The screech of five hundred drawn flying swords rose in a piercing crescendo that shook through the granite bones of the Grand Defile.
Sword Elder Bai Chong stood with his boots planted firmly upon the mossy turf, his silver-and-white robes snapping like stiff sails in the gale of his own spiritual pressure. His right arm was held rigid at shoulder height. He pointed the tip of the Glory of Morning Frost directly at the low cedar table where Lin Xiao sat.
“Unfurl the Nine-Fold Sky-Cleaving Array!” Bai Chong commanded, his voice ringing with the cold power of three hundred years of traditional dominance. “Sever their spirit vein roots! Let the blood of the insolent wash the stone clean!”
Five hundred core students of Heavenly Sword Manor stepped forward in three linked echelons. With practiced, clockwork discipline, each fighter bit their right thumb, flicking a single droplet of vital blood onto the runic grooves of their hovering blades.
The response was instant and terrifying.
Five hundred blades of cold-forged starlight steel ignited with blinding golden light. The single auras twisted together like living cords of liquid bronze. It rose into the sky to form a rotating disc of golden sword-intent three hundred yards wide. The shearing vortex howled with faster-than-sound fury, pulling loose stones from the canyon floor and spinning them into fine gray powder before the blades even began their descent. The surrounding heat dropped as the razor-sharp metal-qi sliced through the humid morning mist. It condensed the water vapor into tiny falling slivers of frost.
Up on the floating flagship Sky-Cleaver, Grand Elder Xuan Ji leaned over the gold-trimmed rail, a thin, cruel smile parting his dry lips. “A textbook execution. Not even a mid-tier Nascent Soul shield could withstand five hundred timed together flying swords striking along the Nine-Fold ringing tones. The blue demon and that vagrant shall be minced into fish bait.”
Down in the meadow, Gu Qingfeng took another leisurely swig from his chipped wine gourd.
The old swordsman wiped his whiskered mouth with the frayed cuff of his green robe. That let out a satisfied, wine-scented belch that echoed faintly over the roar of the dropping blades. He didn’t summon a protective spirit barrier. He didn’t channel golden core light. He didn’t even drop his gourd.
Instead, he loosely twirled the slender willow twig between his index and middle fingers.
The twig was roughly thirty-two inches long, plucked that morning from a weeping willow that leaned over the safe hall’s koi pond. It had three small, tender green leaves near the tip, still sparkling with droplets of fresh dew.
“Five hundred swords,” Gu Qingfeng muttered, squinting up at the shrieking golden vortex that was now diving down from the clouds like a falling mountain of razor blades. “And every single boy is gripping his handle with enough tension to snap an ox tendon. Stiff shoulders. Rigid wrists. They teach them how to sharpen iron. But they never teach them how to let the wind pass through the boughs.”
“Brother Gu,” Lin Xiao called out from his table, casually pouring a splash of hot tea into a spare baked-clay cup. “Don’t break their swords if you can help it. Tie Shan said he could melt down any spares to make irrigation pipes for the melon patch, but Ling’er thinks intact swords make much better garden stakes for the climbing peas.”
“Garden stakes?” Gu Qingfeng snorted with a raspy chuckle. “Aye, they’ve got nice straight spines for snap peas. Let’s plant them neat, then.”
The golden sword storm hit the lower canopy.
Five hundred flying swords plunged downward at four times the speed of sound, their combined striking force exceeding millions of pounds of focused destructive intent. The air groaned under the sideways tearing force. It packed into a faster-than-sound blast wave that flattened shrubs fifty paces ahead of the strike.
Gu Qingfeng took half a step forward. His bare travel sandals settled quietly into the clover.
He raised the green willow twig.
He didn’t thrust. He didn’t block with opposing force. Instead, Gu Qingfeng allowed his wrist to relax fully, tracing a soft, languid circle in the empty space before his chest.
It looked like the absentminded gesture of an idle fisherman stirring the surface of a quiet millpond with a reed.
Yet the tip of that pliable green twig drew its gentle arc. Then, the deepest laws of motion in the Grand Defile seemed to warp. The roaring, linear fury of the dropping blades touched an invisible eddy of pure, ancient water-intent.
The first golden flying sword—a masterwork of folded star-iron traveling at blinding speed—struck the space an inch from the willow twig’s third leaf.
There was no ear-splitting clang of steel on steel. There was no explosion of spiritual spark.
Instead, the lethal forward driving force of the sword was caught in the rotating slipstream of Gu Qingfeng’s circular motion. The blade tilted three degrees, its flight path curving gracefully like a falling leaf trapped in an autumn whirlpool. With a smooth, soft whuff, the sword spun harmlessly around Gu Qingfeng’s shoulder, dropped toward the turf, and buried itself handle-deep into the soft black soil with a clean, muffled thunk.
Thunk.
Before Bai Chong could even blink, the second sword followed. Then the third. Then the tenth. Then the fiftieth.
Gu Qingfeng stood in the center of the downpour, his body swaying with the loose, rhythmic fluidity of a drunkard dancing at a country tavern. His green robe billowed around his ankles as his arm traced circles, spirals, and figure-eights with the willow branch. Each flick of the pliable wood met a screaming blade not with pushback, but with yielding guidance. He accepted their violent moving speed, redirected their angular driving force. Then he grounded their spiritual charge straight into the earth leyline.
Thunk-thunk-thunk!
The impacts came so rapidly they blended into a single nonstop, rhythmic drumbeat against the canyon turf. Blades plunged into the clover with clean, steady care. He stood perfectly upright, three inches apart. He shivered slightly as their excess metal-qi grounded out through the roots of wild thyme.
Elder Bai Chong’s pupils shrank to tiny pinpricks.
His fingers twitched wildly, forming the old family sword-recall hand seals. “Return! Sever the eddy! Sky-Cleaving Triad, disengage!”
Nothing happened.
The spiritual threads connecting the five hundred core students to their bonded weapons were not cut. Rather, they had been lulled into an inert ringing sleep. The swords stood planted in the dirt like iron cabbage stalks, humming a low, peaceful hum as the rich earth-qi of the forest absorbed their aggression.
Within four breaths, the sky was fully clear.
The shrieking golden vortex that had promised to grind the valley into powder was gone. The howling wind died away to a gentle morning breeze.
Surrounding Gu Qingfeng and Lin Xiao’s cedar table was a flawless, perfectly circular outer edge of five hundred gleaming golden flying swords, all planted handle-up in the grass, spaced exactly twelve inches apart like the world’s most expensive fancy garden fence.
Not a single blade was chipped. Not a single handle was bent.
And standing in the center of that shimmering steel ring, Gu Qingfeng held up the willow twig to inspect it against the sunlight.
All three tender green leaves were still attached. The single droplet of morning dew on the middle leaf had not even rolled off.
A crisp, semi-clear blue screen chimed into Lin Xiao’s spiritual sight:
Lin Xiao broke the stunned silence by setting down his teapot and clapping his hands in genuine appreciation.
“Splendid work, Brother Gu!” Lin Xiao said, beaming as he looked around the gleaming outer edge. “The spacing is remarkably even. If we run some hemp twine between the crossguards, we can train the climbing runner beans along the south side and put the morning glories on the north. It’ll look lovely by midsummer.”
Gu Qingfeng chuckled raspy. He tucked the willow twig behind his right ear like a carpenter storing an extra pencil. He picked up his cup of Cloud-Mist tea and took a slow, appreciative sip.
“The balance on these newer blades is a bit front-heavy,” the old swordsman remarked, smacking his lips. “Heavenly Sword Manor’s smiths have gotten lazy. They add too much solar gold to make the metal shine for the young masters. But it ruins the flex in a crosswind. A stiff blade makes for a stiff mind.”
Across the meadow, five hundred core students stood with their empty hands outstretched in the air, their fingers still frozen in hand-seal gestures.
Their jaws hung slack. Their eyes stared at the fence of their own old family weapons with the hollow, blank gaze of men whose very reality had just dissolved beneath their boots. These were the pride of the Eastern Training Sector. Students who had practiced the Nine-Fold Sky-Cleaving Array for fifty years in high mountain courtyards, slaughtering demonic beast packs and bringing entire mortal provinces to heel.
And an unwashed old drunkard had just planted their life-bound swords into the dirt with a piece of firewood.
Sword Elder Bai Chong stood frozen at the head of the formation, his own hand still raised. The Glory of Morning Frost was the only blade that had not joined the fence. It trembled in his white-knuckled grip as cold sweat soaked through his silk undergarments.
His gaze moved from the five hundred upright swords to the ragged green robe of the old drunkard, then traveled upward to the weathered face, the crooked nose, and the clear, mocking twinkle in those bloodshot eyes.
Bai Chong’s sword-heart cracked with a heard, psychic groan.
“That stance...” Bai Chong whispered, his voice cracking like dry kindling. “The Formless Eddy of the Boundless River... It can’t be. He died eighty years ago on the northern sea...”
Gu Qingfeng turned his head slightly. He peeked over his shoulder at the trembling Elder with a lazy, half-amused grin.
“Bai Chong, little nephew,” Gu Qingfeng murmured. His voice soft yet carried the weight of an ancient mountain range. “You still haven’t learned to relax your elbow when you draw from the left hip. Your old master told you that three hundred times before I left the mountain, didn’t he?”