191. Death Hunts the Moonlight, IV (Patreon)

Wu Hao snapped awake, but what he saw wasn't the sight of the road and Master Shu's broad back sitting by the fire. There was no snow nearby, not the harsh dirt underneath his back and the occasional stone stuck to his skin where he'd lain on the ground.

Instead he floated in a vast space, so enormous that it took him a moment to realize that it wasn't just huge but limitless. There was no color except white, in which he was currently bobbing up and down slightly with each movement he made, and he was the only thing which existed. Which could exist. Even he himself, though, didn't feel physically present.

He must have looked like a dot of ink on pristine paper, but those weren't the right words at all.

Wu Hao tried to move but something bound his arms tightly, crushing him with its relentless embrace. He knew the feeling and, odd as it made him feel, it was also slightly comforting, in its own way. At least he had limbs to move.

Struggling for to get a grip on himself and try to start moving, his feet moved without touching anything except more empty air. Nothing there to push himself off from, nothing to hang on to.

There was only a deep nothingness. As soon as he realized that there truly was nothing, a concentrated blast of nothing lanced through him.

Trying to breathe out a grunt of pain, he discovered that his lips, too, were completely sealed. He couldn't scream, couldn't make a sound. He was completely locked.

What the hell was happening? Hadn't he died?

That same thread of nothingness that had driven itself into him, his only means of contact with any world whatsoever, began to softly but insistently pull. Just on general principle he tried to resist, but it was deep inside his core where his heart lay, and even though he didn't feel any pain he could feel an absence there.

Little by little, it began to turn Wu Hao around. How that worked he didn't know - it wasn't a physical thing, happening to him here - but finally something clicked in his mind.

He had seen something like this before. When he'd seen a world divided into two parts, black and white, and a man sitting eternally in the middle of where the two met. Where white flowed into black and black flowed into white, mixing but separated.

This was similar to the vision he'd experienced when Master Shu had become a Sovereign. It had to be.

Which meant... what, exactly? Last time, Master Shu had sent him out. Whose vision was this? His own? The thought seemed laughable. Weren't Sovereigns meant to be wise and old? He was neither.

The thread yanked a little harder, and Wu Hao completed a half-rotation. His eyes flicked to the side, trying to see what or who was pulling him, but it was just beyond sight, until finally -

If he had had breath, it would have been taken away.

It was as if he was looking at something like a sun, floating without noise or movement in the giant void. It hung there, suspended, making not a single movement. There were no beams of sunlight sent out, no blinding light to burn his eyes, and no warmth. It was an enormous ball of simple, writhing, hateful black, deep like no black had ever been. Even Master Shu's black was as black as it was due to the presence of white nearby - his vision had been about contrast, more than anything.

In some sense, Wu Hao felt that it might have been something like qi, but in other aspects it was nothing like that. Studies had taught him that one facet of qi was an energy that carried life and emotions. There were bizarre reflections of emotions here, a bare fascimile of life, but it was thrumming with power in his qi sense nonetheless.

But - no. The idea of a sun had made another idea clear. Now that he looked carefully, it was almost like he was staring at the exact opposite of a sun.

It seemed almost to suck in light, devouring it whole for no seeming purpose other than because it could. It robbed the world of the heat around it and left only a screaming, crackling cold for everything else. Wu Hao had attracted its attention not because of something he had done but simply because he was something, and that was something the sun could not abide. One of the few thoughts he could make out in the dark sun was a bone-deep ambition, in the most negative sense: a desire to tear down everything that wasn't his own.

Wu Hao might have screamed. The sun filled the entirety of his vision as he slowly was drawn closer, and he realized that what he had thought was pure nothingness pulling him in was actually a sunbeam that was being sucked into the gaping void that was the sun.

He thought back to Ke Jiaming's declaration. "Cold is the absence of heat."

Fuck, he thought.

Was this what the man had seen when becoming a Sovereign?

Then - then even his title of Moonlight Sovereign had been completely faked. The explanation that he'd received had been something about being a second sun, lighting up the night when his brother had lit up the day. All of that had been complete, utter bullshit, and he had lived his life in his brother's shadow only to better be able to destroy him.

The idea had never been to support anyone, never to be content with second place. This sun, this vision - it had been made with the express purpose of denying all that a regular sun might be. All that the Diancang Sect and its Patriarch, Ke Taiqi the Glorious Sun Sovereign, might be.

The closer he got, the more that the sun took up the entirety of his vision. He felt himself being ripped to shreds even as he struggled to move, bits and pieces of his body cracking away, falling into the sun as he watched them disappear -

Two hands shook him by the collar and he blinked. When his eyes opened, his vision was blurry until the cold winter morning that he'd been expecting coalesced, and then his head flopped back.

"Boy," Master Shu's voice came. He was standing over Wu Hao, holding him with both hands, thousands of threads of qi hovering over Wu Hao's body, some sticking into his flesh bloodlessly.

Wu Hao craned his neck to try and look beyond Master Shu. Finally he saw the campground that they'd spent the campground they'd spent the night at, not so far from the Diancang Sect's main branch. He couldn't recall anything else right away, but he saw the remnants of the fire and the carriage and the coachman who never said a word to him and the hollowness that he'd felt in his bones started to seep away.

Master Shu sighed in relief. He set Wu Hao down gently on the ground, then took a step back and coughed. "You're finally awake."

"Whuh," Wu Hao managed. "Wbhah."

He extended a hand, rooting around in the cold, and then finally stuck his hand in his storage space while Master Shu still looked puzzled, then pulled out a jug of cold water. In his attempt to drink it, half of it must have drizzled over his neck and chest, and the rest seemed only fit to make him cough, but it got him to become fully awake, at last.

"What happened?" he croaked, wiping his lips and face.

"I don't know," Master Shu said. He was studying Wu Hao intently. "You were sleeping, and I was keeping guard, thinking about tomorrow - and then, all of a sudden, you start to spasm and shake. Your eyes were open but you weren't awake. Your body temperature was below freezing."

"How long ago did it start?" Wu Hao asked.

"Minutes," Master Shu said. "I almost -"

Almost what? But it was a question that'd have to wait. He hadn't ever had that happen. Thousands of deaths, and every time it was as if the future had never happened. He had died and been sent back to sleep, and then he had awoken when he would've woken up otherwise, but that was all.

There hadn't been... dreams. He had never dreamt - he slept, true, but that was all. He closed his eyes and woke up. Between those two points there was nothingness, no matter what he did when awake. He had heard that other people dreamt, but he figured that dreams had been beaten out of him years ago.

And yet, now...

Wu Hao shook his head. The dream - if that was what it was - refused to disappear. The image stayed with him. Maybe it was more accurate to call it a vision, then.

He stared at the blue box that had been begging for his attention as soon as he'd woken up.

You have been killed by a Sovereign Principle for the first time.

Obtained Vision of Sovereignty as a reward.

That confirmed it. Wu Hao had wondered before, what would happen if a Sovereign were to kill him. Would they use Dao-grade techniques, or something even higher ranked than that? Did terms like grades even apply to them? He'd been given books on the nature of qi and he had met plenty of Sovereigns so far. Hell, he was even the disciple of a Sovereign.

But he realized that he knew less than nothing about what they were or how their powers worked. It was clear that they weren't just martial artists who had reached a certain level of strength. There was something more to them, but he had no clue what. He had a vague memory of someone stating that Sovereigns were more than merely the next grade up, but he didn't remember who had said it.

"I don't think there's any point in remaining here," Master Shu said. He looked at the campground. "We should hurry to the Diancang Sect. If nothing else, they'll have a few physicians on staff who can look you over."

"Sure," Wu Hao said. His mind was on other things, though, and he mulled them over as he rose to a sitting position. His muscles hurt slightly, as if he'd sprained them. That was a feeling he hadn't felt ever since becoming a second-grade martial artist. His neck and his hands, most of all. He put his hands together and rubbed them together, hoping to introduce a little warmth into them.

"Can you stand?" Master Shu asked.

"A bit sore," Wu Hao muttered.

Master Shu raised an eyebrow. "Is that all? You're making such a big production out of all this?"

There was maybe a moment there where he seemed almost relieved, but both of them agreed without speaking a word that that wasn't something they were going to discuss.

"Shut up, old man," Wu Hao grumbled. He pushed his hands down and rose more or less smoothly to his feet, testing himself by running through a few quick motions. There was something - a sense lurking just beneath his conscious mind - that he couldn't quite articulate. Not exactly the same thing as when he'd figured out the truth behind the Sky-Severing Saber, but...

"Right," Wu Hao said. "Coming. I feel fine, actually. I -"

He stepped onto a thin covering of ice, a puddle that had frozen over, and stopped. His mind churned as he stared at the paper-thin cracks that had formed onto the ice around his boot.

"What?" Master Shu asked. He turned, staring at Wu Hao.

But Wu Hao was focused entirely on the small puddle. It was such a small thing, really. If he moved his foot just a little bit this way or that he could see the cracks spidering across the ice. Some of the cracks overlapped, some disappeared into the ground past that where there was no ice to crack, others just ended.

With every shift of his position he applied just a little pressure - not intentionally, though. If he moved just so then he could see that one crack widen, turning into something larger. Push harder and he'd break the ice into different fragments.

Lifting his foot Wu Hao pushed himself with a soundless step to the next puddle he found, where what had once been two separate puddles had expanded due to the freezing cold and had formed into two overlapping shapes. He placed his foot onto one and pushed, as lightly as he could, until there was a thin whisper of protest.

Hairline fractures spread throughout both puddles. Not just the one that he'd first pushed down on.

The puddles were connected. Introducing weight to one affected the other, too. In fact, weight didn't just press down. Weight affected everything around him. The weight of the black sun had been so massive that it had pulled everything into itself. It felt so obvious - even childish, maybe, but he'd just never understood it this deeply.

"Shit," he murmured. "Weight. I think I might actually understand now."

Master Shu's gaze had turned not just surprised but now took on another aspect - profound might have been the first word. He looked at Wu Hao as if seeing him for the first time.

"What did you say, boy?"

"Weight," Wu Hao said again. He was still studying the puddles, then put just a little bit more force into his foot. "It's all... weight."

The cracks followed the exact path that he'd predicted it would. Not perfectly, but even its shifts and turns as it ran into uneven patches of ice - those, too, he could suddenly read. A benefit of the vision he'd just seen? It didn't matter.

Everything bore weight. If he wanted to shatter something, then all he'd need to do was to provide sufficient weight.

He looked up at Master Shu.

"Old man," Wu Hao rasped. "Bury me. Hurry up, because I think I've just had some enlightenment."