You have been killed by a Sky-tier Spear Art for the third ti. Obtained Sky-tier Spear Art fragnt III as a reward.
Wu Hao rolled out of bed, wishing that he had so paper to draw on. Right now, the images that he'd seen still lived vividly in his head, but he knew that that wouldn't last long, and the precision of his mory would fade like a dream after re monts.
Left without any sort of pen or ink or paper, he instead bit his finger until it bled just enough to be able to write with. He drew a quick silhouette of a human person, the lines as thin as he could make them, and then began to try and fill in several of the bits that he'd seen before.
He had to bite again, and again, and again. By the ti that he'd finished he felt his fingers burn with the loss of blood and the pain of scraping open wounds over the wooden floor, but he'd managed to scribble down as much as he rembered of the thin arrays that he'd seen on the n.
Leaning back, wiping the sweat from his forehead before it could turn the lines that he'd drawn into blurs, he studied the drawing that he'd made.
By and large the arrays were concentrated on a few spots. Most of it was concentrated on the core, which actually was more of a grouping of arrays, shoved tightly together in ways that he hadn't been able to reproduce. These replicated the functions of a core - storing qi, allowing it to be drawn on, and converting environntal qi into sothing that could be used instinctually.
It was theoretically possible to use environntal qi without processing it, but that was incredibly difficult and Wu Hao had never even tried. He had no need of it now that he'd beco a third-grade martial artist, anyway.
The point was, the arrays converted general qi into specific qi, that shadowy, sticky thing that he'd been sensing all along.
He wished he also knew how to counter it as a result, but he didn't. Qi, despite sharing so of the properties of the natural things he compared it to, wasn't actually made of those natural things. Just because the qi seed shadow-like, it didn't an that it fled before all light.
As an example, the guards hadn't been afraid of standing out in the sun, and they'd undergone these sa procedures.
The other significant clump of arrays was concentrated in the brain. There were arrays that essentially took in small changes in the surrounding qi and worked them into sothing resembling a signal. That signal, then, was fed to an array that - through ways Wu Hao had no idea of - translated that into movent, seeming thoughts, or speech.
He still didn't have a word for what these things were. They were vile, he knew that much, and they were disgusting things, but there were a lot of disgusting things in the world.
For the mont he'd decided to call them Array Dolls.
And that brought him to his next point.
These weren't natural things. Soone had carved these arrays into n. So, perhaps, had been dead, but others had not been.
It wasn't more than a guess, but he imagined that the second-grade martial artists had been taken while alive and experinted on to produce them. They seed marginally more conscious and they bore traces of actual cores, though ones that in no way seed fit to be able to handle the sort of power they were capable of. The arrays around their cores even bore traces of personalization, changing proportions of things Wu Hao didn't understand in order to produce that shadowy qi.
Perhaps normal people could be made into third-grade Array Dolls, while martial artists could be made into second-grade Array Dolls.
It was brilliant, in a way.
It was also deeply evil. Wu Hao felt imnse disgust at the thought of these things, all the more because of his own past as a deathsworn.
Yes, he'd had no life of his own then. He'd been expected to offer his life for nothing more than Father's whims. He had, in fact, died on Father's command directly, and indirectly even more tis than that.
But at least then his death had been his own. There had been freedom in death, and Wu Hao sotis thought that perhaps part of the reason why the deathsworn were "sworn to death" was because they looked forward to dying.
This was worse, though, because these n didn't even have the privilege of dying. They had been resurrected, in a way, made into puppets of so madman. Wu Hao, for the first ti in a while, felt a familiar anger stirring up within him.
If he hadn't ant to eradicate the Mu Clan before, he was certainly intending to now.
He went through his morning routine for a routine morning - checking his clothing, checking his weapon - and then, after fixing the sight of the array that he'd painted on the floor in his mind, he left.
Not without swaying because of the blood he'd lost, though. He clung to the side of the stairs like a drunken man, receiving a few curious looks before he collapsed into a seat and flagged down one of the waiters.
The sa one as usual, he noted. Funny how that worked. He'd seen others at work, though.
He was on the cusp of ordering more wontons but, looking around, he decided that maybe he wouldn't.
Instead, breakfast was the other thing the nu here offered in the mornings: congee. The rice porridge wasn't bad as such, but the flavor was just a little too thin for his liking and the toppings were just a little too poor for his taste. Maybe with a little more at or so egg...
Finishing the soup and looking at the empty bowl, Wu Hao shrugged and stood up. He dodged past Fu Wang's guard post where he'd try to trick Wu Hao into paying his way for the lodging and the food. It'd never once worked, but Fu Wang didn't know that. After that, Steel Alley, hopping over the rooftops on the way to his destination.
He spent an hour or so, just trying out spears across different stores and wondering what spear would suit him best. His thoughts turned inevitably to the new technique that he'd obtained from dying yet again.
It was called the Rib Cracker. It wasn't dissimilar from the Heart Seeker in theory, except that it possessed an extra movent that would, ideally, allow it to break past a last-ditch defense, which the Heart Seeker wasn't ant to do.
It was also said that it'd hurt a lot more to be killed that way, your ribs caving in to squeeze your organs into paste instead of the relatively simple oblivion of having your heart torn apart. Wu Hao could agree, from experience. He tried not to dwell on that.
Besides, he didn't think that it would work, targetting the ribs instead of the heart. From what he'd seen, the simplest - maybe the only - way to kill one of these things was to destroy either its core or the signal receivers in the brain, and he wasn't sure about the brain thing.
Which ant that the first move was still the best. The Heart Seeker would work reliably, if he managed to hit with it.
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Once more the question was raised of how exactly the techniques were chosen that he was given. Wu Hao ignored that for now and gave his newest attempt a good shake to try and figure out the balance.
Now that he'd gotten three techniques from the One Strike Spear Art, though, he was getting better at judging the quality of spears or how well they'd fit him.
This one - the Crescent Spear, according to its na tag - was balanced more for thrusting than sweeping or smashing. It just barely fit within his budget, too, so he'd just made his mind up to buy it and start grabbing the other materials for another attempt to break into the mansion when he was interrupted.
A face popped up in front of him, though his attention was drawn mostly to her large, murky-cloud eyes. Her qi floated around her comfortably, like a cloud.
It was Hanzi, last na unknown, from the Ei Sect, and she was staring at him.
He tried to push his way past her, but she took a quick step back, avoiding his movents easily. Wu Hao raised an eyebrow.
"What?" he asked.
"Your karma's weird," she told him, studying him carefully. "Why?"
"I don't know," Wu Hao said, and drew away slightly. "Why's your qi so weird?"
She blinked at him.
"You can see that?" she asked, a trace of wonder appearing in her qi. There was a lightness to her qi, like it was floating idly around her without really touching or, for that matter, being touched.
Wu Hao's mouth clicked shut as he hurriedly looked around. Shit. He hadn't ant to reveal that. She had put him off his balance, though, and it'd slipped out before he'd thought about it.
"No," Wu Hao said. "I can't."
"Liar," she told him, a slight frown appearing on her face. It didn't quite seem to fit. "Lying's bad, you know. Senior Sister always says -"
"I'm not lying," Wu Hao said, even though he absolutely was.
"You are," she said. "I can tell. Your karma's all knotted."
"Right," Wu Hao said, turning. He gave up on this conversation entirely.
"You don't want to tell ," Hanzi said.
"Right," Wu Hao said again. "I don't. So -"
"So I'll guess," she said. "Let's see."
Her lips pursed as she stared at a point just slightly above Wu Hao's head, the look in her eyes that of soone trying to figure out a puzzle.
"I think you're in trouble," she said. "Deep trouble. Life-or-death-trouble."
Wu Hao had already started walking away, though, but her voice chased him as he left the shop, followed shortly by the girl herself.
"That's why you're buying a spear. You're going to be heading sowhere and trying to take it on, aren't you?"
He spun around again.
"No."
She smiled at him, mouthing the word "liar" at him. He frowned.
"Are you using a technique?" Wu Hao asked, staring at her carefully. If he could see so sort of qi around her that led him to a technique to compel others to answer his questions, that would be monstrously useful.
"A technique?" she asked. "For what?"
"For having people talk to you," Wu Hao said.
"No," she said, tapping her lip. "I'm pretty sure I'd know if I was using one, and I'm not."
Wu Hao had gotten the ssage, though. The best thing was simply to ignore her, and then he could -
"Does it have to do with the murders?" Hanzi asked, cocking her head.
"What murders?" Wu Hao muttered, before mories made themselves apparent again. He'd heard whispers before of random murders occurring in Chongqing, but he'd never bothered to ask around about that. He might have, at so point, if he needed another diversion from going to the Alliance. "Maybe."
Damnit, he thought. He'd done it again. He peered suspiciously at the girl, but her qi barely stirred at his questioning look. In fact, she seed all the more intrigued by the fact that he'd responded.
"Am I right?" she asked, and gave him a little smile that felt smugger than it was probably intended to be. "I'm right, aren't I?"
"Stop following ," Wu Hao demanded.
"Not unless you tell I'm right," she stated.
"You're right. Scram."
But she didn't. Wu Hao could have simply disappeared onto the rooftops, but she held him in a strange sort of binding, where he didn't quite want to be here but didn't quite feel like leaving, either.
"Great," she said. "We'll join you. I think it'll be very interesting."
"No you won't," Wu Hao said, appalled. It was one thing for him to die, but why did this random girl he'd never t before want to join him, too? If she died because he'd brought her along, he'd feel horribly guilty. "It's going to be horrible."
"Oh, horrible fun, maybe," she said, smiling brightly. "It's going to be an adventure!"
"You shouldn't co along," Wu Hao insisted. "It'll be a bloodbath."
"Most adventures usually are," she pointed out, not put off in the slightest. "One mont, please. Huifei, you agree, right?"
"Yes," the other girl said, stepping out from behind another shelf. Only the vague hints of red on her cheeks spoke to her embarassnt at having been caught listening in, though her qi was a lot more honest than her proud face.
"You don't get it," Wu Hao said, frustrated. "There's sothing deeply evil at work. I'm going to solve it because - well, because I have to."
"It'll be fine," Hanzi said. "We've been on a few cases. It's always gone fine, so -"
"The dead walk," Wu Hao growled, and that at last seed to take the girls back. "There's soone taking bodies and making the dead kill for him."
A silence, shorter than Wu Hao had hoped, hung in the store, before it was broken again. Qi launched out from Huifei's core before Wu Hao even thought to intercept it. An answering pulse ca just monts later.
"Then we have a duty," Huifei said, her tone serious. "I've told Senior Sister about this and she will be right behind us. She approves of us going. I'm not sure that you're telling the truth, but if you are, then this is an evil that has touched the world at the heart of the Martial Arts Alliance."
She brushed a strand of long hair out of her eyes, tucking it neatly behind one ear.
"It would be rather foolish to refuse our assistance," she stated. "You're just one boy. Maybe you're a martial artist - "
"He is," Hanzi chirped. They both ignored her.
"- but that doesn't an you can't use our help. It's part of the Ei Sect's core teachings to help those who need it and you look like you need it."
Huifei nodded.
Wu Hao stared at both of them in turn, but they refused to budge.
"Fine," Wu Hao growled. "On your heads be it."
He stomped away, trying to ignore the girlish giggle that crept up from behind him as Hanzi skipped along in ti to his steps and as Huifei stepped leisurely along with her longer legs.
Great, he thought to himself. Not only was he going to fight soone who puppeted dead n's corpses, now he also had to have two twelve-year olds accompanying him.
How did he get himself in these situations?
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