As the pale silver light of dawn spilled over the northern ramparts of Sky-Border Pass. The five hundred thousand border citizens and rogue cultivators who had spent the night brewing [Cold Well-Water Reality Tea] looked up at the sky and froze.
Three hundred streaks of razor-sharp silver sword-light hung five hundred feet above the city gates like a forest of inverted icicles.
Every single one of those three hundred flying swords carried a white-robed Rank 5 Early Foundation Establishment Inner Disciple of the Supreme Sword Sect. At the head of the formation stood a tall, hawk-nosed old man in crimson-and-gold law-enforcement robes. His boots planted atop a thirty-foot flying bronze broadsword that radiated the suffocating pressure of Rank 5 High Foundation Establishment.
It was First Law-Enforcement Elder Zhao—the chief executioner of Supreme Sword Mountain, a man notorious across three border provinces for slaughtering an entire valley of rogue herb-diggers. A single stalk of spirit-ginseng had grown half an inch across the sect’s boundary marker.
Right beside Elder Zhao, propped up on a floating white-jade sedan chair carried by four sweating outer disciples, sat nineteen-year-old Holy Son Chu Tian.
Even though Chu Tian had washed the foul underground mud off his face and put on a fresh robe of embroidered white silk, his complexion was as greenish-gray as an unripe plum. Every time the mountain wind blew past his sedan chair, he winced and clutched the jade armrest to keep his cracked spine and slashed inner thigh from throbbing.
