Chapter 174: Death & Bitter Medicine, IV

As they walked to the arena that had been chosen, Wu Hao got his first glimpses of the Tang clan's gardens. He'd heard of them before, in passing from Prefectural something-or-other Shi, when he'd been at the Jin clan. He'd figured that the reputation was mostly just embellished. Sure, maybe the gardens were large and maybe they were beautiful.

They were both, but so much more than Wu Hao had imagined. The sheer size of the gardens had been marked out by elegant wooden fencing that spread as far as the eye could see, with entire hills taken up by farms and the like. Delicate constructions of glass rose like spines every so often. He checked one out in the glimpse he got; the plant on display was small and not particularly beautiful except for the single bean that grew from the middle of the flower, but the arrays on the glass indicated that the entire glass house was kept heated throughout the year and that attempting to take the plant without proper idenfication would kill everything in the vicinity by means of vicious poison.

"That's a One-Heart Beanflower," Tang Hui said, walking next to Wu Hao. "It's been growing a while. We should be able to harvest its poison next year."

"What does its poison do?" Wu Hao asked. "The plant doesn't look like much."

"Eating the beans will cause your bones to melt from the inside," Tang Hui said cheerfully. "It's a pretty gruesome death, I've been told. Are you curious about poisons?"

"Somewhat," Wu Hao said.

Tang Hui looked a little disappointed. "Only somewhat? I think they're amazing. The human body's a fascinating machine, but it's even more fascinating to see how it reacts to things meant to subvert it."

Wu Hao took a small step further away from Tang Hui and continued walking.

The path up ahead led them away from the bulk of the gardens, instead on a stone path that had been marked carefully with lanterns. The snow had been cleared away but piled up softly on the sides of the road nonetheless, though the trees that lined the road kept away most of the wind's bite.

When the Sovereigns stopped, they stopped at the foot of a large circle that had been marked with a thin scarf of white linen, and the floor of which had been raised slightly from the surrounding soil. Both men moved inside the circle, but everyone else was required to stay out. Wu Hao prodded at the air above the linen and found that it hardened in response to his touch. If he tried to actually step inside it would feel like smacking his head into a brick wall.

"Do you mind?" Tang Shibai asked, turning his hand.

Master Shu smiled. With the flick of a few fingers he sent thick streamers of ink-like qi spilling everywhere, which raced up to the sides of the linen and reinforced the arrays already there. The invisible barrier flared with an explosion of light and then settled again. Wu Hao didn't test it this time, because he could see the qi pulsing gently in time anyway.

When mostly everyone who could still stand had gathered at the circle, Tang Shibai clapped his hands once. The sound spread despite not being that loud, and a sudden silence fell across the crowd.

"Let's begin," he said. "The first move to you, Absent Sovereign?"

"If you insist," Master Shu responded. He bowed slightly and then qi burst from him, thin brushstrokes of ink-like qi dripping down from his extended finger. He beckoned and the ink raced forward like the splatter of a falling inkwell, targeting the Sublime Poison Sovereign by firing the blobs of ink like arrows.

He just stood there and studied the incoming attacks with a curious glance.

"Interesting," he said. Then, with the wave of a sleeve he shoved his hand forward and the qi bled out of his hand, forming into a thick fog that formed like a shield in front of Tang Shibai.

Splatters and gobs of ink crashed into the fog and left thin holes before their momentum was completely stopped - holes which bled black, leaving clear traces on the colorful fog.

Tang Shibai gestured again. The fog contorted and swirled, moving as if alive, splitting off streams of color that lunged forward almost lazily. In response, Master Shu clenched a hand, then swept his fingers through the air. Eddies of ink curved away from his fingertips, meeting the almost certainly acidic fog as if two physical things were clashing.

It was beautiful, not in the way that a mountain view could take the breath away, but it was artful like a painting. The ink swirled through the air as if carried on a series of breezes, while the answering tendrils of color met each on head-on, parrying them. Sometimes color leeched from the tendrils, while soemtimes the ink was pushed away, spots of color infecting its monochrome.

The crowd oohed and aahed respectfully. Wu Hao frowned, though.

Was that all? Yes, it was beautiful. Yes, he supposed that if he was to face one of those clouds of poison then he'd have wound up dead or dying in instants, sometimes without even knowing it. Yes, the master was repelling them all and offering casual attacks of his own.

But that as all. It was all... relaxed. This wasn't a spar. It was more like a game, or a show.

This really was just an exhibition match. Wu Hao's earlier elation was dipping, instead to be replaced with a sense of disappointment.

"Warmed up?" Tang Shibai asked casually but loudly. With the twitch of a finger he summoned up more power, which he sent forward in another colorful cloud that rotted everything that it touched. Master Shu threw up a thin screen, white running through the inky black like veins but which were actually arrays. The poison sunk into it and was gone.

"Of course," Master Shu said, equally casually. Both of them cast a last look around the surroundings - the small clearing where they stood, away from all the plants and the people who were spectating. The barrier flared, as if he was checking just in case. "Are you?"

Tang Shibai laughed, and then they stopped holding back.

Color was ripped from the world as if it had never existed at all the moment Master Shu summoned his power. Only black and white remained, spreading outwards from Master Shu's feet like it was a relentless tide of ink washing away the world. Even above his head it extended until the night sky was nothing but a yawning void of endless black and even the moon was literally blotted out.

For the first time, Wu Hao realized that what he had always thought of as white in Master Shu's monochrome wasn't that. It wasn't white, it was simply the absence of anything else. Everything had been reduced to simplicity itself: either something or not-something.

In that void of black-and-white, though, a thin circle of color remained, centered around Tang Shibai's feet. The flashes of color that had always surrounded him were flashing more and more rapidly between shades that were deeper than the deepest blue, brighter than the sun, more purple than could exist in nature, and dozens more, even colors that were utterly impossible to describe.

Tang Shibai regarded the circle beneath his feet with some amusement.

"You've not left me much space to work with," he remarked. "It's fortunate that I don't need it."

His qi spiked, folded upon itself, and blasted outwards from the circle the moment that he extended a single finger. It formed a thin beam of power that lanced forward through the air, leaving a trace of power in its wake, somehow accumulating more and more as it went rather than dissipating. The power had a price, though, because wherever it touched the black bled away, turning the grass dessicated if not killing it outright.

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Master Shu didn't move as such. He was simply not there anymore when the beam cut through an inky silhouette that he'd left behind while reappearing out of nowhere a few steps further, his arms now extended at his side.

"That could have killed me," he complained, not with reproach but a faint hint of approval.

"I could have treated it anyway," Tang Shibai said. "That said, I do advise you dodge this one, old friend!"

Power erupted from him in waves that hurt the eyes to look at. It formed into several thin clusters of beams, which fired themselves at Master Shu. They curved in mid-air as if sentient, arriving even before Wu Hao had seen them depart at all: it was only by their traces that he could track where they'd gone at all.

They met a thick shield of blackness that Master Shu had summoned and were blasted apart into a fog of poison. Wu Hao stared at it, trying to imprint every single detail that he could onto his memory, while others were taking shelter behind the planters despite the barrier that was protecting everyone. The master's qi had stopped at the circle of white linen, leaving the inside a painter's tableau.

"Now how did you do that?" Tang Shibai asked, lowering his hand slightly in the middle of slinging more of those arrays. That which Wu Hao had taken to be a shield didn't dissipate at all, but instead kept hanging there, pulsing occasionally with a bizarre hum.

"The first law of Absence," Master Shu declared. "Being and non-being are intrinsically linked."

Tang Shibai frowned slightly. "You declared the space between you and me to be nothing?"

"Something like that," Master Shu responded. His tone was a little bit strained, for the first time, but there was a distinct undertone of pride. "It is no-space. Or un-space. There is no word for it yet. Void doesn't quite apply."

"That's a troublesome one," Tang Shibai said. His fingers didn't stop flicking, though, and flickering bursts of power went screaming silently across the glade, curving and trying to find ways around the no-space. They took bizarre paths, seeming almost to miss before abruptly bending in hard angles that looked unnatural.

None of it worked. They simply met small but deliberately placed pockets of no-space and vanished into nothingness, this time without even the chance to burst apart. Throughout the bombardement, Master Shu simply stood there, in constant movement but never taking a step. He seemed to be focusing deeply.

"Troublesome, troublesome," Tang Shibai repeated, studying the no-space. "Very well. Allow me to respond in kind. Take care, though."

Master Shu straightened his back and rose to his full height.

"Please," he said. "Show me."

Tang Shibai stepped forward slowly. His steps sunk into the earth slightly as if he weighted a ton, and his footprints sizzled and hissed with an acrid smoke. Twenty of Wu Hao's steps away from Master Shu, Tang Shibai stopped. The thin circle of his own power went with him, though where he had stood was now swallowed up by the dead unblack-white of dessicated grass.

"First law of the Sublime Poison," he declared. "What separates medicine and poison is dosage."

A blast of qi burned at the air as it spread, and though Master Shu caught it on his shields of no-space as he had all the other attacks, he still stared at it.

Then, out of nowhere, he suddenly coughed. It was surprisingly loud. It sounded only as if Master Shu had swallowed something he shouldn't have, not the serious cough of the ill or the dying. The polite cough of someone introducing themselves.

But even that was absurd. Master Shu was a Sovereign - the highest tier of martial artist. He neither had to eat nor sleep, as he himself had claimed a few times now. Wu Hao stared as Master Shu was caught in another spasm-inducing cough.

He held it back, though, and looked up at Tang Shibai.

"You've made me sick?" Master Shu asked.

"In a sense," Tang Shibai said, placing his hands behind his back again. More thin spikes of scintillating power pulsing feverishly manifested into the air, each concentrating into a single point that left ripples where they tore through the air. There was a thin note of exertion in his voice as well, now. "You're doing well to resist it."

Master Shu was seized by another cough, and this time when his hand came away from his mouth Wu Hao saw thin specks of blood on his skin, so small that he wouldn't have been able to see it if not for the monochrome of the world around them.

"To become a second-grade martial artist, you mixed and ate several Mountain's Breath Mushrooms, as well as a great deal of other ingredients," Tang Shibai remarked. "The tang's very clear to me. However, no two things are equal, no matter if they are of a common origin or not. I merely exploited the small differences in qi alignment between the mushrooms to unsettle your foundation. How does it feel?"

It took an inhale of breath before Master Shu could respond. His qi thrummed with power.

"Awful," he said, and smiled. "But, unfortunately, you forget something. I am not only a Sovereign, Patriarch."

Tang Shibai's smile stilled. His eyes flickered down to the circle of power around his feet which kept the monochrome at bay. Its lights flickered once, twice, and then Tang Shibai grinned boyishly, making no attempt to escape.

"Well done," he said warmly.

Then there was an immense eruption of qi that ripped itself from the ground where Tang Shibai had been standing. Only now did everyone else realize that an enormous set of threads had wormed their ways through the ground, burrowing into the shape of array that had been utterly invisible. The way that Tang Shibai had moved closer to expose his own ability to make Master Shu sick somehow - all of it must have been factored in.

Clods of earth exploded upwards, thrown so high into the air that for a moment grass met the clouds, before it came raining back down, only kept from splattering all of the visitors by a thin, shimmering barrier of black that rattled.

Wu Hao stared at the final array as it began to fray and distort in his senses. It was more intricate than anything he'd ever seen before, and Master Shu had crafted it while keeping the bulk of his attention on parrying the attacks that Tang Shibai had sent his way.

If he had stood there to take Master Shu's attack, he'd have been utterly destroyed in an instant. Tang Shibai reappeared out of a cloud of poison, only a little worse for wear. His hair had been ruffled slightly, if that.

Very little was left of the soil. A large crater, perfectly round, was carved into what had been an even stretch of grass.

"Well," Tang Shibai said cheerfully. "That was fun, Shu Renqing. You've earned your title."

Master Shu took a deep breath.

"Thank you," he said. "Although I'm still getting used to it."

"That comes with time," Tang Shibai stated. "Don't worry about it. Now that we've had our little exercise, though, what say you we get back to the banquet?"