186. Death & Sunset, VI (Patreon)

The earth was damp, cold as ice, and dark. With a bit of prodding Wu Hao could work his fingers into the dirt somewhat, feel it slip between his fingers, and just a little below that there was what he imagined was an endless amount of rock. Below that... well, he had no idea. More rock, presumably. Or mud.

Master Shu must have flicked his fingers again. Ink flashed over Wu Hao's head where he sat in the hole and flickered, once, twice, before it filled in all of a sudden with some sort of thick substance that let not a single pinprick of light in. There was no more sound from above, either. The faint breathing of the horses in the cold, the footfalls of the coachman as he returned to his carriage - Wu Hao heard none of that.

Something settled onto the thick plate of darkness. Ink bled through the sides, forming into arrays that cut into the ground before shaping themselves into something that felt vaguely metallic beneath his fingertips, though it wasn't actual metal. All of them came down at once and shimmered, rapidly expanding into more of that metallic feeling until there didn't seem to be a single gap in the complete coverage.

When it finished, even his faint sense of qi was taken away.

He could sense nothing. He couldn't see anything - in this complete darkness without any light, not even his second-grade senses could pick out anything in particular, even if there had been anything to see. All he felt was earth around him, even the bone-deep cold being gone now that he was completely surrounded.

The thought struck him that if Master Shu wanted, he could pull this entire coffin shut around Wu Hao and leave him there forever. He would die here.

Strangely enough, the thought that Master Shu might do something like that struck Wu Hao as somehow more off-putting than anything else.

"So," Master Shu said. Wu Hao nearly jumped out of his skin at the sound of his voice and managed to bang his head against what felt like a steel plate. It didn't even shift. "You're now in a situation tailor-made to force you to experience a connection to something greater than you. Now that I finally have your undivided attention, let's talk about what that means."

Wu Hao shifted in the hole, testing to see if there was anything he could feel. Not really.

Honestly, this wasn't so different from what he'd experienced as a deathsworn. Except now he was being talked to, instead of being left on his own constantly and feeling a constant grim specter of death hanging over his head.

This was... oddly relaxing, even.

"A Heaven-grade technique is unlike a Sky-grade technique, which we've discussed before. Learning a Heaven-grade technique is the process of learning to explain an answer that you've known all along."

"What question?" Wu Hao asked.

"I'll get to that," Master Shu said calmly. "Patience, boy.

"Now, I've systematically sealed each of your senses. You cannot currently experience sight, smell, hot or cold, or touch. Your sense of equilibrium, which means balance, is also gone by being underground. It's something of a rushed thing, these sets of arrays, but they're functioning well enough. You have only two senses now. One of them is sound, because I am talking to you. Should I decide to stop, then that will be taken away, too."

He cleared his throat.

"I am, however, listening," he said. "Do not do something unsightly as trying to yell, because I will hear it and will decide exactly how long you'll need to spend inside the hole. Is that clear?"

"What if I want to leave?" Wu Hao said, his voice muffled and warped in the narrow confines.

"Then you just have to wait," Master Shu stated. Wu Hao could imagine the smug smirk on his face. "I'll probably let you out in an hour or so. If we were to take this seriously then I might have had to leave you in for a day or so, or until you'd escaped. That was how I was trained."

An entire day? Wu Hao frowned in the darkness. For once he was glad that they were on this world tour.

"Don't go claiming you're afraid of tight spaces either, boy, because you didn't even hesitate all that much getting in."

"Mostly just want to stop being talked to," Wu Hao said.

Master Shu said nothing but Wu Hao thought he knew the old man well enough to know he'd just snorted.

"What's the second sense that I still have?" Wu Hao asked, after a short silence.

"In a moment," Master Shu said, his voice ringing out in Wu Hao's ears. "First, you must understand the history of the Mountain-Shaking Staff Art. It was created by a nameless martial artist, in the second-grade, much as you currently are. Having sought a reclusive life in a cave to meditate and reach the first-grade, he instead woke one day to find that the cave mouth had collapsed. There was no way for him to get out. Without any food or drink, he was trapped entirely."

"That's what this is meant to be?" Wu Hao asked.

"Yes. Exactly. The art he created, after everything else was exhausted - after he had run out of food to eat, water to drink, tools with which to claw his way out, and even air to breathe - was an art he created specifically, for one thing and one thing only. To crush the mountain before it crushed him."

To anyone else that might not have made that much sense, but Wu Hao understood the mindset. There was something about spite that could motivate him like nothing else. To spit in Father's eye, to defeat anyone who had ever defeated him or caused him a loss of some kind - that was a mindset he understood.

"From there he polished it until it became something more complete," Master Shu said. "The Mountain-Shaking Staff Art is a martial art that uses, above everything else, weight as its core. So far you have been using qi and arrays to make your staff or yourself heavier or lighter, to lend yourself extra strength or to shift your movement. That is one kind of weight, yes, but that's not enough. Your understanding of weight is not sufficiently thorough, boy."

Wu Hao blinked.

"Weight is more than merely the physical," Master Shu said. "There are a great deal of types of weight. There is the weight of exhaustion. There is the weight of knowledge. There is the weight of responsibility, weight of duty, weight of grief, weight of pain. Darkness may weigh nothing and yet it has a weight, as does light. Time itself is a heavy millstone that is placed around every man's neck. All these can be heavy enough to break a man. "

Master Shu took a pause, his voice fading away, before it returned.

"That is the only other sense you have left," Master Shu said. "Weight. You possess only the senses of sound and weight. Of yourself. Of the shackles that you bear.

"Focus on weight," Master Shu urged. "Not just the word, but everything you associate with it. Think of how you use weight, of how you do not use weight. Feel yourself going from weightless to weighted and back - then decide what the difference is. Feel weight with your entire skin..."

Weight, Wu Hao thought. He focused on the phrase, trying to find out anything about it that resonated with him. He concentrated on the sound of Master Shu's voice and, when that had faded, he focused on the memory of what the old man had told him.

Weight, he thought. Weight is...

He sank into a sort of trance, repeating Master Shu's speech. There are a great deal of types of weight. The weight of exhaustion, he thought, then the weight of knowledge, then the weight of responsibility and duty and ...

Wu Hao had no clue how long he was down there. He kept repeating the words and they reverberated in his skull as he tried to reach out with senses that weren't really physical, seeking a connection that wasn't quite there. Underneath the earth there was no storm - he couldn't even feel the hint of a connection. There was no wind, nothing pulling and nothing pushing. It was quiet and it was still as a grave.

He felt the weight around his arms of the iron shackle, lifting it slightly then letting it sag again, hoping that perhaps the shifting weight might trigger something that he didn't understand with his mind but knew with his heart instead. Repeating that, his muscles straining slightly, felt oddly relaxing - he could shift just enough that he felt his muscles bunch every time he tried to lift it. Little by little he got higher until -

Until the ink started bleeding away. The plate above his head melted away like snow before the sun - which was appropriate, because a thin shoveling of snow came drifting through the air, down on Wu Hao's head. He stared up at the empty winter sky and winced at how bright it was. Had it been that blue before he'd gone under, though? He recalled it had looked... more drab, in a way.

As he looked around, he inhaled deeply, taking as deep a breath as he could. Every single one of his senses was coming alive again, more powerfully than before, and he was realizing for the first time how weird it had been not to smell anything. He smelled the faint scents of nature, the sweat of the horses.

Wu Hao could smell the aroma of food, too. Master Shu had been having lunch.

"Here," the old man said. "Your share."

With the flick of a finger, a plate of manifested qi as white as porcelain twisted into being out of the air, onto which Master Shu tapped his fingers twice and then placed a plate of noodles, freshly cooked. A small push of his hand sent it moving through the air, floating as if someone was holding it up.

The noodles were pretty good, but Wu Hao attacked them almost ravenously. His sense of taste had also intensified, as if he'd just starved himself for days.

Wiping his mouth, he stuffed the plates into his own storage space. He'd hand them off to be washed at the Diancang Sect later, after which they'd be returned to Master Shu.

"Come on, boy," Master Shu said, stepping back up to the carriage. "We don't have all day. Training's over. Get in."

Wu Hao scrambled to his feet. He wondered how long this bizarre sense of calm was going to last, and wondered if maybe he needed to ask Master Shu to put him in that kind of grave more often. It had felt pretty good, actually.

The carriage jerked slightly as they set into motion again, and Master Shu busied himself with reading a book, but occasionally he glanced up at Wu Hao.

For his part, Wu Hao was trying to get the last scraps of his plan together. He had figured out what he'd do this time around, anyway, and he'd have to see how that evolved after dying a few times.

Because if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that he wasn't going to get out of this situation without at least a couple more deaths.

Before he'd really managed to work something specific out, though, the Cang Mountains came into closer view, and with them the Diancang Sect. Looking at it from this distance, Wu Hao was struck by the neat geometry of the place. The lanes between the various arenas and plazas were all straight and orderly, deviating not at all, and it felt almost like he was seeing something that he wasn't quite sure of...

"Old man," Wu Hao said. Master Shu had put his book down and was looking into the distance, through the walls of the carriage, but at the sound of Wu Hao's voice he looked over.

"What is it, brat?"

"Is the sect arranged that way on purpose?"

Master Shu looked over.

"Yes," he said slowly. "Of course it is, boy."

"What does it mean?"

"Why should I tell you?" Master Shu said. "Look through the books I've given you, if you're interested in knowing the answer."

Wu Hao made a face. No thanks, he thought, but before actually saying as much, Master Shu rose to his feet.

"They're here," he said. Pushing open the carriage doors and walking out with steadily, Wu Hao did nonetheless notice an alertness to Master Shu's gait. Had that not been there last time or had he simply not seen it?

"Good afternoon," Master Shu said. He didn't bow. "I am the Absent Sovereign, Shu Renqing."

"Good afternoon," Ke Shuang said perfunctorily. His qi was bright, prickling with heat. Wu Hao wondered why it was Ke Shuang that was greeting them, of all people. Surely it had to be known that with his personality, he would wind up offending Master Shu or Wu Hao?

Then again, maybe that was intentional? Wu Hao couldn't really guess why, but he couldn't underestimate Ke Jiaming anymore. Ke Shuang might have been little more than a brute, but Ke Jiaming wasn't just as stupidly strong as any Sovereign, he also plotted ahead.

"You are somewhat later than your message said you would be," Ke Shuang said. So that was where he'd begin acting snippy this time. "I've been waiting for a bit here."

"My disciple requested instruction," Master Shu said. "As a teacher, how could I refuse? I judged that one hour more or less would make no difference."

Ke Shuang narrowed his eyes. Clearly he thought that Wu Hao didn't quite merit enough importance to make him wait. "I understand. However, more warning would have been nice. We have disrupted our training to be the ones here to receive the Sovereign, after all."

"I see," Master Shu said. He very clearly didn't intend to apologize.

Ke Shuang gave Wu Hao a look, though. Clearly he was blaming Wu Hao for the delay.

"Your apprentice is looking rather disheveled," he noted.

Wu Hao shrugged and said nothing. Ke Shuang's already-strained politeness took another hit.

"You don't even intend to speak to me?" Ke Shuang snapped. "You are unfathomably rude to your betters, boy."

"You are not my better," Wu Hao responded. "You're a stepping stone, Ke Shuang. A pebble in my shoe."

Maybe that was too obvious, he thought. The first part of his plan was to try and get another duel to happen, but he would need it to happen on his own terms. Not Ke Shuang's, and definitely not Ke Jiaming's.

Master Shu gave him a calculating look, but the faces of the men around Ke Shuang went various fascinating shades. Some went pale, others went red, and a few went blank.

"Are you mad?" Ke Shuang hissed. His skin prickled with intense flames. "I am a second-grade martial artist, young friend Wu. By every metric you, as a third-grade martial artist -"

"I've reached the second grade," Wu Hao said, blatantly interrupting Ke Shuang without even the slightest pretense of politeness. "For a few weeks now. I want to gauge how far I still need to go."

Then, giving his smuggest possible smile, he added: "Someone with middling results in the tournament should suffice as a test, I think."

Ke Shuang nearly erupted then and there. Veins bulged on his forehead and he was whiteknuckling his spear so hard that any lesser iron might have started creaking or deforming under his heated grip. Sizzling erupted from the surroundings. Heat leaked from his skin and the snow around him vanished so quickly that its melting was visible with the naked eye.

"You dare?" he breathed.

"Yes," Wu Hao said, rolling his eyes for effect. "I dare."

"I accept," Ke Shuang said. "If you need a reminder of how high the heavens are, perhaps it is for the best I give it to you."

There, Wu Hao thought. The easy part of his plan was over. Now came the harder part.