Chương 48: Start of Book Two - Death Reborn, I

Wu Hao blinked, twice, watching the world around him. It still didn't quite feel real that he was there. He'd spent all that time hurtling himself through space and time, so much so that he wondered if he'd killed himself a few times too many and this was the afterlife. That was a possibility he'd considered, though in the end he'd gambled on it not actually being possible.

But the grass underneath his fingers felt real, the breeze pushed through his hair felt real, and the sounds of the river shuddering its way through its riverbed nearby felt real, too. Still, Wu Hao pinched himself, just to make sure. It hurt. Good, he supposed. At the very least: not bad. Wu Hao worked himself up to his feet, wondering at how large and bright everything seemed. He was shorter than he remembered being, too, but he'd get used to that, he thought.

It would take a little longer to get used to the absence of his scars, and he felt oddly nude standing there in simple gray clothes that wrapped around him, with nothing covering his face. He might even be recognized by people now. Wu Hao wondered what that might be like. At a loss for what to do next, he stood there for a moment longer. He hadn't actually had much of a plan for what he'd do when he'd actually escaped the Red Dawn Sect.

Even that had seemed such a huge task that it alone had dominated most of his thoughts, kept him sane even as it drove him to repeatedly kill himself. Unfortunately, faced with the sudden realization that he could really do anything, it turned out that he had absolutely no idea of what part of that anything he would like to do. Being able to do something, liking, wanting, they'd all been foreign thoughts for a long while. For now, he supposed, he could stand here, enjoy the weather, but that wouldn't last forever.

A plan could come later, he supposed. It always had before.

"You're not gonna eat?" a voice asked him. Wu Hao turned to face the other man who'd just addressed him. Memories came back. He was a middle-aged man named that Wu Hao knew as old Qin, because while he wasn't the oldest man in the company he was the one that had served for the longest. Streaks of salt-like grey were beginning to pepper his black hair, a few completely grey strands already ringing his wide ears. At some point, it was said, he'd been a soldier of a prefectural army.

More importantly, old Qin was gesturing at Wu Hao's bread roll, as if asking if he wasn't going to eat it. Wu Hao rolled his eyes and began to munch on his food, though he marvelled at the taste. It'd been stuffed with sweet pork, and Wu Hao attacked it ravenously. How long had it been since he'd eaten anything like this? Not since he'd become a deathsworn.

He was thirsty, so he risked a quick drink from his water pouch, all the while imagining that someone might tell him to stop, a comment that never actually came. Slowly, though, memories came ambling back. He was Wu Hao, but he was beginning to remember who Wu Hao had been. A faint recollection of the first ten years being spent in an orphanage, then at 10 he was given - sold, really - to the Golden Lotus Company to start training to become a porter. So. He still wasn't completely free, then.

Freedom wouldn't come so easily after all. Wu Hao might have grumbled about that, but compared to the way he'd been treated in the Red Dawn Sect, this was a true paradise. He received two meals most days, even three occasionally, and there was nothing that was being held against him as a threat other than needing food and shelter. No one even had the ability to command him to kill himself if he made a mistake. It was a laxness that he found nearly overwhelming. Weren't there discipline problems?

At least that explained the queasiness he'd felt facing the porters when trying to figure out a way to survive on Uncle's special mission. He might have become one of them, if life hadn't gone wrong. The point, though, was that even though he'd seen a town, it wasn't his hometown. He didn't really have one, and he wondered at the sense of disappointment that he felt when thinking about it. He'd never had a family, really, so why did it give him a pang of regret to return and have no one to return to?

That was simply what it had always been. However, on one of the trips to transport goods from the Golden Lotus Company headquarters, the caravan had been raided, taken to a slave market, and sold to someone who took them to become deathsworn. The adults had been killed to a man, but there were maybe two others of the same age as Wu Hao, working. He'd never seen them again, and probably wouldn't have known if he had. He shoved those thoughts away, deciding instead to answer another question. When was he, exactly?

This had to have been just before the raid.

"Say, Old Qin," Wu Hao asked, when he'd swallowed the rest of his food.

"Mm?"

"What year is it?" Old Qin raised his eyebrows.

"Let me think." His eyes rolled back and forth as he did some quick calculation. When he finally spoke, it was a little hesitantly.

"It's year 89 of the new calendar," Old Qin said.

"Or maybe 90. I'm not a hundred percent sure."

"Thanks." Year 89 of the new calendar. The new calendar had been established six years after the Second Heavenly Demon War. That gave him maybe... five years before the Third Heavenly Demon War erupted. Four, if old Qin's other guess was nearer to the mark. He'd actually travelled five years back in time. That meant he was currently twelve or so, depending on how you counted it. Wu Hao stared at his empty hands.

He still felt the occasional urge to sit down and grasp his vital qi, then send it soaring upwards to kill himself again, but he throttled it down. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. For now, anyway. If he really needed a lot more time, then... Old Qin peered at him.

"You alright?" he asked. Wu Hao glanced at him, noting the man actually sounded concerned. Something must have shown.

"Fine," Wu Hao said. Old Qin rolled his eyes.

"Sure. I'm going for a piss. We've got fifteen more minutes before we need to start moving again."

"Yeah," Wu Hao said. He stood up too, moving through some quick stances to try and get the hang of this new body of his. It felt weird - he couldn't feel his heart thud in his chest, and it felt like there ought to be qi in his system at the moment. Without it his senses were dulled, his reactions were slow, and his mind felt oddly like it was straining against a body that didn't respond quite right.

He'd have to get his hands on some qi, somehow, but it'd be a waste unless he had a corresponding qi cultivation technique. He could resort to the Limitless Pulse Art again, given that he'd had some success with it already, but that wouldn't do. He didn't think there were any dangers, but all the same he wouldn't try it again. No, the issue was that it relied on a slow acquisition that would hopefully make for a thick base on which to build power.

At the same time, it was an art that proclaimed that it could be cultivated by all, without any special prerequisites for aptitude or physique. Even the greatest idiot could cultivate it, given the time. It had to have been one of the traits that had left the art open to being manipulated by the elders of the Red Dawn Sect. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter was that cultivation manuals didn't grow on trees. Perhaps there was some way of getting it from his system?

He was going to have to devise some way of dying by not having qi. If he used all his vital qi, maybe... In the warmth of the afternoon sun, though, death felt impossibly distant. When Old Qin returned, it wasn't long before the leader of the expedition showed himself. Liu Zhiyi came strolling out from the town, dabbing slightly at the sweat on his forehead with the sleeves of his expensive robe, as always the last to arrive and the first to leave, whistling something tuneless and repetitive.

But then again, that was probably the bosses' privilege. Not to mention that he was the leader of the expedition, he was also one of the five sons of the Golden Lotus Company's leader, Liu Gang. Liu Zhiyi wasn't as fat as his father was rumored to be, but he was still hefty.

"Right," he said loudly.

"Let's get going! We don't have much time to waste, people! We've got to get to the Jin clan compound in two more days, and the sooner we get there, the better!" The carriage creaked under Liu Zhiyi as he made his way up the steps, with a few items of food and a bottle of wine brought up by his servant, Old Wang. Then the shouts went up to get going, and Old Wang made his way forward to the carriage and began to inspect the reins, before snapping the horses into a relatively slow start.

They set off down a road that looked like it had been rough work to hew out of the surrounding woods. Trees in uneven rows lined the path, the carriage's wheels occasionally bumping up as they encountered a root that hadn't been cut away entirely or had simply grown back over the years. The porters walked in front and the back, each carrying heavy packs. Wu Hao's pack wasn't all that heavy, but nonetheless he could definitely feel it on his back.

He had faint memories of having staggered under that weight once, but that was before he'd undergone deathsworn training. Now this level of annoyance or strain barely even registered. Old Qin was talking quietly with one of the other men, and Wu Hao fell in, curious as to what they were talking about. Old Qin glanced aside, then smiled.

"They say never to trust a skinny merchant," Old Qin said, and huffed with a quiet laugh.

"Then our Golden Lotus Company must be the most trustworthy merchant company, no?" The man next to him whose name Wu Hao couldn't recall smiled too and said something he didn't quite make out.

"Right," Old Qin said.

"He was probably pretty disappointed at that, I imagine." Again, he huffed with laughter.

"What?" Wu Hao said. Old Qin traded another smile with the other porter.

"Nothing. Tell you when you're older, huh?" Wu Hao snorted. Fine. He could survive an evening without being clued in. The expedition went on and on, and eventually Wu Hao got so utterly bored with the conversation of Old Qin or even things like trying to count the trees that his thoughts strayed to trying to make plans again. When the night came, Wu Hao told himself, he would be gone.

He would be free, and 12 years old or not, he'd find his way to some other place where he could become a martial artist in his own right until he could kill Father. In the meantime, though, he meekly followed along with the others, telling himself that he would seize a moment of distraction, thinking up idle plans of where he would go, into which sects or clans he might be accepted.

Even as they stopped for the evening, the horses were released from their reins and cleaned and tied down, as a campfire was made and the men gathered around it to start putting their bedrolls onto the cold ground, as the lanterns were extinguished, a refrain ran through his mind: any moment now he'd get to his feet and start actually doing something, anything. He'd grab a knife from somewhere, he'd go off into the wilderness, he'd survive on his own.

He'd leave these people to be raided, even if that thought sent shivers of unhappiness down his spine every time he thought it. But Wu Hao was still there, half-dozing, when the first scream ripped through the night.