Wu Hao returned to the Crane's Nest, stumbling along the streets of Chongqing. He nearly tripped and fell - the little qi he had sustained him, but not much more than that.
He felt awful. The qi that Wuling had given him was a temporary asure - just by the nature of being soone else's qi, it didn't belong in his system. It nestled uneasily in his core for now, but it was ready to be driven out. It leaked from his pores as he walked, steadily draining away and filling the air with a floral scent.
For him, at least. Others that he passed gave him bizarre looks and he was sure that the sll of flowers wasn't one that was shared with everyone else.
He had to muscle his way through the crowds, because the way he was now, he figured that any attempt to scale the roofs would see him falling to the stupidest death he'd had yet. Worse, maybe, would be to fall and break sothing and not die.
Fortunately, the inn was still open. It felt like a week since he'd been here, though, and Fu Wang's eyes widened when he saw Wu Hao shamble into the inn.
In the glassware cabinet Wu Hao could see his own reflection for the first ti in a long while. His face was gaunt, his hair was longer than he rembered it ever having been, and his clothes probably needed a good wash.
He slled of sweat. Despite having a generally darker complexion after his weeks on the run, he still looked paler sohow. Overdrawn might be the word, he supposed. Wu Hao had to touch his own cheek just to make sure that he was seeing himself and not so ghost dredged up from a nearby well.
"The hell happened to you?" Fu Wang asked. "Thought you were going out to explore the town or sothing."
"Killed a bunch of things," Wu Hao mumbled. Exhaustion drove thoughts of secrecy from his mind, but then again Sister Wuling hadn't stated that he should keep quiet or anything.
Exhaustion also drove the ability to speak out of his mind, apparently. He had intended to speak clearly, but what ca out was a jumbled ss.
"What?" Fu Wang asked, his voice incredulous and loud. Several of the other patrons of the Crane's Nest turned their heads, staring at the scene. "You - what?"
Wu Hao closed his eyes and leaned against a post, taking so strength in its stability.
Fuck, he thought. Money. Of course.
"Ei," Wu Hao whispered. "Ask them money. No, wait - don't."
"Are you drunk?" Fu Wang asked, his voice louder still sohow, as he pulled out a towel and made his way over.
There was a certain glee in his voice, though. Wu Hao felt a certain dread pool in his stomach, especially as the other patrons turned back to their als and had whispered discussions.
"Now listen here," Fu Wang began. "You still haven't paid for your stay here, and if you're gonna beco so sort of teenage wastrel, then -"
"Shut up," Wu Hao mumbled, only half-coherent. "Beggars paid. I'm going bed."
Fu Wang scowled, but whether it was at Wu Hao telling him to shut up or if it was at Wu Hao shutting him down wasn't entirely clear. It didn't matter, either.
One of the patrons snickered a little too loudly after looking at Wu Hao, but he didn't care.
He dodged Fu Wang's grabbing hand - huh, hadn't even realized that the other man had co close enough to grab - and staggered off to the stairs, leaving them all behind.
Resting his head on the door for a mont more, Wu Hao made his way into his room, locked the door, and closed his mind to everything except ditation.
That sa river of qi that he imagined, which ran across the Heaven and Earth Wheel, felt sohow more strained. The wheel creaked as he pushed it along, and then it sputtered and stopped before he'd managed to collect any qi.
He scowled. Alright, then. He pushed harder, focusing as much as he could on the simple motion of rotation first of all, blotting out the rest of the details of the world around him. They faded into nothing but brushstrokes of thought, little suggestions that held no aning beyond there having been sothing at one point.
Wu Hao breathed in and breathed out. He felt the wheel move, finally, and completed a single rotation.
He had to keep pushing, keep cycling, keep forcing it to go. No matter how strained qi was qi and he pulled bits and pieces from the river, dragging it if he had to, and forced that sa qi into his core.
Then, too, there was the problem of venting the qi that had been injected into him. It was a gentle, reassuring qi that spoke of carefree mornings, of the simple joy of a child, of the sense of awe at seeing sothing beautiful and vast and knowing that there would always be beautiful things out there.
These weren't things that Wu Hao had space for right now. It was nice, but it didn't align with him. His qi was a hungry thing. He drove his qi hard through his core, watching the two blend and mingle, but it wasn't so much a contest as it was a child attempting to pull an adult by the hand.
It only succeeded because it let him. There wasn't that much qi - Sister Wuling really had injected just a hair more than he'd need to survive qi deprivation and nothing more.
Wu Hao pushed it out slightly, rebuilding his own reservoir back up with the qi he plucked from the world around him. The qi that he'd rejected was part of that grand river, as well, and he recycled in into sothing specifically his own.
When his reservoir was half full, he took another deep breath, just slightly out of sync with the rest of the ditative breathing's rhythm, and his eyes fluttered open.
He needed a new art. The Heaven and Earth Wheel was slow and careful and those were things he was lacking in, but now that he was in the city he could probably find sothing better. Buy sothing or steal it, study it, get killed to get his money or ti back, and then piece it together over a few lives.
It was evening, now, though it tended towards night. It was difficult to say how late it was given how late night could fall during sumrs, but he heard the general sound of dinner being eaten below.
His stomach growled and Wu Hao grimaced.
The first problem had been solved, he thought. He'd have to see to the rest of his botherso bodily needs now.
Wu Hao walked down the stairs and found the Crane's Nest rowdier than he rembered it having been. Then again, he'd only experienced it a few yesterdays ago when he'd co here for the first ti, during which he was practically sleepwalking, and he'd experienced it at the height of its occupancy only once.
He was lucky again, he supposed, because there were a few tables still open. One had recently been vacated after wine had been spilled over one seat, so he picked another.
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"Waiter," he said, flagging one of them down. "Dinner. Please."
A nod and then a few minutes of idly listening in on the conversations around him. People still wondered about the recent spate of murders, which Wuling had seed convinced had been Mu Jun's fault. It was possible.
He devoured the food like he'd not had anything to eat in days. It all disappeared down his gullet and, since he was still hungry, he ordered seconds. He guzzled an entire jug of water down and still felt thirsty.
Qi deprivation, Wu Hao decided, sucked. He knew that he'd have to do his best to either not get it or not to survive it if he did, because he felt like shit.
Another upside was that the patrons who had sat in the inn all day seed largely to have left for other places while Wu Hao was cultivating. New ones had taken their places - a different crowd, not the various rchants who seed to use the Nest as a temporary stay. In other words, he did get odd glances and vague murmurs at his expense, but he could convince himself it was due to his table manners. Which he didn't have, on account on rarely actually having eaten at a table in the last couple of years.
That wasn't to say that there weren't people looking at him, though. The waiters kept giving him glances and, after a while, one of them walked up to him.
It was the sa one as he'd ordered the wontons from this morning, Wu Hao noted. Maybe he'd been the one assigned to Wu Hao for so reason? It wasn't really worth thinking about.
"Er," he said. "Are you feeling... better, sir? Only you looked rather unwell, earlier today."
"I'm fine," Wu Hao responded. "Could I have another jug of water?"
"Of course, sir," the waiter said and scurried off.
Wu Hao sat there for a while, just digesting everything - the food, the water, the "adventure" - before he went up to his room again, where he decided he'd solved enough of his qi deprivation that he could risk going to bed early.
Just to be on the safe side, he repurposed that sa array that he'd ant to use as a trap a night ago, and rewrote it so that it'd go off with a series of bangs in eight hours. It'd function as an alarm of sorts, and frankly it seed a lot more reliable than asking Fu Wang or his brood to try to wake him up.
With that, he had nothing left to do except to lay on his bed and think about the last couple of days. Sothing still bugged him. He'd been killed by Mu Jun or Mu Jun's Array Dolls, the difference wasn't important, to turn him into an Array Doll like the other corpses.
Or maybe just to silence him. That was possible, too. He hoped that he was strong enough to have been made into an Array Doll, but that was a macabre thought even for him.
But in any case, he'd been killed. They'd shoved those talismans under the door to leak a gas of so kind and then used the shadow techniques for the ones who they thought might have survived the gas.
It was clever, though. Despite being a repeated victim, he felt impressed by the thought that had gone into it. The Array Dolls, too, had functioned on levels that he didn't understand. There were principles of arrays worked into the fundants of how they were created that seed entirely separate from what Wu Hao had gotten shoved into his head, and there were things on the Array Dolls that seed to drastically contradict the principles he did know.
If soone had told him that the Array Dolls were works made by so array master, like one of the elders of the Zhuge, then he wouldn't have been surprised that they'd had the skill. That they'd bother making them, that would have surprised him. It was as clear of a demonic technique as he'd ever thought about, though he didn't have any idea of what the sacrifice might have entailed.
Although maybe it had been Mu Jun's sanity. He certainly hadn't seed lucid. That raised another question, though, and that was another thing he'd been thinking about. He wondered if the Array Dolls had been Mu Jun's at all. Maybe - but then again, maybe not.
That crown had seed very much bizarre to his senses. It was like it'd generated a qi of its own, but that should be impossible. It was an inanimate object.
The Array Dolls were also inanimate objects, though. And the way that crown had reacted, with visible emotion to his senses... There was just sothing that gave him a bad feeling about the whole thing. Not catastrophically bad, perhaps, but bad all the sa. There was an itch between his shoulderblades, like he was missing the final piece of a puzzle, a hint in a riddle that he didn't quite know what to make of.
He'd ntion it when he went in for his reward, he decided, and he'd do that as soon as he figured out what that reward might be.
Idle fantasizing left him sitting there until other guests pulled chairs away from his table, leaving him sitting there markedly alone. He jerked from his thoughts, looked around, and went back up the stairs to his room.
Dreams were best left for sleeping, and that was what he'd do. He looked forward to seeing tomorrow, for once.
He slept well enough, as exhaustion tended to do to him, and when he awoke there was a distant suggestion of rain on the dawning horizon.
Best of all, there were no blue boxes hovering nearby.
His head hurt, though, and he wondered if that pounding was part of it before realizing that it wasn't. Soone was at his door.
Wu Hao stumbled towards the door, feeling his head ache, and pulled the key from underneath the mat. He pushed it into the keyhole with only two attempts, then unlocked it with a twist of his wrist.
He still felt awful, and seeing Fu Wang's grimacing face staring back at him didn't help improve his morning.
"The Beggar's Court has summoned you," Fu Wang spoke.
Wu Hao regarded him blearily.
"What?"
"The Beggar's Court," Fu Wang repeated at a slower pace, "has summoned you. They've passed along a ssage for you to present yourself before the elders today."
Fu Wang stood as if to turn away but then thought better of it and turned back to Wu Hao.
"And tell them to pay while you're at it!"
He stomped back down the stairs. At least he hadn't seen the remnants of the Array Doll drawings that Wu Hao had left all across the floor.
Wu Hao stared after him, then squared his shoulders.
His qi reserves were half full, if that. He had only a single knife on him. He still probably stank of yesterday's sweat and the brackish blood that he'd spilled.
Ti to et the elders again, then.
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