That asshole Tai Buzhou felt the need to give a long, rambling explanation of the events that had led up to the both of them standing there, who they were, and the stakes of their fight.
Since he'd managed to dig up little on Wu Hao, that made it so that Tai Buzhou had to keep saying that he was a mystery, a dark horse, from an unknown sect or an unknown lineage. At least it was funny, both in the tortured way he had to dance around repeating phrases he'd used before, and in the way his qi nearly seemed to gag on the words.
Then there was a recitation of the history of the Hua Sect, beginning with its founding back in the mists of time by the first man ever to carry the name Flame Sovereign. After that, Tai Buzhou went through the history of the Heavenly Demon Wars and the current crop of its masters.
Hua Lixin's story was also interesting. He had apparently been left as a baby on the stoop of the mountain itself, and he was found on a sunny morning in August, ensconsced in the arms of a plum tree in the middle of blossoming. There was nothing to identify the boy, so he had been given the name Hua Lixin, given the last name of the mountain.
On and on it went. How well had he done in the trials to become an official disciple of the Hua Sect, how he had dazzled every master there with his mastery not only of Taoist lore but also his prowess with the sword. His natural affinity for the sect's swordplay as if he'd quite literally been born for the purpose of becoming its sect master one day. How he had received instruction from each of the masters and absorbed it like a sponge.
Wu Hao had seen Hua Lixin before, of course. They hadn't officially met or anything, but they had stood on the same stage before. Wu Hao had never paid Hua Lixin all that much attention, as much out of a stubborn desire not to acknowledge the other boy as any more reasonable rationale, but now he studied Hua Lixin for the first time.
His hair, a shade of red so bright that it might have been called pink and tinged at its edges with white, was long, though to make allowances for the martial nature of the tournament it had been tied into a ponytail that hung behind Hua Lixin's face. He was handsome too, of course. A fine chin that looked to have been etched out of marble, eyes that were clear, he looked like the sort of child every father might imagine his son growing up to be.
He was Wu Hao's age, though perhaps a year older. That made him fifteen.
His clothes were fine and Hua Lixin was dressed to the nines, but nonetheless the thing that was clearly the most expensive item he owned was his sword.
It was a beautiful sword. Longer than most swords, it bore no inscriptions and no designs, nothing to set it apart from any other sword that might have been bought at the market except the Mount Hua symbol that had been etched into its pommel. It was polished to a mirror sheen, though, and it looked sharp enough that it might cut the wing of a fly without the fly even feeling it.
Wu Hao could detect, if he focused all of his attention on it, incredibly fine filligree running over the surface of the sword. Arrays meant to keep it in good shape, arrays meant to enhance its cutting power by extending the edge just the slightest possible distance, an array meant to keep the sword free of blood and gore.
In other words, it was a perfect merging of functionality and form. Wu Hao didn't have anything like a craftsman's heart, but he could tell that the sword might have cost enough to buy whoever sold it a significant fiefdom.
Hua Lixin studied him in return. He felt the other boy's gaze like a physical thing, flicking from the scars on his hands and the state of his saber to the look in his eyes.
There was no dread or doubt in either his expression, in his posture, or his qi, merely some curiosity and some expectation.
Wu Hao took an instinctive dislike to Hua Lixin, though he couldn't have said why. Perhaps it simply was that the other boy seemed to almost be set up to have every success in life.
Tai Buzhou's rambling was finally over. Silence swept across the arena for a brief moment before Hua Lixin raised his sword in an unspoken challenge.
Good. At least he wasn't a talker. Wu Hao's saber came up as well, the sparks of potential beginning to drive themselves up his spine. He couldn't yet see any lines, but they would follow.
For the last time, Tai Buzhou's hand was raised and came whistling down to the ground.
"Begin!" he roared.
Wu Hao pushed on his back foot as his qi flooded into his veins, saber already raising into a movement to set up a devastating slash that would cut Hua Lixin's wrist from his body. The corner of his sight blurred as he accelerated.
Then, abruptly, he decelerated as his saber slammed into something. Hua Lixin had charged at him at the same instant with a movement technique that left flames where he'd stood, and they collided with a loud clang as steel met steel. Wu Hao's eyes widened, Hua Lixin's narrowed, and then there was no more time for thinking.
Lines appeared as Wu Hao's saber tore through the air, trying to salvage the stab that he'd just attempted. Qi tingled through his arms and set goosebumps across his flesh as he swiped out. The snap of thunder fizzling across his sword echoed out.
But there was a similar burst of qi from Hua Lixin. His sword lit up with a deep cherry-red heat that made the air around the edge contort and he met Wu Hao's strike without flinching.
Thunder met heat and both weapons were repelled, Wu Hao's line fizzling into nothing.
He took a slight step to the side and found Hua Lixin already on the attack again. For the first time since he'd started thinking in lines Wu Hao found that he had to block, slapping aside the sword as it came to carve him like a roast duck, from hip to clavicle.
Qi swirled around them, both of them shedding enormous amounts of energy. A thin keening filled the air as thunder screeched and heat hissed. Wu Hao's focus was on nothing except the dance of stepping forward, attacking, being blocked and blocking the counter that he received in return with less and less margin for error.
Hua Lixin kept up a relentless pressure. Wu Hao's saber slashed out as fast as he could but the necessity to wait for a line to appear made Wu Hao's reactions just a beat too slow, and Hua Lixin seemed able to interfere with his lines. Repeatedly Wu Hao thought that he had a winning strike only for Hua Lixin's sword to interrupt his line.
They clashed again and again. Wu Hao scored a series of thin nicks across Hua Lixin's arms and ripped into his fine robes, while Hua Lixin had managed to inflict several slashes on Wu Hao's belly that were welling with blood.
Grimacing Wu Hao gave up on trying to conserve anything. He pushed harder and harder, allowing several more wounds to appear on his body if it allowed him to rip into Hua Lixin in return. He scored a long slash that Hua Lixin had to jerk his head away from before it took out an eye, but at the same to inflict that wound he had to allow a long slash that nearly cut through his leg.
This wasn't sustainable. Wu Hao was taking more wounds and achieving less.
A blurring step let him make just enough distance to take a deep breath, away from the whirling dance of steel that they'd both unleashed. Hua Lixin didn't follow, he just stood there and allowed Wu Hao to gather himself without so much as a word. His qi, though, gave off a definite signal - that of curiosity, a slight wariness but no more than that. Whatever Wu Hao was to throw at him, his qi said, Hua Lixin would have something better.
So far he'd been right. Time to see if that extended to this too, then.
Wu Hao let everything fall away except the storm raging inside of him. Emotion, the world around him, the deepseated frustrations that had built up throughout the tournament.
All of it came bursting out like a punch to the heart, crashing over his mind like a flood crashed over a rocky shore. He had repressed all of it for so long that he now felt like little more than a raft tossed everywhere by a raging ocean, and he embraced that feeling, too.
Qi erupted from him, thick and steady. The tiger's roar in his ears resounded proudly.
He didn't say anything, but Hua Lixin's eyes remained locked on Wu Hao's hands. Wu Hao dropped slightly lower to the ground, feeling the stable ground around him sway as he let himself simply move, and then he let his saber swipe over the ground.
"Sky Severing Saber Art," Wu Hao whispered. "Cutting Clouds."
It was as if that enormous tide of emotion came sweeping out with his movement. The stone parted like clay before his saber, the qi jetting out of it at such immense speeds that it seemed almost to be one continous blade extending out from the ground.
Hands feeling steady, swept up in the moment, Wu Hao dragged his hands slowly up.
Everything narrowed into a single line. With what felt like infinite care, achingly slow, the tip of his saber reached out and followed the thin mark on the world. He couldn't see anything except that line, and he felt his qi slipping away, and he felt like none of it mattered.
There was only the line, digging its way steadily upwards. The arena was now utterly ruined already, rubble thrown everywhere, and he had the fleeting thought that Du Linglong would probably be jealous of him again.
A thin smile on his face, he fed that into the storm, as well. His saber rose and rose, until it was rearing up like a living thing and aiming past Hua Lixin. Wind whipped through Wu Hao's clothes and he let it, allowing the storm to move through him. Every single thing that had been bottled up came in an endless torrent that was focused only into that single line.
But inches away from reaching Hua Lixin, the line blossomed. The ink which wasn't ink at all split into fragments, two lines forming where there had been only one before. That line, too, cracked apart and grew into several branches of its own.
The world forced its way back into Wu Hao's mind and he felt unable to stop it, his concentration fracturing.
Hua Lixin, eyebrows crunched into deep concentration, spoke even as his sword reached down.
"Plum Blossom Sword Art," he said slowly, as if through some sort of wall that muffled all sound. "Thousand-Year Blooming."
Where his sword touched on the line that was yet to be completed, a tree seemed to bloom. The roots of the tree spread first of all, sprouting into tendrils of qi that slithered along the ground and sucked greedily at the surrounding environmental qi. It grew steadily upwards and upwards and upwards, branches forming as if seeing the work of years all in an instant, and then flowers and leaves created themselves out of thin air to cover the entirety of the tree. The impression that Wu Hao got was that it was nothing if not a massive pillar that stretched into the sky.
Brilliant pink qi spread everywhere, gathering into thick petals of white-and-pink plum blossoms that floated slightly on an invisible, unfelt breeze. Wu Hao's senses were so confused by the image of the tree that he couldn't have said if the blossoms were a mere manifestation or physical things.
And still the sword kept coming.
If Wu Hao had tried to cut through the sky, this tree represented the opposite intent: to hold up heaven.
"Competing Heaven-tier techniques," Tai Buzhou roared into the crowd, his voice shrill. "My god! This is unseen from third-grade competitors, I cannot believe -"
Everything faded until there was nothing in the world except Wu Hao's saber and Hua Lixin's sword.
The saber had already begun to show cracks. It carved through the air as if trying to cut through the entire world, its progress slow and unsteady. In contrast, Hua Lixin's sword was crashing down.
The rising saber and the falling sword met with an explosion of light and power that burst out in a brilliant flash. Without them ever touching there was the impression of an immense impact as if a giant fist had smashed into the arena. There was no sound and all color vanished.
Wu Hao couldn't breathe, couldn't think - his watering eyes just locked onto the clash. The world was nothing to him now except a series of flickering instants, paintings still wet with ink and the painter's brush.
And then it ended.
The saber cracked under the pressure, while the sword held out. The steel of Wu Hao's saber simply gave way, deep shearing grooves appearing in the metal with the final tortured scream of something that had withstood a far greater impact than it had ever been intended to.
Both techniques unravelled into nothingness.
The sky remained whole, supported by a single, immense tree.
Wu Hao felt his legs collapse under him, knees buckling as his mind did the same. He heard a sharp crack as the pendant around his neck cracked, broken after a single day. The only present he had ever received. Wasted.
More than all of that, though, his eyes were the ones that told him something he couldn't accept.
Hua Lixin still stood.
He looked down at Wu Hao, his eyes free of judgement as Wu Hao tried to struggle back up to his feet. His qi, mostly exhausted, spoke of nothing more than a vague dissatisfaction. Thin sweat beaded his brow, but otherwise he didn't look all the much worse for wear.
"You did well," Hua Lixin offered. "We will fight again. Perhaps a year from now, or perhaps a decade. Perhaps you will win. Be proud of what you have achieved, in the meantime."
Hua Lixin gave a sort of comforting smile. It didn't seem that he was entirely comfortable with the gesture.
"You are the greatest opponent I have faced within my own generation," Hua Lixin said. "Congratulations."
Perhaps it was meant to make him feel better. Hua Lixin even inclined his head slightly, the rat bastard.
The sheer shame that hit him when he heard that statement might have killed Wu Hao all by itself, but the knife that he thrust into his own heart afterwards definitely did. He had to fling himself down onto the knife with the last of his muscle strength, ensuring that it got deep enough into him that it could actually kill him instantly.
And then he was gone once more. His last thought, above everything else, was that Hua Lixin really was the monster he'd been said to be.
You have been killed by a suicide for the seventh time.