Chapter 171: Death & Bitter Medicine, I

The next morning, Wu Hao wasn't subject to any more traps. He hadn't asked the master about it, in part because he was convinced that trying to ask why there were no more traps would only result in there being more traps. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Wu Hao was now a second-grade martial artist; maybe it had something to do with the fact that they were heading somewhere else.

Whatever the answer was, Wu Hao decided to simply enjoy the fact that he didn't need to doublecheck every single item of food he ate for breakfast to see if it was boobytrapped, and that he wasn't awoken by the sight of an array sizzling into life underneath him. It would have gotten old very fast, though he was surprised that the old man didn't keep throwing him into arrays he'd created for the sole purpose of torturing his only disciple.

After breakfast they packed up their stuff into the spatial storages, which took them a few minutes at most. Then they ascended into the carriage again and it would drive off, following a road that Wu Hao didn't recognize in the slightest.

Not that he would have been able to recognize any road, but still. It was annoying not to know where they were going, or why, beyond that the master was apparently expected there. Then again, he was apparently expected in half the world, to hear him tell it.

For lunch, they stopped again at the roadside. They could have eaten in the carriage, but Wu Hao was very much glad to be outside of the thing for once. His body had been reconstructed, but there was still something about sitting still that didn't agree with him for long.

Wu Hao ate a quick meal given to him by the master. For all the changes his body had gone through during his transformation into the second-grade, apparently the need for food hadn't changed, but it was less pressing in ways that Wu Hao couldn't quite put to words - as if he could go longer than others without food if he wanted to, his body sustained on some level purely by qi.

That wasn't the only change, obviously. Now that Wu Hao had advanced a step, he found himself faster and stronger, more resilient, reacting quicker. It was as if he'd lived his entire life mired in muck and now that had finally been cleared away, allowing him to breath and move the way he wanted to. He could control every single muscle with ease, summon forth more strength than he'd had before, and his qi control had improved significantly.

He looked over to the master. The last time they had sparred, Wu Hao had been knocked flat onto his ass. He didn't intend to let things continue that way, though.

"Let's spar," master Shu said. He stretched slightly, extending his arms as if doing some sort of basic warm-up. Even he must have gotten tired after sitting for that long.

Wu Hao threw himself into the air so fast the ground beneath his feet heaved, pulling the staff out of his spatial storage while still flying. He focused his qi into a single point and then let it explode outwards, pushing it into the patterns required for the Falling Rock technique of the Heavy Iron Staff Art.

Master Shu watched Wu Hao descend, his eyebrows raised.

"Come on, then," he said, concentrating his qi so that it took the form of a staff for him to wield. Even before it was done, the thick line of black not-ink swung up into a block meant to meet Wu Hao.

He'd probably succeed, of course. The Heavy Iron Staff Art they both practiced emphasized steady defence over anything else, and Wu Hao had given a clear indication of what to guard against.

So he simply let the qi flood out of his technique and instead breathed in deeply, spinning the diamond in his chest so that it'd provide him with thunder-aligned qi instead of earth-aligned qi. The technique fizzled and the staff in his hands sparked, gathering a charge as he simply improvised a technique on the fly.

The master sighed, reached out with his own staff, and met Wu Hao's attack by thrusting his staff forward, allowing it to roll in his grip. The first strike struck against Wu Hao's own staff and knocked it slightly out of place, so that it wasn't aiming at the master anymore but instead just an empty patch of ground. The second strike struck Wu Hao's shin precisely, turning his controlled descent into a spinning somersault without inflicting much injury, and the third of the Three Sparrows stopped in front of Wu Hao's chest as he slammed to the ground in a tangle of feet and limbs.

"Why do we use techniques?" master Shu asked Wu Hao as he lay there, dazed. "Hmm?"

"I don't know," Wu Hao huffed.

"Clearly," the master muttered. "Otherwise you wouldn't have tried to do what you just did. That's a recipe for disaster, boy."

"How bad could it have been?" Wu Hao asked. "It didn't feel that bad."

The master's eyebrows narrowed into a frown. "If you're lucky it kills both your opponent and you. Most of the time, it will do nothing, and perhaps you'll survive the fight. Perhaps you won't. And, if you're unlucky - and brat, you don't seem to have much luck - then it will simply kill you."

"But not instantly," Wu Hao prompted.

Master Shu grunted. "Not always."

Hmm. He'd have to keep that in mind. Experimenting that way still felt like it held some promise.

"Besides," the master added. "You should've read all of this in the Basics of Qi already, brat. You claimed you'd read it from front to back, but perhaps you need to read it from back to front as well if you want to have a hope of understanding its lessons."

That... was actually true. Damn. Wu Hao did recall several passages where the nature of qi alignment was discussed, although he was drawing the blank on the specifics.

"If you want to actually make proper use of your new core, then study your textbooks in more depth," master Shu said, crossing his arms. "Why do you think I assigned you your reading material, brat? Whatever I do, I do for a reason."

Wu Hao wasn't sure that that was true either, but what the hell. He could try it, he supposed. When they got back into the carriage, he left the Great Powers of the Jianghu aside and instead pulled the book of On the Basics out again, with a sigh.

In that way, they continued on. Three meals per day were spent outside the carriage, as were the nights. The rest of the time they spent inside, being pulled along to wherever they were going. Wu Hao got beaten up almost every day, though never severely enough to leave visible bruises or welts. That didn't mean it didn't hurt, it just meant his skin had restored to looking unbroken when he woke up in the morning.

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One afternoon, their route took them past a stream. Distantly, a waterfall roared. The master ordered the carriage to stop here, causing Wu Hao to look up from his own studies, though it didn't take much to interrupt him anyway.

Master Shu hummed.

"Good timing," he said appreciatively. "Now, brat. Wash yourself."

"No," Wu Hao said. "It looks cold."

Master Shu had quirked an eyebrow. In the next moment Wu Hao's feet left the ground and he was catapulted forward, just slow enough that he had a few instants to realize what was about to happen, and then he was dunked into the ice-cold water. It was even worse than he'd thought. He resurfaced with an agonized gasp.

"Are you afraid of the water?" the master chided him. "You stink, brat. Do something about it. Perhaps today is the day we arrive, and what manner of beast would you think they make of you, if you were to arrive like this? Some sort of pig that learned to walk on two trotters, perhaps."

Wu Hao raised himself out of the water, which was so ice cold that thin floes of ice drifted past. If not for a martial artist's physique, he might have already suffered frostbite. With the cold all around him it felt like he wasn't wrapped in water but in some sort of cocoon, holding him tight. At least he could stand here, if only barely.

"Now meditate," master Shu had said. "It's decently pure ice-aligned qi around here, boy. You won't get its like with cities nearby."

Drawing in a breath that was almost pure ice, Wu Hao let that same breath go, felt the qi that he had pulled in travel down into his lungs and from there into his core. It spun, exposing another new facet, which took in the yin cold qi and colored with a faint hue of blue. The cold lessened just a little bit, enough to where he didn't feel like he was in danger of dying.

He'd have taken some pleasure in splashing the old man with some of that ice-cold water if not for the fact that the master had simply hummed and stepped into the river of his own accord, finding a deeper spot where his head was above water and the rest of him wasn't. In fact, the old man sunk into the water with zero complaints except a faint sigh of relaxation, as if it was a hot spring or a medicinal bath.

Wu Hao stared.

"Heating arrays," master Shu told him smugly. Secure in the knowledge that Wu Hao's robes lacked those particular arrays, of course. Wu Hao's arrays lacked most arrays. He hadn't had the time to work on it, in between dodging traps in the morning, being beaten to a pulp at lunch, or falling asleep in the evening.

When Master Shu stepped out his beard was luxurious and the robes he had kept on were shiny and clean, due to a function of the innumerable arrays inscribed on it that kept it dry and comfortable. The flash of qi that made that array function was fascinating, in its own ways, but Wu Hao couldn't currently give a flying fuck.

Teeth chattering, he marched up to Master Shu.

"Teach me," he demanded.

"Teach you what?" Master Shu asked.

"How to stay dry. What technique are you using?"

"Well," the master said, making a show of thinking it through. "It's called don't go in the water with your robe on."

"You threw me," Wu Hao forced out.

"That's another technique," master Shu said. "It's called do what your master says without talking back. You don't seem to have mastered it yet."

Wu Hao glared. At least the master relented and dried him off with a few flicks of his wrist and a welcome, warm wave of qi that rushed through his clothes like a spring breeze. He felt almost grateful before he remembered whose fault it was that he had needed to be dried off in the first place.

"Don't get water on my books," Master Shu reprimanded.

One day, Wu Hao vowed, he was going to get his revenge, and it was not going to be pretty.

In that way, they continued on. Three meals per day were spent outside the carriage, as were the nights. The rest of the time they spent inside, being pulled along to wherever they were going.

But as the days dragged on and on, Wu Hao noticed one thing, again and again.

Master Shu's mood was getting... not worse, but certainly more somber. Whereas on the way to the Emei Sect he'd spent his time with his nose in his books and enjoying some sort of snack or tea, now he was more and more unable to really focus, it seemed.

Frequently, when Wu Hao looked up, blinking, from his own studies, he saw master Shu staring out the window. He still seemed relaxed as ever and his veil was as impenetrable as it ever was, but his gaze stared into the long distance. It was as if he didn't see the trees passing by, the villages they occasionally ambled through, the peddlers of random merchandise they passed without looking twice.

The master had never seemed like the happiest of people, but this was much more so than Wu Hao had ever seen him before. There were even times where he would say something underneath his breath, as if talking to someone far away. Wu Hao kept a careful eye on the man to see if there was anything, but he learned nothing new.

But the villages got larger and larger, to the point where it took them more than a few minutes to cross from one end to the other, and the number of people they passed grew similarly. It became harder to find a spot where they could settle the carriage for the night without anyone else nearby. Not that Master Shu seemed to care, but Wu Hao always slept worse with others nearby.

By the end of the seventh day of their trip, Wu Hao wondered if perhaps there were more people on the road than in one of the villages they had passed.

They tended to catch his eye, too, because in every group they passed there was something that stuck out to him. Several were carrying people over their shoulders, hurrying along children that seemed pale and drawn, or were outright missing limbs. Guards stood posted at the sides of the road every so often, staring silently but vigilantly in front of them.

It was as if they had unwittingly joined some sort of pilgrimage of the sick.

That musing, combined with the symbol that was printed on each of the guards' uniforms, was what clued him in as to where they were going. It was a symbol Wu Hao recognized, one he stared at. It was the symbol of medicine, clad in a shade of purple that seemed almost royal.

They had entered the lands of the Tang Clan.