Tier 3: The Deep Mountain Soak was carved into a natural recess of dark stone, sheltered beneath an overhanging row of stone pillars of ancient storm-cedar beams.
Here, the water heat held steady at forty-one point five degrees of deep, piercing warmth. It was the pool preferred by those whose bones carried the heavy, deep-seated ache of hundreds of years. Fighters whose marrow had been chilled by ancient frost techniques, old warriors whose joints had been stiffened by thousands of leagues of marching, and masters whose spirits had spent decades strung as tight as bowstrings.
Underwater to his collarbones in the steaming stone basin, his unkempt gray hair tied loosely with a simple strip of washed hemp, sat Gu Qingfeng.
The legendary Sword Saint of the Azure Realm, a man whose formless blade-intent had once split sky-galleons and deflected divine lightning arrays, was doing absolutely nothing.
His patched, frayed gray daoist robes—clothes that had weathered five hundred years of blood, wind, and sect vendettas—lay neatly folded upon a dry cedar bench several paces away. Beside him, resting flat upon the smooth storm-cedar rim of the pool, was his weapon: an ordinary, eight-inch willow twig. The little piece of wood was dark and damp from the water drops, fully empty of the terrifying, world-severing sword-light that had once made supreme sect patriarchs tremble in their golden boots.
