Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Death At Dawn, III

Finally he was allowed to stumble off to the cooking tents, where he was handed a bowl of something wet and lukewarm that might have had meat in it and several bits of vegetable, as well as a clump of rice. The sour taste that came with the drugs he'd long since learned to ignore. He choked it down with shaking fingers, tasting absolutely nothing of what he ate, and then tilted his head to make sure he'd gotten all of it.

When he was finished, he licked the bowl clean, feeling like a beaten dog who had been handed the table scraps. He felt grateful for receiving even that much, but there was an odd twist to that feeling that curled into Wu Hao's chest.

Miserable, still hungry, and cold, he returned to 726, who was keeping watch over the entire group of boys. They had returned from their tasks, which seemed to have been rather less arduous than Wu Hao's. Where he felt dead on his feet they only looked somewhat tired. Their expressions gave nothing away, but he knew their body language well enough that he read the smug disregard they had for him anyway.

He was pretty sure that it wasn't his imagination, either.

Normally he would have shrunk away and quietly joined in with the rest of the group, but now he simply stood there, hiding his shivers in the evening cold and fighting not to have his eyes slide closed.

"721," Brother 726 said, voice still cold. "You're here."

The "finally" wasn't said out loud, but it came through clearly.

"I am."

"It's practice time," he said. "Fall in."

"Yes."

726 turned and walked away. The others followed behind him, and Wu Hao took a place in the middle of the line. They hadn't ever bothered to try and distinguish an order between themselves; there was Father above all, Uncles below him, and each group had a Brother who kept watch on them all. Beneath the level of Brother, all were equal.

Because all of them were worthless, Brothers made only slightly less so by their relative proximity to Father. It was Father who gave their lives and deaths meaning, whereas before they'd had none.

They arrived at a small meadow, with 726 making his way there on some predetermined route. When they arrived, the previous group was standing up, stretching limbs that had gone numb during the cultivation.

A corpse was lying there, also. It was clear from the expression on his face that he had suffered before he died, and equally clear that he had been one of the deathsworn. He had been about sixteen, maybe, with black hair that had begun to peek out from underneath the head-covering he wore and stubble on his somewhat pudgy cheeks.

His heart had exploded inside of him, the pressure building up until there had been no other way for it to go but outwards. Blood and gore covered a section of the grass, which the Uncle supervising was grimacing at with a faint look of distaste.

"Take that away," he said, pointing to the corpse and then at three members of the previous squad. What their numbers were was impossible to say without a look at their dogtags, and it wasn't like Uncle to care anyway. "You, you, and you."

"Yes, Uncle," they chorused, and began to drag their one-time fellow back with them to bring him to the fires where he would be cremated. No other burial ceremonies were permitted, being signs of emotion and therefore of defectiveness.

The Uncle supervising the cultivation rubbed his beard with one hand, then motioned to Wu Hao's group. It wasn't the same Uncle as the one that had tested him earlier in the day. That Uncle had been short and squat, with a series of spots on his left cheek. This Uncle was tall and reedy, with a full carefully-combed beard and moustache covering his chin and cheeks.

"Sit down," he commanded, making no mention of the corpse. None of them ever would.

It was not the first corpse Wu Hao had seen, and that wasn't counting himself at least twice now. This happened every so often - during cultivation practice, small little errors in cultivation would pile up until they became too much to hold back, and the qi reflux would form a feedback loop that always ended fatally, whether it was immediately or after the defectiveness had been noticed.

Father and the Uncles could prevent the overflow from occurring, but usually they saw no need to bother. It had been the victim's own mistakes that had led them here, after all - what fault or problem of theirs was it? Better to have one sword of high-quality steel than ten that were brittle and would snap at the first sign of stress.

So Father said, and Wu Hao had to believe that.

Wu Hao chose a spot quickly, on the opposite end of where the corpse had been. He wasn't squeamish any longer but neither did he feel a need to get soaked in blood and gore without it being strictly necessary. 726 left, moving to another part of the camp to do his own training.

It was a mark of them only being halfway into the third-grade that they had to sink into meditation like this to summon up their qi at all. Those who took the rank of Brother were fully into the third grade and needed no time at all to summon their qi, and therefore they were taught techniques to actually make use of it.

Folding one of his legs over the other, Wu Hao closed his eyes and waited for the Uncle to begin. The man had been in charge of their cultivation practice for years now, as he was for the other disciples. His script must have been hammered out years ago, and he delivered it by rote each time.

"Breathe in for five beats of your heart; breathe out for three.... Hold that for a moment, then breathe in again..."

Wu Hao followed the orders, breathing easily syncing up with that of the others. He focused on the feeling of breathing above all, which brought him deeper into a trance easily enough.

"Focus on your heart and feel every single one of its pulses. Feel them thrum with power - a power that, if you can use it, far exceeds that of the rest of your muscles..."

Recited by rote or not, Uncle's words were true. Wu Hao's heart continually pulsed with qi. The extreme awareness that this sort of meditation brought him let him literally feel it, every contraction of his heart an audible thump and every relaxation only a momentary pause in the beat. He felt an awareness of his entire body and the qi that radiated through it, drawn in constantly with his every breath into his core and then back into his heart, which then pumped qi through his meridians the same way it pumped blood through his veins.

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The art they cultivated, the Endless Pulse Art, focused on the beat of their hearts. It was said that every pulse of a master could make his heartbeat sound like the beat of a drum, audible from across a field.

Wu Hao wasn't a master, so the best he could do during these meditations was draw in a little qi and then send it into his limbs, trying to match the timing of drawing in qi with the pulses of his heart. He kept from hissing as the successive pulses of delicious heat flashed through his limbs, washing away some of the horrible soreness and exhaustion he felt. Unfortunately he couldn't send it coursing through his head and take away the headache he felt. Trying to do that would be a very easy way to overload the meridians in his brain, with fatal consequences.

Equally unfortunately, the ambient qi up here might have been thick once, but that had been before several groups of deathsworn had cultivated here and taken most of it with them. Now it was thin or, if it was thick, tainted with impurities. Wu Hao used what he could, which wasn't much.

Finally Uncle's voice finished its meandering speech.

"Wake up," he said, and from the rustle of cloth Wu Hao knew that he'd stood up. "I will now inspect each of you personally. Do not move. Do not circulate your qi any further after it reaches the outermost part of your limbs this cycle. You know the penalties for failure."

From the steps of Uncle's boots against the soft grass, he had started at Wu Hao's end first and would then work his way over to the opposite side. Wu Hao would be one of the first to receive the Uncle's guidance.

He breathed in and out, keeping his attention on his qi. Keeping it in position wasn't really all that hard, but it was like trying to keep a muscle engaged for a long period of time. Qi wanted to move, so keeping it still required a firm mental hold. During the first cultivation guidance sessions, several prospective deathsworn hadn't been able to keep their qi at the point Uncle had commanded, and since that had been contravention of an order they had been flogged for their mistakes.

On the other hand, keeping the qi flow out of the limbs or the body meant suffering the full brunt of the cold or their aches, but that was unpleasant at best, compared to the agony of being flogged.

As he sat there, keeping his back straight and his qi flow as minimal as possible, he heard the same pattern repeating again and again. Uncle stopped near someone, judging by the sound of his boots whispering through the grass stopping. Then he delivered his guiding qi swiftly into the core, stood up again, and moved on to the next. The process took maybe a few breaths per deathsworn.

Soon, it was Wu Hao's time. The boots stopped just behind his back, considered him for a moment, and then he felt Uncle's palm lay itself against the upper part of his back, feeling the state of his qi with small pulses of ice-cold qi.

Wu Hao fought not to grimace at the first touch to his back, then braced himself. Uncle's palm withdrew for a short moment, and he felt Uncle gather qi around him. This Uncle didn't have the same oily, filthy qi that the other Uncle had. His was more -

A spike that held no physical weight slammed into his back like a shard of ice driven directly into his spine, then tunneled through his body until it found his heart and the loop of qi that swirled there.

It touched the circle and felt at it for a moment, before he could feel something like approval flitter through it. Although, no - approval wasn't the right word.

It was more an absence of disapproval than anything else.

That Uncle's qi was like ice, and like ice it began to melt before joining the rest of the circle around his heart. The circle surged for a moment and regained the momentum it had lost over the course of the day.

That circle was his filter. It diluted the qi rushing back from his limbs with Uncle's own qi so that he couldn't access the qi stored outside of his core without first having to break down that loop of qi. On the other hand, the core inside of him had been deliberately starved of high-quality qi, meaning that if the qi from outside did leak back in his heart unregulated, his organs would be overwhelmed and transform into a bomb.

It was an art that had been tailor made for giving to deathsworn, it seemed to him.

If the Uncles didn't deliberately give them only enough qi for the filter to last only a full day and a few hours, if the Uncles couldn't deactivate that filter from a distance by simply ripping back their qi, if it didn't require being nearly emotionless to allow the filter to last longer...

Uncle stood up and, without saying a word, left for the next deathsworn. Wu Hao didn't make the mistake of retracting his qi, though. Until the Uncles gave a verbal command that they could relax, doing so would be punished immediately.

It took a bit of time before Uncle had managed to see to all the deathsworn. He was normally faster than this, but it seemed something must have been on his mind.

"Release," he commanded, and if they hadn't been commanded to never react to anything, sighs of relief would have been clearly audible.

Wu Hao, too, let the qi slip from his mental grasp. It coursed through him, warming his sore muscles throughout his body, but when it came back to his heart following his blood stream, it slammed into the filter that Uncle had placed there. Little by little, very small parts of it came dripping back into his core, but not enough to head off the sudden surge of nausea that always accompanied cultivation guidance.

Was it like that for others, too, Wu Hao wondered. Did other arts feel the same way? He didn't know, and would never be allowed to find out. He wondered why he was thinking, all of a sudden.

"Stand up," Uncle ordered. "Sleep."

As the others stood and accepted the cold blasts of air that ran through the bare mountaintops, Wu Hao's mind was elsewhere.

So far - despite having faced the threat of punishment and defectiveness again - nothing much had changed for the group. Which meant that, in all likelihood, Father would give his speech again. Which meant that Wu Hao would face his death tomorrow after another gruelling march, this time to the battlefield.

That couldn't be allowed to happen. He had tasted death twice now. He felt no desire to meet his end for a third time.

This time, he felt, if he approached Father the right way, Father would listen to him.