Chapter 196 Death Hunts the Moonlight, III

One of the first things that Wu Hao had done was study where the door of the shack was. It had seemed a very reasonable point to start his studies of the shack's arrays from, plus it was also a recognizable landmark due to the ways the arrays there had to work around the door. It made them slightly less powerful, due to having to work with all angles that the door could be at.

He put his hand just inches away from the door, the saber still in his other hand. He could sense the vague lines of where he could cut even in the inanimate wood, but the lines grew fuzzy if he so much as focused on the door proper. He placed one of the pieces of paper that Master Shu had given him earlier against the door - a sapper, which could be connected to an existing array and siphon away its power.

Pulling his brush from the spatial storage, he set about adding the necessary extra lines. Picking where to connect the arrays was as much of an art as it was a science, but he didn't care about the most optimal path right now. He'd settle for something that worked.

A sudden bright light flashed when he'd drawn the line, emanating from the entirety of the cottage, and when the bright spots cleared from his vision as if he'd just stared into the sun, the wood of the shack was softly shimmering. It was still attempting to push his eyes away from looking at it directly, but the compulsion was much, much weaker. He focused, feeling another droplet of blood drip down his chin, and identified the doorknob, the way the hinges would turn on the door.

Then he kicked the door in. He didn't stop to find out if anyone had noticed - he had to assume they had - and he clearly wasn't going to be able to talk his way out of this, anyway.

But the inside of the shack didn't seem to contain much of anything. A few gardening tools were scattered around the shed, as well as bags of compost or something else that stunk horribly. Feed for various animals, crates of moldy old books and things which might have once been treasured possessions, curios and the like. Something smelled rotten.

He ignored all of that, though the smell made his eyes crinkle. Odd to imagine that Ke Jiaming had set foot in here - Wu Hao had difficulty believing a man like that spending any time inside a hovel like this.

The point was, this wasn't anything worth setting a guard for, or placing arrays on. There had to be a secret here, something that absolutely couldn't get out. Something that was worth trusting a second-grade martial artist for, whereas Ke Jiaming didn't seem like the kind of person who would involve another person in his schemes if he could help it.

Wu Hao darted inside, shoving some of the bags of feed and compost out of the way. Bits of matter fell onto his robe, staining it with what he hoped was dirt or something, but he couldn't find anything like a staircase down underneath. There wasn't even any clue as to who had made the arrays - the inside of the shack bore a few spiraling curves of high-quality ink, all carefully hidden, but there were nothing that pointed to an identity of its creator.

The cold air was leaking in, blowing snow into the cottage, and as he looked down he could see that the snow was blowing in faster and deeper than should be natural.

Shit. He'd better hurry.

Staring at the floor more intently, he finally found a small lip that had been carved out of the floor, nestled neatly in the space between two planks. He shoved his fingers inside and pulled, with all his strength, and with some strain he managed to unearth a small cover that he lifted up.

It revealed a small rope ladder that extended down into the belly of the earth. Wu Hao nodded to himself, checked around to see if he could see anyone alive nearby - no - good. Jackpot.

He pulled up the rope slightly and started sawing through it with his saber, then caught it with his other hand before it could fall all the way to the ground. Wrapping it around one of his spare knives, he let it fall into the hole and listened if he could hear any reaction from the dark space below. He heard nothing - not a shout of surprise, not a heartbeat that sounded louder than it had before, could sense no qi. At least the small thud of the knife confirmed that it wasn't that deep into the ground.

And the lack of any response when the knife exploded seconds later confirmed that either there was no one below or they were very good at avoiding his attempts at sussing out surprise attacks.

Without further ado, he lowered himself onto his haunches, then slipped through the hole in the ground. He didn't bother pulling the cover back over his head - there wouldn't be anyone who stumbled across this place. Not at the moment, especially. Anyone who found it would know where to find him as well.

He landed into a small tunnel of dirt, which had been carved out of the earth with some sort of technique. There was no other explanation for the sharp edges at its sides, or the neat way the frozen earth had been packed to form walls. The lightening array that had been cast onto Wu Hao's clothes kept him from making a sound as he landed, and he felt for an instant like a snowflake drifting down from the sky.

Even from this angle, though, what he could see was horrifying. He refused to trust his eyes, though, and instead walked deeper into the tunnel, where he entered a small room.

There were dead bodies, everywhere. Wu Hao had seen bodies before, including his own, but the only times he'd seen this many bodies had been during the Third Heavenly Demon War, on the battlefield. People had died there in droves, but they had all been martial artists, and they had all been freshly dead.

These people were not fresh. Some of them were in advanced stages of putrefaction, the cold that had the chamber in its grip the only reason why the room's smell didn't make Wu Hao's eyes water. Some of them were mainly bones - the oldest of the corpses, he presumed, and they had been scattered across one side of the room, almost as if they'd been thrown there by a bored child.

It stuck in his mind that there were none that looked like they'd died peacefully. All of them had some form of wounds, the majority of them having clearly suffered from burn wounds across large parts of their bodies. Whether those had been fatal or not, he had no way to know.

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The corpses were of every age, every gender, every status. A rich man in obvious finery lay underneath a dead washerwoman, his skull mostly burned away except a few clumps of skin, while her hands were still resting on top of her chest where an enormous wound was obviously inflicted by a weapon of some kind. Wu Hao could see the head of a child laying separate from the rest of its body, blue eyes still open with an expression of deepest fear, while nearby a grandfather was in a pose like he'd been attempting to crawl over.

Men. Women. Children. Seniors. The rich. The poor. The healthy. The sick.

All dead.

Wu Hao stumbled back from the... - the graveyard? The charnelhouse? The ossuary? None of those words fit, exactly. All of them at the same time, maybe. It made him feel sick to even think of how many people there were contained here.

With an effort of will, Wu Hao tore his eyes away from the piles of bodies strewn about the room. Instead he tried to focus on something else, anything else, and at the end of the room he spotted it.

There stood a small desk, almost incongruous in its neatness. It wasn't an especially nice desk, but it was made of beautiful carved, lacquered wood, and it bore several pieces of paper that looked like they might be promising. There was a small stand set up there, too, with something shifting inside as he stepped forward, trying not to gag or look where he was stepping.

He checked the paper first, but it was blank. There had to be some kind of secret to the paper, but he didn't have the time to investigate what that secret might be. Right now, all he could do was try and gather as much information as he could, with the assumption that he'd die afterwards.

The stand, then. Looking closer it was a sort of brewery like the one that Uncle Liu had in his tent, years from now. Something an apothecary might use to concoct medicines, or poison. Wu Hao sniffed the air, trying to discern if he could tell anything about what was being brewed from the smell, but he could pick up nothing underneath the thick scent of death. Neither were there any ingredients still laying nearby.

Taking another risk he pushed the brewery stand off the desk, watching the delicate glassware crash into the floor and fall to a thousand pieces. He could pick out a thin odor, now, though only due to his enhanced senses.

Wu Hao leaned forward, wondering if maybe he should dip his finger inside and risk having a quick taste -

Instincts screamed at him to move, and Wu Hao jumped as hard as he could, smashing his head into the roof and leaving a thick dent in the dirt. The room shook, thick reams of frost scouring the floor like a tide - an attempt to freeze him in place.

Several of the bodies creaked and shuddered, the way that a wooden house might in a tempest. Blue-tinged ice crept up skeletal remains of limbs and bodies and faces, rime creeping everywhere. For a moment Wu Hao thought that they might even move - but they settled again, and he had other things to worry about.

Ke Jiaming's cold, empty eyes looked at Wu Hao, betraying not a single emotion. His presence didn't quite feel real, his clean pure white attire clashing with the evidence of the slaughter around him. In his hand he held the piece of paper that would've acted as a flare, which he put into his spatial storage.

Damnit. For a few breaths, Wu Hao had harbored a faint hope that Ke Jiaming would try and rip it apart.

"Did you think I wouldn't notice your little trip?" Ke Jiaming asked. He didn't sound amused in the slightest. "The struggle outside?"

One thing was for sure, then. Wu Hao would die here. That left him with one more thing to do, then. One thing he'd never figured out.

"Why?" Wu Hao asked.

Ke Jiaming shook his head.

"That's your last question?" he asked. "A so-called genius, and those are your last words? Disappointing."

"Why did you betray the Alliance? Why did you join the Demon Cult?" Wu Hao pressed. He pulled his saber from storage with one hand, holding no illusions that he could take on Ke Jiaming, but it was useful to make the man think he was still stalling for time.

No lines manifested. There was no sense of sparks running up his spine, the reassuring feeling pounding in his chest as he felt himself come alive at the edge of death yet again. All the same, though, he couldn't feel dread or panic - all he could express, right now, was an icy calm.

"Betray the Alliance?" Ke Jiaming scoffed. "You're wrong, boy. I never betrayed the Alliance. Neither did I join the Demon Cult. I simply use them, and I allow them to use me occasionally. It is a business relationship."

Wu Hao flung out his arm. "You call this not joining them?"

Several of the corpses collapsed, drawn together by the sheer power of the ice. It was almost perverse to watch, like a family huddling together against the cold.

"Why do you care?" Ke Jiaming asked.

Wu Hao faltered. "What do you mean, why do you care?"

"They were ants," Ke Jiaming said. He gestured with one hand, a pillar of ice ripping itself out of the floor in front of him and bearing the corpse of some merchant, who he regarded with evident disdain. "Do you mourn every ant you step on? The duck whose flesh you ate tonight? No. They are lower forms of life."

Wu Hao's arms dug into his palms.

"They were people," he hissed.

Ke Jiaming cocked his head. "But not our people. Besides, they die whatever we do. Why not get some use out of their deaths?"

This man was a monster. Wu Hao had known that, intellectually, knowing the man's sheer callousness towards his own family. The sheer scale of this was on another level, though.

"Why tell me all this?" he asked.

"To see if you could be convinced," Ke Jiaming said. "But, apparently, you cannot. Then there is no more need for talk."

He extended a hand. Wu Hao dodged reflexively as a blast of qi erupted where he'd been standing. The floor under his feet had frozen over entirely by now, with thick layers of rime covering every single surface in the room. Pillars erupted from everywhere, their points as sharp as any spear's tip, all manifesting in perfect silence as they tried to rip him apart.

Ke Jiaming didn't speak a word.

More pillars of ice manifested out of nowhere. Pulling his saber out of storage entirely, Wu Hao tried to see lines - but the ice moved faster than he could react, and the only thing he managed to do was block one pillar that would've ripped a hole into him, his saber leaving a spiderwebbing crack on the ice that felt somehow significant.

And though Wu Hao managed to avoid a few, several of the ones that he thought he'd dodged suddenly sprouted long branches like trees of pure ice and ripped through his robe as if it was paper. He was stabbed in several places, only narrowly managing avoiding the loss of an eye by jerking his head back, but strikes sheared off parts of his fingers holding on to the saber and he screamed as it tumbled to the floor.

Frost rippled like water underneath Ke Jiaming's feet, forming into a tide of ice that grew and extended itself towards Wu Hao like a dozen more spears, all stabbing out for his vitals precisely. Wu Hao tried to dodge, but suddenly the dirt was slick beneath his feet and he had to focus on getting his footing back for just an instant before he could respond with a slash or attempt to dodge.

Ke Jiaming's ice skewered him from every angle instantly. He hung, suspended, in excruciating pain, barely kept alive as his organs began to freeze over from the coldness of the room. He couldn't see, but he could feel the ice swimming in his veins, ripping apart his lungs.

"So ends another genius," Ke Jiaming said, and Wu Hao could feel the Sovereign's qi signature ripple with some sort of emotion that he couldn't identify. The ice lingered in his wake, leaving Wu Hao pinned.

He reached out. With his arms and muscles shredded he couldn't exert any strength, but he ripped away all of the vital qi that he had left and focused it into his finger. He had felt something, there, something that was important...

While the rest of him died, his hand took a grip on one of the pillars of ice that had run through his shoulder and exerted all the strength he had left.

His last vision was of the ice cracking, just slightly, and then he was gone.