You have been killed by a suicide for the first time. Obtained Perseverance I as a reward.
In the middle of a step, Wu Hao stumbled. As one foot found itself placed in front of the other and his legs tangled themselves into a knot, his hands flew to his throat as he took a heaving, shaky breath. He landed on the ground clumsily, with his knees slamming into a rock and his chin striking the ground hard.
He lay there for a moment, taking shallow, quick breaths. His hands felt around his throat and found the black strips of cloth around his neck, which he tore off with quick, fervent motions, caught in the throes of a panic he felt unable to name.
And yet - there seemed to be nothing wrong. There were no wounds, no blood gushing from the cut he'd made. He didn't even feel the telltale rough skin of a scar, and he had more than enough scars to know how those felt.
Around him, one black-clad shape after another flowed around him as their march continued. They left him behind as easily as they breathed on their climb up the mountain.
Wu Hao tried to struggle to his feet, but his head felt slightly dizzy. When he felt safe enough, he took his hands from his throat and placed them under him.
With a grunt of effort he pushed himself up to a standing position, though he still felt unsteady. He felt at his throat again, just to be sure that he'd felt it correctly.
If anyone noticed his outburst, they made no remark. All the others simply walked forwards, splitting around him and reforming the line, surging into a current of black that surged forwards and upwards. In the distance he could see a long snakelike line of boys like him, of different heights but otherwise identically clad, moving the same ways, and not speaking a single word.
Wu Hao stared up at the sky, thinking, and barely even noticed as the little window that had appeared in his sight vanished into nothingness again. He instead turned his head and studied the landscape as others went by him, picking out the shape of the terrain through which they were heading.
He didn't recognize any of it, but he felt like it was familiar. All of it. He had seen this before. What was going on? Twice now he had died, only to wake up again.
It was like -
It was too quiet. Wu Hao snapped out of his thoughts and looked around, seeing the last of the deathsworn pass him by. A pair of boots stopped near him, crunching on the rock, and Wu Hao glanced up at the Uncle who was glaring daggers at him.
No - not daggers. That was an unpleasant thought.
"Why have you stopped, 721?" the Uncle asked, swabbing at his moustache with one hand. His voice was rough, his breath was heavily tinted with the smell of alcohol, and in one hand he held the flask of wine that he always carried with him. Its contents sloshed gently as the man kept staring at Wu Hao, and the narrowing of his eyes was like the clock ticking down until Wu Hao would face punishment for not answering properly.
"Forgive me, Uncle," Wu Hao said quickly, finding his voice somewhat shaky still. "It won't happen again."
The Uncle stared at him for a few moments more, then reached out a hand, palm-first, and shoved Wu Hao forward.
"Go," he ordered. "If you slow us down again, I'll tell Father you're defective. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Uncle," Wu Hao said, rocking back on his feet from the surprising strength that Uncle had put into his push. It wasn't to the extent of a full-fledged attack, but still ... Wu Hao could feel the qi stick to him, an oily sort of thing that reminded him of Uncle and the cloying, thick scent of his wine.
With that oily sensation came something else, but Wu Hao found it impossible to pin down exactly what that was. Something felt wrong about that palmprint and the way it seeped into his clothing and his skin.
"March!" Uncle barked.
Battling the urge to grimace, Wu Hao took one step, trying to feel out what Uncle had done to him. The next step he set, he tried to feel out as carefully as he could without making it obvious what he was doing, but he felt almost nothing yet.
Under the squinting eyes of Uncle and the man's slowly growing grin, Wu Hao continued walking, chasing after the retreating backs of the other deathsworn. He put one foot in front of the other, forcing himself further down the path up the mountains.
But with every step, he felt the palm print grow just a little bit. It was feeding on his qi, and as it was gaining in qi it also was gaining in weight. Every step was just a little bit harder than the last. It felt like the mountain was fighting him with every step, with every handhold he had to pull himself up by.
But what could he do? He had to fight back, little by little.
Sweating, grunting, he forced his way up the mountain, hurting with every step. If that was all it would have been one thing, but he had to catch up with the others, too. It was costing him twice the effort, and they weren't slowing at all to let him rejoin the herd. If it was twice the effort required, that would have been one thing, but instead it was taking him thrice the effort, if not more.
Uncle, next to him, kept pace effortlessly, of course. He was employing the same odd walk that Father and the other Uncle knew, which seemed to push them forward with almost absurd ease. A movement technique. For Wu Hao, every step up the endless slope was torture, while Uncle could scale even a vertical wall better than a mountain goat, without even slowing his pace.
But to stop meant death. Death was bad. Although everything that had seemed so sure before had become unstable now, that still seemed true to him.
Wu Hao continued his endless climb until the palm print had grown as heavy as it seemed able to, with the qi smudge taking up the entire front of his body like an enormous heavy shirt. His legs hurt, his lungs ached with every breath, and his back was soaked with sweat.
The distance to the last of the deathsworn didn't shrink, but neither did it grow, either. He kept pace, no matter how hard it was, because what else could he do?
Nonetheless he kept going. It wasn't just the thought of dying or being declared defective that was keeping him stumbling forwards, step after step, even when his body was screaming at him to just give up already. A doggedness had taken hold of him and was pushing him onwards. Maybe it was spite, maybe it was fear, maybe it was something else entirely. He didn't know, and he couldn't waste the effort it took him to move on wondering, either.
Finally, what felt like hours later, the slope stopped increasing when they'd reached the apex of their climb, and then after a short stretch of walking across flatter terrain, the slope went downhill again.
Somehow, that made it worse. The weight still hung from the front of Wu Hao's chest and shifted every so often. There was an odd pattern to its shifts, too - usually around particularly rough terrain, or when Wu Hao was in the middle of taking a step where stumbling would have seen him fall off the mountainside.
That meant something, but he couldn't consider that thought now. Instead, he struggled onwards, though that took a different form now.
When before he had to fight to keep pace with the others, now he had to fight to keep his feet taking only smaller steps so that he wouldn't hurl himself down the path and break something. An arm, maybe, or a leg. In either case, he would be marked defective even if he completed the day's march.
Swaying, stumbling, so blinded with exhaustion that a black haze had crept in on the sides of his vision, he finally reached the campsite that he'd woken up in yesterday. Today. When he'd last died.
Uncle had stayed with him all the way. Was this a test, then? To prove that he wasn't defective, that he could cope with any challenge Father or the Uncle set him to?
Judging by Uncle's disappointed frown, it wasn't. What else was there, then?
With an angry wave of his hand, Uncle had Wu Hao stop. Then, with the same hand that he'd shoved Wu Hao with earlier, he touched Wu Hao again, and the palm print fell away as the qi he'd forced upon Wu Hao slid away, siphoned back into Uncle's stores.
Wu Hao didn't mind. He was mostly just glad to be rid of the weight and almost fell himself, when it fell away. Even then he still swayed on his feet, feeling the sweat sting his eyes, feeling his legs burn.
In the distance, he heard the other Uncles give orders to the deathsworn. Groups of boys were being sent to erect tents, to set out the Uncles' things in their tents, to feed the beasts of burden, to begin hunting for food, to forage for wood for the fires.
"Don't do it again," Uncle growled. "Or else the next one won't be a test. Now go do your tasks."
"Thank you, Uncle," Wu Hao panted.
Finally the man left. Wu Hao didn't watch him go, but only heard him stomp away to oversee other parts of the camp. The deathsworn from Wu Hao's group - 720 to 732 - had already raised a tent, but it would be hours before they would be allowed to sleep. Or eat. They had other tasks, first, and the little qi they had at their disposal made things like eating or sleeping not as pressing as they otherwise would have been, but Wu Hao felt a bone-deep exhaustion and hunger anyway.
But voicing that would have seen him marked defective, and he hadn't fought so hard during the trek to be forced to kill himself again. Wu Hao had no desire to test if whatever miracle had kept him alive after two deaths would extend to a third.
Ignoring his body's loud protests, he stopped hunkering down and moved himself to a standing position again despite his creaking knees and walked over to the others of his group. 726, the leader of them as marked by the white pin he'd received to keep his rags together, stared at Wu Hao when he stumbled over.
"Report," 726 said. His voice was as boyish as all of theirs were, but it had always seemed to Wu Hao that the cold and the dark had crept into 726 more than it had in others, hollowing him out entirely until nothing else remained.
"Uncle said I was to help," Wu Hao said, working to keep his eyes open. He was failing, though.
726 regarded him with dead eyes. "All others have been sent out already."
"Then what do I do?"
Several of the others came by, hauling supplies or the cooking pots that all the deathsworn's food was cooked in. They didn't greet Wu Hao, and neither did he greet them. They reported to 726, who then sent them out again while thinking over what Wu Hao was to do. 723 came by, not from the cooking pots but instead from returning inside the camp, having apparently found some kind of mushroom that was valuable.
Wu Hao didn't bother hoping that maybe he would be able to use the extra time to get some rest. That wasn't how things worked. Uncle's order was that he help, so some way of making him help would be found.
"Join the group digging a latrine," 726 finally said. If he'd chosen the most physically gruelling task deliberately, then he showed no outward sign of it. He looked as impassive as they all did. "When you're done, dig another."
"Understood."
Without another word, Wu Hao ignored the black haze creeping in at the side of his vision at the thought of more labor. His body needed rest, food, water. To actually ask for those was a sign of failure.
As Father had said once - they could sleep when they were dead. But collecting a shovel from an impassive-faced deathsworn and hunkering down near a group whose numbers he didn't know, Wu Hao reflected that judging by the last days, even in death he probably wouldn't get any rest.