Ten Thousand Tragedies

Wu Hao stepped out of the carriage and into the rain.

He'd hated the rain at first, hated the wind, hated having to be here to fulfill someone else's desire. If he'd been here out of his own free will the rain wouldn't have been better, but perhaps he might have hated it less.

It didn't matter, though. He walked away from the carriage, trying to find a wide open place where he and his thoughts wouldn't be disturbed.

When he found it - a small open square, at the edge of the camp, not near any tents - he sat down, letting the mud seep into his clothes and letting the rain slather his hair against his face. He was cold and he was wet and by all rights he should be miserable.

He took the saber carefully from its sheathe, and then placed it into the ground, burying the tip so it'd stand up straight.

Wu Hao reached up and tried to feel the storm with his entire senses. There had more to it than just driving rain. Otherwise, how could he have derived meaning from it? Was there qi in the rain, maybe?

But there was nothing that he sensed that had that more-than-normal glow to it. He was reminded of that one Daoist tract he'd tried to read - the Violet Clouds Manual, or whatever it'd been. It'd claimed that there were vast clouds of qi just drifting around, if he remembered it right.

The wind roared, but whatever meaning that Wu Hao had tried to feel from it wasn't there.

The storm, Wu Hao thought, was empty.

Grunting to himself, he stood up. He'd have brushed the mud from his robes but there would've been no point. Instead he rolled his shoulders, aimed himself at the mines, and began to simply walk.

He'd just have to have a realization mid-battle again, then. For anyone else, that thought might've been arrogant, but Wu Hao was ready to sacrifice a few lives, if he had to. He could repeat that conversation with Jin Qilong.

The mines were still there, the same as every time. Wu Hao walked in calmly, and when the guards noticed him he made some sort of noise of acknowledgement.

One of them was about to speak before he caught sight of Wu Hao's dirty robes. It was Ye Er, the redhead.

"You get lost, kid?" he asked. "Because -"

Wu Hao pulled the saber from its sheathe, pushed just a little qi into it, and with one swing he carved a deep line into the side of the cave.

"I'm a martial artist," Wu Hao said. "You. Go get every guard you can. Tell them to stay away from here if they don't want to end up dead."

Ye Er hesitated, but then Wu Hao janked his saber out of the wall again and whirled it around until it came to a sudden stop on his shoulder.

"Go," Wu Hao commanded, and the guard went. Wu Hao looked over to the other guard. "You. Go find my boss."

"Who are you?" the other guard asked. "You can't just barge in like this, no matter who you are!"

"I can. There's a martial artist down below. Go to the main building now, or stay and die."

An unwilling, even sullen gaze, and then the man left as well. Wu Hao exhaled, waited until he could feel Wang Hangsheng activate a movement technique, and began to push pulses of his qi into the earth to wake up the martial artist. At first it began clumsily, but then he found a few tricks that could make his qi sink deeper.

He jerked back once he felt Lan Yongbin stir and Wang Hangsheng landed next to him.

"One man, second-grade martial artist," Wu Hao said.

Wang Hangsheng looked at him, confused even though Wu Hao'd rattled off the information that he'd wanted. Whatever.

"He's coming," Wu Hao said, and concentrated the qi he'd gathered into his feet again. He took a step, aimed himself squarely at the entrance. "Five seconds."

Then he detonated the qi, firing himself away outside. It was impossible to draw Lan Yongbin's attention outside of the mine, but equally it'd be impossible to survive if they fought the man inside the cavern itself, which was putty in his hands. Wang Hangsheng followed a second later, rolled before Wu Hao had even landed, and veiled himself in the same movement.

Landing, rolling on his feet to absord the impact and feeling the wet mud splatter onto him, Wu Hao dove behind a small hill that was running wet with rain. More mud - he had a moment to wonder cynically why it was always the mud that he wound up face-down-in and then Lan Yongbin's strike reached the ground where they'd stood.

Enormous spears of earth spiked out of the mouth of the tunnel, as if the beast slumbering in the side of the mountain had suddenly gained a set of massive teeth of out nowhere and bit down with all its might.

Wu Hao watched, staring carefully, as he felt Lan Yongbin's qi run through with the realization that his big attack had hit nothing. A slight twist, a pulse of power that spread underneath their feet as Lan Yongbin sought them out again.

A whirling around as he found his target, pointing him straight at Wu Hao.

Shit.

Wu Hao gathered qi and ran, forcing himself up the small hill as qi was forced forwards and the earth shifted. He didn't run away, though - instead, he ran towards Lan Yongbin, his saber bouncing in its hands as he tried to keep it steady enough to run his qi through.

There was another blast of spraying earth as behind him the hill exploded into more spears and Wu Hao spoke, even as his voice was utterly muted.

"Storm-Cutting Saber Art," he said. "Tempest Slash!"

Qi gathered in his saber and clicked against the steel, with the usual loud snap, and Wu Hao tried to feel whatever he'd felt earlier as he ran. There was some sort of inkling, like he could see what his subconscious had realized but that his conscious hadn't.

He reached out, trying to force it into his hands, but the more he tried the further away it seemed.

Growling, he shoved those thoughts aside. He had to keep going, had to still finish this. Even without a Heaven-tier technique, he could still win this.

His steps sent him catapulting over the rough earth, and the wind blew all the harder the quicker he tried to run, keeping him running at uneven spurts of speed. Nearly tumbling as a blast of wind pushed him from the side, mid-step, he let his saber dip into the earth and carved a long furrow.

Then he twisted, flinging out his saber for balance. That felt right, somehow, but he couldn't focus on that right now.

"Now!" he roared, staring directly at the spot where he now knew that Wang Hangsheng was hiding.

There was a flicker of that same calm power suddenly forced into life, and then a great azure crescent of qi burst into existence from seemingly nowhere, burrowing into the ground. Its scale pattern was slightly more uneven, Wu Hao noted clinically, and then he had to launch himself again to deal with the pillars of earth that Lan Yongbin had set on him like hounds.

Whirling mid-air, saber still extended, Wu Hao felt more of that connected, tenuous. It whispered and it roared and he strained, trying to feel it out, but the moment he felt like he'd caught even the barest glimpse of it it slipped away again.

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Wang Hangseng, now fully unveiled, made a sound of extreme exertion and then began to haul his saber back. The prodigious muscles of his arms swelled as he pushed more qi into his body, Wu Hao watching the entire thing wide-eyed. He hadn't gotten a good look earlier, but what Wang Hangsheng was doing was essentially trying to pull up the entirety of the earth nearby that Lan Yongbin had anchored himself to.

Wu Hao gathered qi to his saber again, feeling the connection resurge that had fizzled away the moment he'd carved the line to mark Wang Hangsheng's target.

"Storm-Cutting Saber Art," he growled, gathering his qi but not letting it come together just yet. His timing had to be exact, just at the right time, to make the most use of this opportunity.

With a roar that sounded barely human, Wang Hangsheng ripped his saber up and away, the earth nearly exploding as a tremendous ball of rock was hauled up into the air. It rose almost ponderously, and now that Wu Hao knew the signs he could recognize that Lan Yongbin would react the same way as he had last time.

The clumps of stone shifted around, compressed tight as if by a giant's hand, and then exploded outwards.

Again, Wu Hao charged forwards, pushing his legs to pump as hard as they ever had. He regretted having jumped that much earlier, which left the bottom of his feet injury-ridden wrecks from the sheer power that he'd forced through them.

But that was mere pain. Stone flashed by like whistling meteors, and bolstered by that tenuous connection that Wu Hao still couldn't explain, still couldn't manage to take a hold of, he managed to smash most of them aside. The fury of the earth crashed against his saber and he carved it in half, parrying what he couldn't and enduring the injuries that he could.

Wounds appeared all over his body from the small pieces that he'd chosen to let through.

"Tempest Slash!" Wu Hao roared, and with the next step he'd managed to reach Lan Yongbin just seconds before the man sunk back into the ground. Lan Yongbin was deeply encased within the stone around him and momentarily blinded by the lack of earth around him, but nonetheless Wu Hao thought that their eyes had met.

His saber rang out, the edge screaming as it crashed into the ball of stone. Its keen highpitched wail resounded above the sound of the storm, louder than ever, but Wu Hao forced himself to push it, using the rings at the back just to keep hold of it and to push it deeper.

It felt like an eternity, but then a crack resounded and the sound of steel piercing flesh rang out.

Wu Hao panted, withdrew his saber, and despite wanting to collapse he instead took staggering steps backward.

Two heartbeats later Lan Yongbin, with an enormous gash running across his chest, smashed into his block. Then he was rearing back again, and this time his claw whistled past Wu Hao's face with so much force he felt a gash open despite having just barely managed to dodge.

Locked in a battle for his life, Wu Hao felt his feet start to give way as Lan Yongbin pushed him relentlessly. He kept up a relentless pace of attacks, and Wu Hao didn't have the sheer physicality he needed to watch the pace.

He couldn't die now. He still needed to find why the storm could have influenced his saber, still needed to make good on his escape. He'd promised Jin Qilong, and that had to mean something, even if only to him.

Wu Hao strained as hard as he could, feeling the claws push at him. His saber creaked with every blow, barely warded off. The Storm-Cutting Saber Art was meant to be a whirling dervish of steel, and with Lan Yongbin being faster than him Wu Hao could barely keep up with the man's constant combinations.

The stone gauntlet flashed past another block and clipped Wu Hao, sending him spiking down into the ground. Before the air had even fully managed to leave his lungs from the impact he was already forcing qi to his feet and blasting himself away, diagonally into the sky in an uncontrolled flight. Craning his head and contorting himself into a flip, he could see that where he'd have landed had several spikes already punching their way out of the ground.

Gritting his teeth at the pain in his feet, Wu Hao completed his mid-air roll and made a crash-landing, feet slipping and sliding as the impact pushed him further away.

Qi surged beneath Lan Yongbin's feet, pushing him up and then forwards, until he'd formed a tsunami of earth that came rumbling up from the earth and was rolling steadily downhill at Wu Hao.

He stared up at it.

Of course, he thought bitterly. If his Storm-Cutting Saber had been enhanced by the storm, then so would the Stone Soul Sect's art be improved by the presence of so much stone and earth. That only made sense.

Lan Yongbin might even have chosen this battlefield just to enhance his own martial arts -

Then, all of a sudden, everything clicked.

It was never about the storm, not really. It was and it wasn't.

The point was about connecting to a greater whole. For Wu Hao, that greater whole was now the storm. For Lan Yongbin, that greater whole would be the earth.

Dark clouds gathered, the winds blew, and the earth rumbled. To anyone else it might have seemed as if the world might be coming to an end, and the gigantic wave of earth that was about to come crashing down would sweep the board clean.

Wu Hao reached out, felt the storm once again. Not the physical storm, but the storm that raged everywhere. In his mind, too. That tenuous connection he'd felt earlier - it was this, not anything else.

He laughed, loudly, and watched the wave of earth curl as it began its inevitable descent to smash him flat.

And then he let his qi go free. Qi roared up to the heavens - every dreg he had and then some, everything he could give and then more still.

The wind whipped his hair. Every blade of wind that whistled through the air now was a part of the storm, the rain caught up from some distant sea, and the storm itself was just part of a sky.

Beyond the storm, there was the sky.

Raising his saber, he didn't bother to try and use some sort of technique to escape. Lan Yongbin swam somewhere at the back of the wave readying his next technique, assuming that Wu Hao would definitely die, and Wang Hangsheng had hidden himself away again near a small puddle, conserving his power. Both of them would kill him, even if he managed to survive.

Wang Hangsheng was his sky. Lan Yongbin was his earth. By all rights, in magnitude and in power they outclassed him without any effort.

But...

Beyond the sky, there was Heaven.

The saber rose higher, and higher, until he was holding it up with both hands, its point aimed directly at a sky he couldn't see. The rings at its back spun and clinked like bells attached to a weathervane, an insistent ringing to seek cover, to hide, as if even they feared the wave.

Instead, he spoke.

"Sky-Severing Saber Art," he said, calling the name of the Heaven-tier saber art. He knew, from the depths of his soul, that it would work. "Cutting Clouds."

The saber slashed down.