Chương 74: Death on the Sidelines, II

"So how was the duel?" Old Qin asked, his eyes on the heavy load that he was carrying to somewhere. Wu Hao'd found him in the middle of being sent somewhere to fetch something while Wu Hao had just been wandering, unable to really sit still or to cultivate, and he'd decided to just walk and talk with the old man. The realization that he really had no one else to talk to except Jin Qilong was swiftly shoved into the back of his mind, with the rest of his emotions.

"It was over quickly, I guess," Wu Hao said. Old Qin paused, watching Wu Hao from the corner of his eye. He wore a servant's robes, which weren't as fine as Wu Hao's had been. Wu Hao didn't have much an eye for fashion, but even he could tell that his robes had been made to fit someone of his vague shape comfortably, but Old Qin's robes were made so that he wouldn't stand out at all. It wasn't quite working.

Compared to the other servants, Old Qin still had an air of not fitting in to him, like a cat that consented to sleep in the house and would eat the food it was offered but didn't really care for its supposed owners beyond that. He had his sleeves rolled up and his collar as open as it would go, exposing muscular forearms and hints of hair on his chest.

Another example of not quite fitting in: regardless of the weather, the other men and especially the women tended to be a lot more hidden in their clothes, a servility in their bearing that Old Qin aped but didn't really let sink deeply.

"What was it like?" Old Qin asked.

"I just said," Wu Hao protested.

"It was over in a single strike. With one swipe of her fan, his head went flying." Old Qin stepped carefully over a upwards step at the edge of a hallway, then grunted as the basket shook in his arms. His hands dipped slightly as he shifted his grip.

"Lady Jin," he said.

"She's something, eh? Didn't I tell you?"

"You did," Wu Hao said, and eyeballed Old Qin.

"You were talking about her martial arts, then? Because I thought that you were talking about her -" Old Qin's smile vanished and he sent Wu Hao a pleading look. The box shook in his hands, with the clanging sound of metal things butting against each other. He looked around, clearly trying to see if anyone'd overheard.

"Shut up," he hissed.

"Kid, for Heaven's sake. Don't even joke about that."

"You said it, not me."

"In private," Old Qin responded.

"Do you want to see me killed?" Wu Hao didn't, not really. Old Qin was the only link he still had to his old life. He'd only really had that old life for two days, but even now in quiet moments when he couldn't sleep he found himself glancing over the walls of the compound and feeling a need to just make it for a run. He could make it now. He had his qi back and better than ever, he really should give it a try.

Maybe see if he could evade the guards now, before Shan Kong returned from his healing to try Wu Hao's patience yet again, before Yi Wei did whatever she was planning on doing... And yet something kept him here, like he was tethered, the same way that he'd felt tethered to the Golden Lotus Company. The feeling was annoying and thinking about it felt like he was itching in his soul, so Wu Hao repressed it and changed the topic.

"What are you carrying, anyway?"

"No clue," Old Qin said.

"But the blacksmiths need a lot of it, whatever it is, so I'm breaking my back ferrying these crates back and forth. This'll be the last one for today, though." Wu Hao watched as Old Qin pushed the crate against one of the walls, leaning it up slightly so it was held there by one arm and his belly, and then scratched at his left arm. He sighed in relief.

"Goddamned itch," he muttered.

"That's been driving me mad the entire way." Old Qin took a few more breaths, scraping idly with his fingers down his arm, and then sighed.

"Right," he said.

"Let's get going again before we miss dinner. Not that you seem to eat any, do you, kid?" Wu Hao winced, but Old Qin appeared not to notice. Instead, he pushed his arm back under the box and heaved, but the box moved out from his arms as several items in it moved, and the entire thing capsized. Old Qin's grasping hands went wild, the box shifted further, and the entire thing nearly smashed into the floor.

On instinct, Wu Hao rushed forward, pushing qi through his feet in a small explosion that hurtled him to a stop just in front of the crate, and then pushed his arms against it, stopping its fall.

"Got it," he said, teeth gritted. It was a lot heavier than it looked, and qi-enhanced muscle only counted for so much. He could wield a saber and jump distances as long as adult men were tall, but those were bursts of power, not sustained pushing.

"Shit," Old Qin cursed, and Wu Hao felt the old man's hands run over the bottom of the crate before the weight on Wu Hao's arms was abruptly lifted.

"I got it, kid. Let go." Wu Hao let his arms fall to the side, rubbing his wrist slightly.

"You alright?" Old Qin said, studying him.

"Yeah," Wu Hao said.

"Why?"

"A lot to lift," Old Qin said.

"For a scrawny little snot like you all the more so."

"It's fine," Wu Hao said. Old Qin's eyes narrowed before he came to a realization.

"You having some success with the Heaven and Earth Wheel Art, then?" His voice was casual, but there was an edge of eager curiosity tinged with dread there that Wu Hao decided to just ignore.

"Yeah." Old Qin whistled, the sound cutting off when the box shifted again and he had to grunt as he shoved it higher in his arms.

"How many days will it take you to form a core, then?" Wu Hao stuck up three fingers. It wasn't technically a lie, either.

"Three more days?" Old Qin said, shifting the box around in his arms. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

"No," Wu Hao corrected.

"I did it in three days."

"Three days?"

"Three days," Wu Hao confirmed. Old Qin said nothing, a variety of expressions flickering across his face, before finally shaking his head.

"Fuck off," he grumbled, and marched away. Before he disappeared around a corner, Wu Hao could hear his final words, quiet enough that he needed his qi to hear: "My own stupid fault for asking. Brat." Grinning, Wu Hao watched him go. He could've caught up, but the mention of dinner earlier reminded him that he hadn't eaten yet. Hunger was one of those sensations that qi muted, but it wasn't like he had a reason to go hungry, at the moment. He'd always been scrawny as a deathsworn, as they'd all been.

This time he'd try to actually put some muscle on. He'd need it, if he was to become a martial artist. And everyone knew that you needed to eat a lot, if you were big and strong. Taking that logic the other way around, if you wanted to become muscular, you'd need to eat a lot. That made sense to Wu Hao. The kitchens were easy to find by now, and as he usually did Wu Hao grabbed a few buns that were ready to go out, as well as a bowl of rice and some meat.

The vegetables he left behind - not to his taste, though also harder to steal. If anyone noticed they didn't really care to mention it, and qi made stealing a lot easier anyway, in a dozen little ways. Especially when you weren't really expected to have any qi yet. He really could've just eaten his dinner with the other servants in the room, but that just didn't feel right. He didn't know any of them except Old Qin, and while he'd occasionally chanced a peek into the louder dinner room he'd never bothered to enter.

Eating, Wu Hao had been taught, was something you did by yourself, and in quiet, so that it was over more quickly and that you could get on to more useful things. The rest of the evening he spent wandering around, watching the occasional guard patrol go by. He'd found several spots around the compound that seemed vaguely interesting: a garden that had fallen into disuse, the guards' barracks, and something that he was pretty sure was a cemetery on the compound grounds. For Jin Clan members, he supposed.

Librarian Zhu probably wouldn't be buried there, he thought wryly. In any case, though, his musings were interrupted by the appearance of Jin Qilong, who appeared out of a building nearby. Not the servants' quarters, but an adjacent building. Someone had stuffed a bun in his hand, it seemed, and he was munching it in thought as he went. Jin Qilong was looking around, casting his eyes everywhere, until he caught sight of Wu Hao. He hurried forward, munching on his stuffed bun.

His emotions, as usual, were tangled like no one else Wu Hao had seen before, but he detected notes of excitement, dread, and for once a certain firmness of mind.

"There you are," he said.

"Listen, I think I might have it."

"It?"

"I think I've got an idea," Jin Qilong said. Wu Hao nodded.

"I'm listening, young master."

"Don't call me that," Jin Qilong said, but he and Wu Hao both knew that he wouldn't.

"Anyway... I've got a question for you."

"About time," Wu Hao muttered.

"When do I duel her?"

"What?" Jin Qilong said, then groaned.

"No duels. That's not even the question." Damnit. Wu Hao would be lying if he said that he wasn't curious about what Yi Wei could do.

"It's..." Jin Qilong said, and trailed off. He stared out at the grass, which was slowly bleeding into orange.

"I just..." Wu Hao said nothing, until finally Jin Qilong appeared to find the words.

"It has to be me," Jin Qilong said. More to himself than to Wu Hao, he continued: "It's got to be me. For my mother, for my father, it's always had to be me. That's what Mother tried to teach me earlier. It wasn't to have it be over quickly, that's just something I made up when I didn't know what else to say..." Jin Qilong sighed.

"The true lesson that she wanted me to learn was that it had to be me," Jin Qilong repeated.

"I have to figure out what to do. I have to be the one who acts, and I have to be the one that wields the saber. There has to be a hand at its hilt and that has to be mine." Wu Hao tilted his head. He didn't quite understand, frankly, but Jin Qilong didn't seem inclined to explain it, for once.

"The saber cuts through all untruth," Jin Qilong muttered. He drew his own, a saber that held a beautifully decorated hilt but only the most stripped-down possible blade, and held it up to the faint light of the lanterns. It sparked slightly, the reflection on its mirror-polished surface cutting a swath of light through the garden they were sitting at the edges of. Compared to Wu Hao's own it might as well have been made out of solid diamond.

"It cuts through the Dao and in so doing finds its way. I get that, but..." Jin Qilong sighed.

"What's the question?" Wu Hao asked, before the other boy could drown in poetry again. Wu Hao preferred the material, the immediate, because he'd found it hard to keep hold of anything else.

"Right," Jin Qilong said, struck out of his odd trance.

"Sorry. This whole thing with Yi Wei... It's got me thinking, and once I started thinking I found it hard to stop. Which isn't really unusual for me, I guess, but with you being an example of what I could be, well. I decided something." Wu Hao gave him a blank stare.

"Young master?" he said, verbally prodding.

"I need to be strong," Jin Qilong pled. The words seemed to have come from somewhere deep.

"I need to be brave, I need to be resolute, I need to not waver." Jin Qilong's fists clenched at his sides. He wasn't quite choked with emotion, but nonetheless Wu Hao didn't need to be a sensor to tell that this didn't seem to be an easy thing to ask.

"Teach me how to be strong like you are."