In a stretch of white mist, the young figure in black robes with a face like jade, seemed rather innocent and adrift.
A single strand of gu-thought, fine as a hair, had hooked itself onto the figure.
Master Wu felt a flicker of surprise. He had not expected, through the gu art, to trace the source of the karmic fate pattern so quickly.
He had thought it would cost a great deal more effort, yet it had gone unexpectedly smoothly.
"My arts of the Unorthodox path have truly improved a great deal... These years of bitter cultivation were not wasted," Master Wu thought.
In the Unorthodox, cultivation is often nothing more than years accumulated. The longer one lives and the longer one cultivates, the stronger one's attainment grows, and the more easily one handles sorcery.
Master Wu looked once more at Mo Hua's face. Young indeed, and somewhat green. His gaze was clear as flowing water, the sort one could see straight to the bottom of, and it still carried something dull and childish, as if he had not yet grown up.
This was the "fate-pattern manifestation" of a cultivator within his karmic fate.
It was not like a "divine sense avatar," which is whole, refined, and possessed clear self-awareness.
The manifested form within a cultivator's karmic fate is usually an illusory shape, born of all the karma gathered across that cultivator's past.
Such manifestations arise mostly without the cultivator's intent, and they differ widely in look and in form.
Different cultivators come from different origins and live through different experiences, so the image their karmic fate produces naturally differs.
Even the same person, at different ages, in different circumstances, in different states of mind, may show a greatly different fate-form.
But that was a secret of the Divine Path of a higher order still.
Just what relation binds a cultivator's heart, spirit, and fate is a secret of life that many Unorthodox cultivators, and even many old monsters of the Divine Path, spend their whole lives pursuing.
Master Wu did not understand it deeply either.
Even so, that a fate pattern could take "human form" meant this person's character was exceptional, and his divine sense would carry certain peculiar traits.
He might even have some roots in the Unorthodox.
Master Wu felt faint surprise at this, but recalling that the boy was a formation master, versed in formations, it was not so strange after all.
Master Wu studied the figure and spoke probingly, "Who are you?"
"Mo Hua" asked in return, "Who are you?"
It could converse... such spirit in it.
Master Wu asked again, "I am asking you."
Mo Hua also said, "I am asking you."
Master Wu frowned, thinking, why was this fate-pattern manifestation behaving like a fool? Could it only echo what it heard?
So Master Wu said: "I am... Venerable Green Face."
---
Mo Hua said nothing. He only looked quietly at Master Wu, the way one looks at an idiot.
Master Wu started, sensing something amiss. This manifestation did not merely echo. Could it also judge... that he was lying?
After turning it over a moment, Master Wu said, "I am Master Wu."
Mo Hua said, "I am Mo Hua."
Master Wu's eyes moved, and he grasped the trick of it at once.
To gain something, one must first give something.
To ask something, one must first answer something.
This was equivalent exchange, karmic recompense.
Whatever exists within a karmic fate rests upon the real, yet appears in illusory form.
Being illusory, it is by nature changeable, full of variables.
Each manifestation of karma has its own character and its own laws.
The fate-pattern manifestation before him had its own "rules": it observed the cycle of karma, and equivalent exchange.
From the standpoint of karma, this was reasonable. In fact it seemed almost too reasonable, too wedded to rules.
In this day and age, a karmic avatar so "reasonable" could only be found on such a green youth, one newly entered upon the path.
Those old venomous schemers of the Unorthodox, every last one, did all they could to poison their own karma, laying sinister snares within it, so that one careless step left you struck.
Still... Mo Hua?
Master Wu frowned, silently turning the name over in his heart, and sank into thought.
In these Divine Lands, which noble clan bore the surname Mo? What power of any standing was surnamed Mo?
And among the higher paths, no branch seemed to bear the surname Mo either.
Mo Hua...
Master Wu, full of doubt, recited the two characters of "Mo Hua" over and over, wholly unaware that the fate-pattern manifestation before him was watching him with an uncanny gaze.
As if bespelled, Master Wu kept repeating the name. Then his chest suddenly tightened, and he jerked his head up toward Mo Hua.
Yet the manifestation of Mo Hua before him had gone docile again, gaze clear, looking a little dull.
Master Wu turned the matter over, and then a thought stirred. He asked, "Have you ever cultivated the Unorthodox?"
Mo Hua asked in return, "Have you ever cultivated the Unorthodox?"
Master Wu nodded. "I have."
Mo Hua was silent a moment, then said, "I have."
Master Wu started at that. No, wait. This boy had truly cultivated the Unorthodox?
He asked at once, "How many years have you cultivated the Unorthodox?"
Mo Hua asked the same, "How many years have you cultivated the Unorthodox?"
Master Wu replied, "Fewer than three hundred years."
Mo Hua said, "Fewer than thirty years."
Master Wu frowned. Fewer than thirty years. At such a tender age, what could he have managed? He would be lucky to pass through the gate.
Master Wu asked, "Do you have a master?"
Mo Hua repeated the question once more.
Master Wu's eyes glinted, and he answered first, "My line comes from the remnants of the Southern Frontier. I took Immortal Wu Gong as my master, cultivated the Myriad Poison Gu arts of the Unorthodox path, and took Lady Myriad Spiders as my divine patron..."
Mo Hua seemed to understand, and asked, "Who is Lady Myriad Spiders?"
"Lady Myriad Spiders..." Master Wu paused, and at once sensed that something was wrong. The karmic question-and-answer of this manifestation seemed to have slipped its rules again.
Master Wu asked, low and grave, "Why are you no longer repeating me?"
Mo Hua countered, "Why should I repeat you?"
Master Wu's pupils narrowed. Something uncanny stirred in him. He asked again, "Your lineage... you have not yet answered me."
Mo Hua said, "In the Unorthodox path, I have no master."
Master Wu frowned, "No master, and still you could cultivate the Unorthodox?"
Mo Hua replied, "Only a little."
Master Wu asked, "How did you cultivate it?"
Mo Hua said, "Feeling my own way, picking things up here and there..."
Master Wu sneered inwardly and gave no answer either way.
Mo Hua pressed on, "This Lady Myriad Spiders you speak of, who is she, exactly... one of the great divine patrons?"
Master Wu's heart stirred slightly. He asked, "Why do you ask?"
Mo Hua said, "I am a devout and dutiful cultivator. Whenever I pass a temple, I pay my respects, and whenever I meet a god, I think to bow to them as well..."
Master Wu neither agreed nor disagreed. "Devotion is a good thing. A cultivator who lives must know reverence, and above all must respect gods and spirits, and those unknowable existences."
Mo Hua nodded, deeply agreeing. "Then could you take me to worship at Lady Myriad Spiders' temple?"
Master Wu asked again, "And once you have worshipped Lady Myriad Spiders, what do you intend to do?"
Mo Hua thought a moment, then said: "I would like to learn some Unorthodox sorcery. I do not know whether Lady Myriad Spiders would teach me."
Master Wu said, "You misunderstand. Gods are born with their divine powers; those are not 'learned' arts. Sorcery is meant for people to learn. It is the learning of men."
"I see..." Mo Hua looked rather disappointed, his expression falling.
A sharp light flashed through Master Wu's cloudy eyes, and he said slowly, "Lady Myriad Spiders does not know sorcery. But I do."
Mo Hua started, eyes brightening a little, and asked, "Then would you teach me sorcery?"
Master Wu nodded. "I can."
Joy crossed Mo Hua's face, and with it a trace of puzzlement. He asked, "But... why would you teach me sorcery?"
Master Wu looked long and deep at Mo Hua, and said, "Because I can see that you are a talent of the very highest order."
Mo Hua nodded, then said dubiously, "You can see that?"
Master Wu sighed, "Not only can I see that your innate divine sense is exceptional, I can see that you have rare gift for sorcery as well. A talent like yours, if he did not learn sorcery and never became a patriarch of the Unorthodox, would truly be a squandering of Heaven's gifts..."
Mo Hua was rather pleased. "Truly?"
Master Wu said sternly, "I am the master of Myriad Spiders Temple, inheritor of the Myriad Poison Gu Path, a Master of the Unorthodox. My word carries the weight of nine tripods. How would I deceive you?"
Delight showed on Mo Hua's face, a smile at the corner of his mouth, and he confirmed once more, "Master Wu, are you certain that you will teach me sorcery?"
Master Wu nodded. "I will teach you."
Mo Hua asked again, "You are not deceiving me?"
Master Wu replied, "If you don't believe me, I will teach you one technique right now."
Mo Hua's delight deepened. "Teach me what?"
Master Wu spread open one palm. "Look closely."
Mo Hua fixed his eyes on the palm. It was pale and withered, covered in poison blotches and gaps of missing flesh, as if it had been gnawed by venomous insects, the flesh mottled.
"What is this..." Mo Hua faltered.
Master Wu said, "This is the price of cultivating the Five Poisons Gu Art. But for the sake of the supreme wondrous arts of the Unorthodox, such backlash is not worth mentioning..."
Mo Hua nodded.
Master Wu said, "Hold still. Let me show you the true mystery of sorcery."
Mo Hua stood still.
Master Wu's withered old palm, mottled all over, pressed slowly against Mo Hua's forehead.
"The art I teach you now is a kind of Gu technique. It is called the Five Ghost Human-Face Curse-Slaying Art, an art in which five human-faced ghost spiders are refined into Gu insects, cruelly strangled, their curse-thoughts formed and fused into the five fingers..."
"When it is loosened, the five fingers become the curse. So long as one uses a karmic medium to seep the thought-power of the human-faced ghost spiders into another's sea of consciousness, one may curse him to death outright..."
"Just as I am doing now..."
The five fingers pressed to Mo Hua's forehead suddenly blackened, the nails bulging, the flesh rotting, and five ghost-faced spiders bored out of them, crawling along Mo Hua's forehead and drilling inward.
Mo Hua was dazed a moment before he said in dismay, "Master Wu... were you not going to teach me sorcery?"
"Am I not teaching you right now?"
"But..." Mo Hua's face began to pale. Black curse-thoughts bit through his forehead and burrowed toward his sea of consciousness. "I..."
Master Wu said, "If you do not taste it yourself, how will you know how strong and how vicious this curse art is?"
"What I teach you now is the swiftest way to grasp the Five Ghost Human-Face Curse-Slaying Art."
Black lines were already crawling over Mo Hua's face like black insects. He cried out, "You... mean to kill me?"
Master Wu shook his head. "Venerable Green Face truly is a fool. Not one word he says can be trusted."
"You are far, far cleverer than Venerable Green Face."
"You even knew to weave a false fate-body to deceive me."
"It is only a pity that your attainment is too shallow and your arts unrefined. In the end you showed too many flaws, and could not hide them from me..."
"To practice the arts of the Unorthodox, one needs an eye that tells true from false. How could a false body pass for real?"
Mo Hua's fate-form had been corrupted to the core. Its flesh rotted fiercely and black blood flowed, and it seemed about to die.
Mo Hua sighed again, "Why kill me, though?"
Mockery crossed Master Wu's face. "Blame yourself. Your learning was shallow and your attainment thin, yet you dared copy others and play at these little Unorthodox games..."
"To die beneath the Five Ghost Human-Face Curse is a blessing of its own. Keep a better memory in your next life."
Master Wu drove the final death-curse. From his five fingers black blood ran like spider silk, sinking wholly into Mo Hua's head.
Mo Hua was stained through and through with black blood, a dreadful sight.
He murmured, "Master Wu, I only meant it for your good... I was afraid that if you saw my true form, you would be frightened to death on the spot..."
Hearing this, Master Wu first froze, then only sneered.
What nonsense was this boy spouting.
Go to your death in peace.
The Five Ghost Human-Face Curse was indeed a terribly powerful art. Within a few breaths Mo Hua could speak no more, his whole body bleeding from its seven apertures under the curse, nothing of a human shape left to him.
So his false fate-body was "cursed to death," its karma shattered, leaving only an empty husk.
Master Wu shook his head. The five-poison hand pressed to Mo Hua's forehead clenched hard and crushed half of Mo Hua's skull.
The broken skull split, and in the warping void a gap tore open.
Master Wu's attainment was deep. He could judge that this false fate-body called Mo Hua was one with the true fate-body.
The boy had molded a false karmic body and wrapped it over his true fate, to bewilder others.
And the truth of karma lay hidden inside the false appearance.
Master Wu sneered. "Then let me see just what your true fate pattern looks like..."
With that he looked through the gap in Mo Hua's "skull," and the smile on his face stiffened at once.
He had not really seen anything.
Or rather, he had seen it, but his mind could not comprehend what it was looking at.
He was left with only a faint illusion, as though through Mo Hua's skull he had chanced to glance into an abyss, and glimpsed the unnameable embryo of chaos.
Master Wu felt only that he must be dreaming.
And no ordinary dream, but a nightmare, one he could never have imagined even in dreams in all his days, a nightmare of uttermost terror.
Master Wu's body began to shake.
---
In that moment he wanted nothing so much as to gouge out his own eyes.
And indeed he tried.
Not only within the karmic realm of fate.
In reality, in the great hall of Myriad Spiders Temple.
Venerable Green Face, who had been standing guard, saw Master Wu, hale and heart not a breath before, suddenly curl into a ball and begin to writhe.
The mighty Master Wu crawled across the floor like a maggot.
For a moment Venerable Green Face's mind could not take it in.
Before he could act, Master Wu's limbs twisted back on themselves like a spider's legs, bending and struggling, fingers clawing at his own eyeballs.
Venerable Green Face's face went white with alarm. Remembering the instructions Master Wu had given before the ritual, he stamped down at once, shattering the floor and every tile, crushing every Gu insect beneath the weight of his pressure, and forcibly broke the ritual.
Only after all this did Venerable Green Face walk to Master Wu's side and snap his limbs with his bare hands.
But snapping them did not seem to help.
Master Wu seemed as if he had turned to a puppet, his senses deranged. His broken limbs, twisted like braided rope, gathered toward the crown of his head, still trying to dig out his eyeballs.
As if he had seen something unclean, and his eyes could no longer bear to exist...