The fifty severed sword-beams dissolved into harmless sparks across the glowing violet-silver grid of the five-kilometer Ninth-Thunder Abacus Domain.
Grandmaster Yan Beichen staggered on the glacier bridge, his eyes bulging with frantic terror above the wadded seventh booklet still jammed between his jaws.
The pulp romance pamphlet choked his spiritual breath. He clawed at the paper with one hand, but Sterling’s thunder-blade Qi had welded the mulberry fibers into an unbreakable plug.
Elder Sterling did not hesitate.
He took half a step forward on the sanded ice, his right wrist flicking in a silent horizontal cleave of his Spirit Domain Early thunder-blade.
His ancient steel longsword flashed once.
A solitary horizontal line of violet-silver thunder-light whispered through the air, clean and soundless.
The strike bisected Yan Beichen’s Tier 6 broadsword at its center and passed straight through the Sword-Preceptor’s dantian at the base of his spine.
