Chapter 19: Wusu’s Duck Sit

Truth be told, Wusu had never known what “sitting like a duck” meant; he’d tripped and fallen by accident, and Mina had teased him for it.

Wusu did know ducks.

Asimi Village raised them; quack-quack-quack, such a racket.

But they were white, and fiercely protective of their home.

Wusu lowered his head and patted his slippery knees.

Looked left.

Looked right.

Not a speck of duck to be seen.

His fingers brushed the tender skin of his knees, and both fingers and knees gave a sting; Wusu studied his sorry-looking fingers.

Climbing to the pillar’s crown, he had scraped raw all ten thin, tender fingers yet again.

While he climbed, Alyosha had seen the blood and couldn’t help asking Wusu why he wouldn’t simply let the vines carry him up.

Wusu puffed out his little chest. “Climb. Myself.”

A little bit proud.

The grass was good, and the flowers were good.

But Wusu was good too.

Things he could do, Wusu wanted to do himself.

With no one around, Wusu reached over and touched his scraped fingertips.

He’d meant to comfort himself, but left hand rubbing right, everything hurt.

All ten fingers were raw, the peeled skin even snagging on his knees.

Wusu said of himself, softly, in a small voice.

“So delicate.”

The players inside the temple came pouring out, hearts in throats at the quaking ground. Had the attack the game spoke of come early?

This game’s realism never let anyone down: if it said monster, then it truly was a monster, hideous beyond words. Back when the game first opened, who knew how many players it had scared off.

As of now, though, they didn’t have the first clue about any attacking monster.

“Wusu!”

Mina spotted the small figure sitting alone on the high perch at a glance.

“I’ll get you down!”

The dwarf lady was all action; she flung her stone behind her and made to pounce.

The stone cracked the Elf across the head.

Then Alesu picked her up.

The towering orc gave the little dwarf a shake. “No running off.”

Mina pursed her lips to argue, but Hugo was already a step ahead, calling up, “Is what’s happening to the pillar connected to Wusu?”

The delicate, little Wusu hummed. “Leave.”

Travelers could not stay here.

Too dangerous.

Wusu wrapped his arms around his small self and lifted his head.

Those jet-black, unclouded eyes seemed to churn with a soundless light and fire; through the layered lattice of branch and leaf, he seemed to gaze upon a world beyond.

Hugo wasted no words; one raised hand pulled the team back. Alesu, ever one to follow Hugo’s lead, hauled off the shrieking Mina, who was aching to scoop Wusu up and carry him off, and rushed the pair out of the ruins zone; the instant they emerged, the crowd gathered outside swallowed them.

Ignorant of the Eastern Han was getting worked up. “Did that NPC do something again?”

The Descendant of the Fire Dragon couldn’t be bothered with him; it was I Don’t Eat Eggplant who snorted coldly, “Want to know? Walk in and see for yourself.”

His head still throbbed where Mina’s stone had found it, and his trash-talk venom sprayed in every direction.

The orc had only just set Mina down when she seized the opening and sprang for the ruins.

Bang.

She might as well have hit a wall of invisible glass; her whole body went splat, sliding down.

That sound… it carried.

You could hear how much it hurt.

“Waaah, my little Susu doesn’t want me anymore…” Mina fake-sobbed.

The cold wind turned suddenly wild.

The Secluded Forest’s plummeting chill was bone-deep.

It felt like the forest’s earliest days again; no, more dead-still, colder even than then.

Alyosha: “Something’s wrong.”

She gripped the magic staff now in her hand; that shoulder-length carved staff shone faintly.

She wasn’t alone; most of the territory’s people had drawn their weapons under that inexplicable pressure, and every weapon with any real power to it glowed whether its owner willed it or not.

“Everyone, get inside!”

Through the shrieking cold wind, a resilient, forceful woman’s voice cut through: Alana Wolfe stood in a pale pink gown, sword drawn and waiting, the high collar fitted close against her fair skin, the hem streaming on the wind.

The grand knight’s rebuke and presence steadied the panicked crowd; the Blade of Light’s glow was like a steady anchor, calling back everyone stranded outside.

Once the last person had scuttled into the Adventurers’ Guild, Alana shoved the door shut without a moment’s hesitation, sealing the guild.

“Then what about Wusu?”

Mina had been dragged back by Alesu; seeing the grand knight seal the guild sent a jolt through her.

Her voice should never have carried that clearly in a guild this loud, but the moment Mina’s words landed, the guild, noisy as a market square, went abruptly silent.

Fewer than a hundred people, and every pair of eyes snapped to Alana.

The grand knight held the Blade of Light, which shed a steady, milky-white glow; its sharp, crystalline body was lovely to behold, and nothing in its look betrayed the years of blood its edge had drunk, or how it forever hungered for the next foe.

Alana swept her sword downward, quiet and forceful. “Anyone who steps one foot out that door dies!”

Under the grand knight’s pressure, the killing intent cut like frost.

Where her gaze passed, even the players gave ground.

Alana drove them inside to protect them.

But more than that, to keep an eye on them.

The grand knight had no idea what Wusu meant to do, but she knew this territory always held a few restless souls only too eager to poke at (read: take quests from) Wusu.

Not one of them would be allowed to hinder him.

The stones left behind by the Star Rainbow Light trembled.

In the ruins, gray-brown stones stood heaped at the foot of every pillar, small hills of rock shivering, liquefying without pause.

Solid mass compressed, twisted, and melted like water.

First single gray-brown droplets, then rivulets, then vast currents… Around every shattered giant pillar, a film of gray-brown wound and wound without end.

The wounds on Wusu’s fingers were closing fast.

Vitality without end drew upward, along Wusu’s shoulders, along Wusu’s wrists, along Wusu’s little toes, along the pillars, spreading up from the earth itself.

Dum.

Like a heartbeat.

Dum-dum.

Then a furious knocking.

The giant pillars rose as if raised by a nameless force and sank down roots; those ages-old broken scars were driven closed by the gray-brown liquid, by a vitality no eye could see nor hand touch, by Wusu.

First the faintest tracery of pattern.

Then power came pouring in.

Then light so bright it nearly split the Secluded Forest’s never-lit sky.

Wusu watched the light rise from the ruins.

He counted the pillars, very slowly.

One. Two. Three…

The cleanest, most upright light.

The world vast, the starfield deep.

Even the boundless corners of the continent seemed to feel that aura.

Pythia.

“What… what is that?”

In the West District, Emma came out the door with an armful of laundry to wash, staring in shock at the light stabbing through the heavens. Behind her, a little boy peeked out; Emma, brown hair spilling loose, remembered something, and that frail frame erupted with impossible strength as she shoved the boy back inside.

“Don’t come out!”

Lakeside Town.

Old Joseph was lecturing soft-hearted Mary yet again; she could never resist bringing strange people home.

“Mom, it’s so bright…”

Both turned toward the shuttered window; light spilled through the gaps and dropped to the floor, like rolling beads, like a heat wave. Clean, crystalline light, and yet no one could explain why they dared not come near it.

“What a light.”

“The light…”

“Where is it coming from?”

“What is going on with that light?”

They whispered.

They cried.

“It’s light!”

Meanwhile, at the Adventurers’ Guild.

A few players crowded the windows trying to film and photograph the sight for a forum livestream, but every shot came out blurred like a haunted photo, and at last they gave up.

The bellowing wind slapped ceaselessly at the guild’s doors and windows; the shrill din gnawed at the nerves, and even the thickest-skinned player could feel that indescribable, warped, uncanny sense of tearing.

So long as no one stepped outside, Alana let them carry on in silence.

That calm, powerful, graceful face won every heart.

Only the fingers gathered at her side, resting on the Blade of Light, trembled, just slightly.

The stronger one was, the more easily power devoured. Alana drew a deep breath, leaned against the cold door, tuned her body’s senses, and forced her mind quiet, refusing to hear what stirred outside.

In that raucous wind, something seemed to whisper.

An urging. A goading. A leaping pulse… A hunger for power.

“The light…”

The players by the window were the first to cry out, then the second, then the third.

The forest’s eternal black was torn open.

That grand, upright light sat so wrongly against the Secluded Forest, and within it, the pillars stood, one after another.

Wusu swung his little legs.

Vitality no eye could find surged on and on.

Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five…

That power, upholding a light bright enough to split the sky and run through the continent, was, to Wusu, seemingly the simplest of things.

Thirty-nine. Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two…

One hundred and thirty-eight.

A colonnade of intricately carved pillars stood in silent guard around the Divine Temple, no two pillars’ patterns alike, each bearing its own charm and meaning, while the few at the very center rose tallest of all, as if they carried some meaning all their own.

The dust settled.

The colonnade that had drunk and drunk of vitality went still.

[Temple Awakening Progress: 15]

Wusu patted his own head. “Wusu was good.”

On his quest log, a glaring [Complete] popped up.

Content, well-behaved Wusu readied himself to jump down from the pillar.

Something tugged his hem.

Wusu: Huh?

A timid, soft, sweet-tempered, and very quiet Little Tentacle had hold of Wusu.