When Wu Hao woke up, it wasn't where he'd expected to wake up - not in the woods somewhere, left behind between the dying, and not in a cage, being carried away for the theft of the Three-Seed Peaches and about to be locked in a jail.

  Instead, as his eyes cracked open, he was in an infirmary of sorts, laying on a bed. The walls were made of stone and wood, a faint odor of medicine permeated the entire room despite a window having been opened, looking out over a courtyard.

  Wu Hao blinked, then blinked again. Huh.

  Where was he? How was he here?

  Next to him someone stirred and Wu Hao shot upright reflexively, grasping around him for anything he could use as a weapon, and then a hand pressed him gently down to the bed again.

  "Take it easy," Old Qin said next to him.

  "Wbhuhh," Wu Hao managed, finding his mouth so dry he couldn't speak.

  "There's some water on the nightstand next to you."

  Blindly Wu Hao felt around before his hand smacked against the solid wood of the nightstand and a earthenware cup there, which sloshed around when he pulled it back to him, and it would be more accurate to say that he dumped it down his throat than he drank it.

  Old Qin adjusted a little in the seat next to the bed. Now that Wu Hao was more ready to take a look at him, he seemed somehow different. Before the attack, he'd looked the way he must always have looked - his wide shoulders had bent inwards slightly, what Wu Hao had considered simply to be the result of age. Now, though, he held himself in a more natural position, and he seemed somehow refreshed.

  He was wearing slightly different clothes, too. He was still wearing the same pants as always, even if they'd gone through a wash, and he'd gotten a new coat from somewhere. Wu Hao's brows furrowed when he saw that, feeling that there was something missing.

  "You're finally awake," Old Qin said, cheerfully. "Took you a while, huh? You've been out like a light ever since the attack."

  There was a flash of guilt in his expression, making it clear that his cheer was mostly put on.

  "I thought I'd been too late," Old Qin muttered. "But, well. The doctor here said you'd recover, provided you had enough bed rest. He did something that involved qi. It's a good thing that we took you here, he said, because otherwise things might have been more dicey."

  "What happened?" Wu Hao asked. He didn't really care about the treatment, although the idea that there might be ways to treat qi deprivation was shelved for later.

  "After you fainted, you mean?"

  Wu Hao nodded, though he'd have put it in different words.

  "Young Master Zhiyi about had a fit," Old Qin said. He scratched the back of his neck. "A bandit attack is honestly fairly rare, so to have one happen on his third expedition doesn't seem to bode all that well. No one died, but Chu Bidao might lose the leg."

  There was a flicker of spite that ran through Wu Hao at that. Serves him right, he thought. He didn't tell that to Old Qin, and though the man must have glimpsed something of it on his face he said nothing, either.

  "Where are we?" Wu Hao asked.

  "Our destination," Old Qin said. "One of the Jin Clan compounds. The Hebei branch, to be specific."

  Wu Hao turned his head to look out the window, to the courtyard. He saw expanses of well-kept grass and a massive garden in the distance, elegant stone paths curving neatly throughout multiple great halls, of which even a single one matched the Golden Lotus Company's main office, and he saw in the distance a gate so grand that three of him could have stood on each other's shoulders and still not reached the spike at its triangular top. The walls were thick and made of stone, and he saw small figures standing guard at the gates.

  "This is only a branch?" he asked, awed by the sheer scale of what he was seeing.

  Old Qin nodded.

  The Jin clan, huh. He'd met some of them - the men named Zunxin and Shizhen, last names unknown but presumably Jin. He supposed they'd been relatively helpful, though if he was to be honest each was annoying in their own ways.

  They were mainly merchants and mercenaries, if he remembered correctly. The Peng were involved in the night life, the Tang handled poisons, the Zhuge handled machinery and stratagems, and there were the Murong who were famous for their horses and their eyesight.

  "How'd we get here?" Wu Hao asked, sagging back.

  "You were transported in the carriage," Old Qin said. "Next to Chu Bidao and the young master, of course. When we arrived, though, the young master - well, there's really no easy way to say this..."

  He sighed, ran his hands through his stubble, and cast his eyes to the roof before he spoke again.

  "The Three-Seed Peaches were meant for the Third Mistress of the Jin clan," Old Qin said. "The Golden Lotus Company didn't buy them for her, you have to understand. She bought them, we - they - only had to transport them to her, and that's the service for which we were paid."

  Wu Hao tilted his head, frowning.

  "I don't understand. What does that have to do with me being here?"

  "It was a deal Young Master Zhiyi made," Old Qin finally said. "He negotiated a deal where they didn't have to pay for the peaches, but he needed something to sell them in the place of that. So..."

  "He sold my contract," Wu Hao said, the pieces clicking into place. "He sold me."

  He sat there for a long moment, stunned.

  "I was sold for three Three-Seed Peaches?" Wu Hao asked, disbelief still clear in his tone.

  "He sold my contract too," Old Qin said. He grinned, and there was something about it that struck Wu Hao. He stared at the old man again, eyes falling back to the new coat, and realized what was missing.

  The Golden Lotus Company's emblem was gone. Perhaps it had been ripped clean off when Liu Zhiyi had sold their contracts, perhaps he'd simply cast it away, but either way he couldn't wear it anymore.

  Anger spiked through him, heavy and fierce. He'd just escaped the fate of becoming a deathsworn, and now he was reduced to being a slave yet again?

  Old Qin sighed.

  "Wu Hao," he said, quietly. His tone was conciliatory, trying to soothe, but he just didn't understand. "Kid, listen. I know it's not ideal, but -"

  "Not ideal?" Wu Hao asked, turning his eyes on Old Qin. The volume of his voice rose, until he was nearly shouting. "It's not ideal that I was sold into slavery?"

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  "Hold on," Old Qin said. Again, his tone was quiet, soothing. He sat there, unflinching in the face of Wu Hao's anger. "Let me finish, kid. Shout at me as much as you like, but at least do it after understanding the what and the why."

  Wu Hao jerked his head into a sharp nod, trying to quell the anger that was crashing through him. But the more he thought about it, the angrier he became.

  "It is not slavery," Old Qin said. "Okay? It's just a debt you have to work off. Same as it always was. But it's a much lighter debt than what you've paid before. Your contract was until adulthood. That's, what? Five years from now, or until you pay off the costs of your food and education?"

  He put some extra disdain into the word "education".

  "Probably," Wu Hao said. "So?"

  "One of the Jin's martial artists earns enough to wipe out your entire debt in a month or two." "How much?"

  Old Qin named a number. Wu Hao blinked, made a few mental calculations. He was rusty on the basic sums and figures he'd been taught, but he stared at Old Qin. That couldn't be possible, right?

  "Then why all this talk about debt?" Wu Hao asked. "If they're so wealthy that they're paying that much?"

  "That's my point," Old Qin said. "Listen. Three-Seed Peaches mean nothing to the Jin. I think that should be clear enough, right? They're snacks and minor cultivation aids. It isn't about the peaches."

  "Then why buy out my contract?" Wu Hao asked again.

  "Your contract is worth less than the paper it was written on," Old Qin said bluntly. "But they're a family of merchants, boy. They're always looking for things of value, and they took the most valuable thing in the entire caravan at a massive discount. They want you, boy. Do you even know what you did?"

  He'd nearly died, that was what he'd done. Perhaps it had been better if he had died again. That way he could've tried to find a way past the bandits that didn't involve fighting and dying.

  "It was just bandits," he muttered. "You killed a bandit too, didn't you? I think even the others managed as much."

  "I," Old Qin said, "am a fully-grown man, an ex-soldier. I've been in fights before. I've been in kill-or-be-killed situations before. And I was armed with a spear. A weapon that I know how to use, even if I've failed to learn an Earth-tier martial art. Even then I was nearly speared through the belly, a few nights ago."

  It was possible to fail to learn an Earth-tier martial art? Wu Hao hadn't ever even heard that was possible. Then again, he supposed that if you weren't talented enough to even learn that, then you wouldn't survive the cullings to become a deathsworn, so he wouldn't ever have heard about anyone like that.

  But it made sense. If everyone could learn martial arts then everyone would.

  He was distantly aware that maybe he hadn't focused on the right thing, but it stuck out in his mind.

  "So?" Wu Hao said.

  "You were - are - a child with a knife. A weapon that you've never learned to use. You somehow knew enough about the peaches that you knew you not just what they were, and that you had to take them, but you also showed the sheer courage to go against an adult man two heads taller than me and managed to kill him and several others. With no more than a single goddamned fruit knife."

  Wu Hao blushed. Was that a compliment? From his perspective he hadn't really done much of anything too special. Yes, he'd killed a few men, but he'd killed before, as a deathsworn. All the others were expected to give their lives as well, so -

  Oh.

  He wasn't a deathsworn anymore. Let alone the bindings around his core, he didn't even have a core at the moment.

  "Well - " he said.

  "You are a genius," Old Qin said firmly. "A genius the likes of which shows up in the stories, not in real life."

  "I'm not -" Wu Hao protested. Why was the room suddenly so bizarrely hot? It felt like he was suffocating. He pulled at the collar of the robes they'd given him, but it didn't help. Old Qin grinned at Wu Hao.

  "You're a goddamned hero," Old Qin insisted. "Come on, kid. You swore up and down just a few days ago that you'd never learned martial arts."

  He had?

  "I told that to Lady Jin and she found that very interesting. In other words, it's not just me that thinks you're a genius. She must think it, too, or else she wouldn't have gone through the effort. Liu Zhiyi swore up and down that you were the greatest genius he'd ever seen and that your name Hao means intelligent."

  "It does?"

  "Fucked if I know," Old Qin said. "But it's going to have to."

  He spread his hands.

  "At least if you want to make the most of the chance you've been given," he said. "Because this is a chance, like it or not. There's a library just outside that houses more knowledge on martial arts than a man can learn in any single lifetime. The instructor here is a second-grade martial artist. A second-grade, boy! If you yourself become a second-grade martial artist you will live a life incomparable to that Liu Zhiyi and the like had planned for you."

  A tone of yearning had entered Old Qin's voice, but he broke off with a sigh.

  "You stand a chance of fulfilling every dream I've ever had," he said. "To soar among the clouds. To be among the best of men. To rise to the absolute top. Please, Wu Hao. Don't waste that chance. You nearly died for it."

  Wu Hao lay there. The anger had dissipated almost entirely, leaving nothing but a faint hollowness. What would his next steps be?

  As much as Old Qin had tried to portray the Jin as just merchants, Wu Hao knew better. If they paid him, then that would also mean that they expected things of him. Service, maybe even servility. If that was what they wanted then they'd have to beat it into him.

  Because, he realized, he could still run. There was nothing holding him back now, not even death.

  And in the meantime he'd get as much as he could out of the Jin. That was what he'd done with the Red Dawn Sect, too. He'd taken whatever he could take, and when there had been nothing left, he'd gotten away in the only way he could have.

  Wu Hao struggled to his feet.

  "Let me see Lady Jin," he demanded. Old Qin grinned and Wu Hao smiled awkwardly back.

  Because - loathe as he was to admit it - maybe, just maybe, Old Qin might have had a point.