull. That seemed a question he might actually be able to answer. Maybe at Chongqing, Wu Hao reflected. He stepped up his pace. Later in the evening he found another village.

He'd seen four of them by now, all cast in more or less similar molds: next to the side of the road, never too far from a river or a stream that ran nearby, and with small walls that would probably repel anyone that wasn't a martial artist. This one was that same design, the same type of people, except that now it'd been scaled up to be twice as large at least.

The walls stretched higher, there were more signs of life even during the night time, and as if to further illustrate that this was definitely more of a village it even had a name. Green Village, a nearby sign read. It wasn't much of a name, but compared to simply being "the village" it was an improvement.

With the ease of a few days of practice Wu Hao snuck around to the side of the village, tried to judge where the wall would be easiest to jump over, and then tried to extend his senses over to the other side of the wall to see if he felt anything. The scare with Bao the beggar hadn't repeated itself since he'd gone from that village. There'd been no other villages with martial artists waiting nearby, nowhere where there seemed to be enough valuables that a martial artist might have been posted as a guard.

Didn't mean he was going to stop taking precautions, though. He slipped over the wall. It wasn't night yet - it'd take too long and he was feeling pressed in a way that he couldn't really define - but no one seemed to see him. There'd be a reaction of some kind, if he had been, and there'd been nothing. Wu Hao gathered his stuff and walked out from the small alley he'd found himself in, checking out the street around him. It was the evening rush.

Men - lumberjacks, servants, porters, all sorts of laborers - were returning home, stinking of sweat. Children ran through the group occasionally, trying to dodge the legs of the men around them while they played or raced home, and they weren't always successful. There was a small commotion as a few carts made their way through the square. Wu Hao had a quick look to see if there was anything valuable there, but it was farmers' tools and a bunch of other things that he couldn't use or didn't recognize.

No food, unfortunately. That seemed to have been sold already. If he'd come a little earlier he might have still caught the last eddies of the market, but he hadn't. It wasn't worth trying to get here faster, he decided: yes, he imagined that markets were pretty easy to steal from, but he'd eaten that morning and the hunger that he felt could still be ignored. As if on cue his stomach growled and Wu Hao moved on.

He tried to go quickly enough that no one paid him too much attention, and he didn't try to swerve through or past people - he just kept to the sidelines. A housewife did wrinkle her nose at the state of him and muttered something to her equally stout daughter, about Wu Hao's age, but he ignored the both of them. And then, suddenly, a face he knew. In a crowd of almost a hundred people, something stood out in the corner of his eyesight. He turned but found it already gone.

They'd died more often together than days they'd spent together. There wasn't a scar on his face that pulled his lips into a sardonic grin and there was no qi to make him immediately identifiable. He wasn't wearing the rags that Wu Hao had seen him in last - instead he was dressed in the workmanlike clothing of a store's apprentice, bearing bits of clothes that he had slung across his shoulder. Finally, Wu Hao knew him as a more gaunt figure, but right now there was still baby fat clinging to his cheeks.

All the same, Wu Hao was sure that he'd just seen 729. No - not 729 yet. Just a boy. A boy who, at the moment, would still have a name and a family and memories. And a job, too, it seemed. He hesitated a moment longer - wondered if maybe it'd been a trick of his imagination, a lack of sleep playing up again despite having slept a full four hours the night before, just the general feeling of emptiness that the crowd in which he found himself inspired in him... No. It couldn't have been.

Wu Hao turned on his heel, trying to recapture the sight, maybe try to figure out where not-yet-729 was going. But if curiosity killed the cat, what did that matter to him? He'd simply come back.