Chương 102: The Road To Death, I (Start of Book Three)

Sitting in untamed wilderness for the seventh morning in a row, staring at the remains of his qi-fuelled fire, and now warming himself against the morning chill while his stomach pled for something to eat that wasn't just random mushrooms and charred bits of small woodland creatures, Wu Hao reflected that freedom might not have been everything that he'd been hoping for.

After his escape at the mining camp, he'd started hobbling vaguely southwards with eyes that barely saw anything and nothing to go on except a desire to simply be gone from here, and he hadn't bothered much trying to find out where here was or where there would be. He'd crashed through some sort of of underbrush, which had left stinging red marks on his legs that looked to become nasty but had fortunately faded.

He'd stepped through an endless forest, which wound up and down innumerable hills, and when he did peek through the canopies to spot something of the sky it was dark and cloudy even so. His water had run out two days ago, and he'd drank from the brooks that he'd found in the forest and the rain he'd collected in his hands, hoping that what people said was true - that real martial artists could survive of the dew left on the leaves and sunlight, requiring no other food or even air.

If that was true, then he wasn't a real martial artist yet, because he still felt like he was dying and his stomach hurt like hell. It was a small miracle that he hadn't gotten the shits and simply died from that, or from eating the wrong thing. Death from dehydration, he thought grimly. What reward would that give him? On the other hand, the fact that it'd been raining as long as he'd been near the mines was ominous, too. Wu Hao hoped that rain season hadn't arrived yet.

He had no idea of the time, simply trying to keep moving and to find any sign of civilization. At one point he'd had a standoff with a bear. He'd screamed at it and it'd flinched, before he'd jumped up in a tree by launching himself with his qi. It'd sniffed the air a few times, then lumbered away. Honestly, he had nothing else. All but one of his knives were gone, strewn about the battlefield that he'd left several days behind him or exploded into fragments.

The one he had left was chipped and might shatter if he ran qi through it. He hadn't even bothered to take the remains of his saber when he'd gone, and somehow he doubted that the Heavy Fist Art would be able to do anything against a bear. All of his other arts required weapons that he simply didn't have. Last night, though, as dark once again fell across the forests and hills, he'd stumbled across a dilapidated path.

It was overgrown with weeds, and it seemed like no one might have used it for centuries now, but the sheer relief of seeing it had driven Wu Hao to laugh so hard even he wondered if he'd gone mad. Every path led somewhere. That meant that if he followed the path to its end he might find a village, where he could get food, or some idea of where he was, or clean water to drink. He'd slept, just a little.

It was a sleep that left him still feeling exhausted and like a rag that'd been twisted and squeezed dry, but it was sleep. The noise of the storm in the distance rumbling again had shaken him awake and he'd stumbled to his feet, qi-enhanced eyes picking out the pathway that he'd been following even in the pre-dawn gloom. For the moment, the rain seemed to hold off, and that was the best news that Wu Hao had seen ever since he'd escaped.

Checking himself again, Wu Hao staggered onwards, thoughts turning inwards again. Then what? he heard Jin Qilong's voice say. Where are you heading? Wu Hao wished he knew. The path traced the curving slopes of the hills, vaguely downwards. That was an encouraging sign, Wu Hao hoped, and he hoped that it was also an encouraging sign that the trees ahead seemed to be thinning slightly. An hour - maybe two - more of walking.

Dawn began to peek through the trees, orange fingers brushing aside the leaves like a clumsy painter pressing his brush too hard. There was beauty in that but he was cold and couldn't stop to appreciate in it, even if he'd wanted to. Finally, though, he heard something in the distance. Not a bear. Not something else crashing through the trees. Not a babbling brook, though that would've been equally appreciated. Human voices. Wu Hao nearly walked forward out of relief before his better judgement took over.

Just because they were human didn't mean they were kind, or even that they'd react all that well to him randomly appearing out of the forest. What if they thought he was a bandit or something? The last thing he needed was to wind up in a brawl right now, exhausted as he was. But they were simply lumberjacks. They held short axes up over their shoulders and were working on a tree now, one that they'd clearly felled themselves and were sawing it into more manageable chunks.

They were strong men, working in tandem, but sweat beaded down their foreheads. Though he hesitated again, Wu Hao still kept his distance until the men were done and significant chunks of the tree had been handled. They pushed the fruit of their labor into a cart that they'd been filling, had a quiet conversation that Wu Hao didn't catch. Just as he was thinking that maybe he should just talk to them and maybe beg some food, they turned and left. That was good, he supposed.

He followed the lumberjacks at a distance as they ambled down the path at a casual pace, lugging the wood that they'd collected on the cart behind them. It bounced occasionally and the men occasionally switched who was tugging and who was pulling, but either way they weren't all that attentive to the path around them. Thanks to his enhanced hearing, Wu Hao could heard bits and pieces of their conversation, which kept him pointed in the right direction but told him not much of interest.

He couldn't identify their accents, which were pretty heavy. There was idle talk about the cooking of their wives and what they were hoping to eat. Chicken, mainly, which sounded absolutely fantastic to Wu Hao right now. Maybe they'd share with him? Hunger nearly drove him to come forward - but no. He'd wait. The litany against fear that he'd learned ran through his head, though it was less than effective against the hunger he was feeling. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Fortunately they got back to the village fairly quickly after maybe fifteen minutes' walk, though Wu Hao stayed behind in the treeline, hoping not to get spotted. The town was bigger than he'd expected. A river ran at its side, the water streaming through not all that quickly. He imagined that during warm summer afternoons women would do their washing there while kids played in the stream and splashed their friends with water, or whatever kids did.

Wu Hao had only ever watched that from a distance before he'd had to turn back to the work of being a Golden Lotus Company porter. Otherwise there didn't seem too much notable about the town. There was a decent number of buildings, though compared to the Jin clan branch compound it was smaller and much less imposing. Easier to escape from, too, or to get into, which was good. Wu Hao couldn't have guessed how many inhabitants there were, and he didn't really see a need to bother to estimate, either.

It was later in the evening, though, and if there'd been people outside the wooden palisades that served as the city walls, they'd been called inside when he arrived. There seemed to be two main gates, one at the south entrance and the other at the north entrance. These gates were large wooden doors, made from particularly thick trees. Each of the beams of wood had been sharpened at the top to deter people from trying to jump over. People that weren't martial artists, at any rate.

The thought struck him that this town wasn't so different from the one that he'd seen in the distance the moment he'd returned from the future and where his relentless string of suicides had stopped. He'd never wound up entering that town, come to think of it. He wondered how Old Qin and Jin Qilong were doing, but then berated himself for letting his attention fray again. Right, he thought, shaking his head. So: a town. Now what?

He needed food, he needed water, he needed somewhere to sleep, and he needed a knife that wasn't shattered. Considering those goals, he could think of several places that might be of use. An inn, a restaurant, maybe a pharmacy. A butcher shop or a slaughterhouse would be good, too. His stomach growled at the thought of meat, but still he waited, biting his lip. The lumberjacks walked in, nodding at the guards who, straightening from a discussion they were having, pushed open the doors and then glanced around.

The door shuddered closed again after the lumberjacks had passed through. Then they sagged back, talking with each other in low voices and in occasional, short bursts of conversations that Wu Hao didn't bother to listen to. Instead, he circled around, waiting until it was well and truly dark. He'd had a little time to study the Dragon Gate Ascending Art. It was simpler than he'd thought, but it also wasn't as fantastic as Old Qin had made it sound.

He'd managed to add in something of the underlying principles to his own movement technique, making it less painful and more subtle. The point was, he released the qi in his feet into a short loop and then pushed with all his strength on his legs. There was no explosion of power this time but there was more of a sigh of wind as he launched himself upwards, limbs pressed against the side of his body like a salmon swimming upstream.

With a whisper of movement, he angled himself so that his robes weren't caught on the sharpened tips of the wooden palisade and then landed with a quiet thump on the ground nearby. He was quietly pleased with himself for how well that'd gone, and then focused again. Right, Wu Hao thought, studying the landscape, such as it was. It stretched out before him, essentially a long alleyway that had been squeezed out of the space between two buildings.

Wu Hao couldn't tell what the buildings were used for, but next to him there was a stretch of wooden fence that seemed to have been erected around a sort of garden. A very well-stocked garden, at that. The bittersweet scent of medicinal plants hung nearby, so much so that Wu Hao had to second-guess himself to see if maybe he was smelling qi instead, but he wasn't. He figured that this was a pharmacy, or maybe an apothecary, or a physician's office. A store that dealt in medicine, in any case.

The other building might have simply been a house. There wasn't much to note about it, especially not in the gloom. A light was on in one of the windows but the curtains had been drawn and there was no indication of what the insides of the house were like.

"Oi," an unexpectedly alert voice called from next to him, and Wu Hao froze. He turned, slowly, and found a man staring back. His face was no less streaked with dirt than Wu Hao's and his hair was equally matted with filth, but whereas Wu Hao had been living like that for a week, this man seemed to have been roughing it for a longer time still. So much so that the dirt seemed almost to have become part of him, and the stench that came with it a mark of pride rather than something to be ashamed of.

His shirt, ripped at the armpits, bore food stains. He sat on top of a mat that might have been pilfered from a garbage dump, while a small wooden alms bowl seemed to have been used as a pillow of sorts. A bottle - empty but recently made so - lay on its side nearby. This man was a beggar. And he had qi. Not a lot, but enough that a definite core had formed in his gaunt belly, and that definitely wasn't the sort of thing that someone got by sheer accident.

He was a third-grade martial artist, and as Wu Hao's eyes made out some of the shapes in the dark he could make out the shape of a long length of dark, hard wood. A staff.

"Listen, kid," the beggar said, and rose to his feet unexpectedly smoothly. With a move that looked clumsy but wasn't, he stepped on the end of his staff and it flew up into the air, then fell into his hand eagerly. He looked as if he knew how to use it.

"This is my turf. I don't know if you're Union or not, but if you don't scram back up over that fence I'm gonna have teach you a lesson." Wu Hao stared. Ah, fuck, he thought. Just his luck. This man wasn't just a beggar. He was part of the Beggar's Union, the tenth of the Nine Sects, and he was ready for a fight.