Du Cang’s composure cracked like brittle glaze on an overfired fine china vase.
For five hundred years, his name had been spoken with hushed respect across the seventy-two prefectures of the Central Plains. Sect elders paid tribute in tons of refined spiritual jade merely for the privilege of observing his morning practice. Yet here, upon the sacred stones of Sword Saint Mountain, an uncultivated laborer and an empty-dantian vagrant had casually brushed aside his Void-Seeking Trigram as if shooing away mountain flies.
“Demonic insolence,” Du Cang hissed. His voice dropped an octave into a deep-throated, shaking roar that rang with the earth-shaking plates beneath the mountain range. “You mock the divine art of the sword? You treat the Dao of Heaven like carpentry?”
The Sword Saint swept both wide sleeves outward.
Above the Nine-Peak Proving Grounds, the silver dome of nine thousand hovering swords flared with terrifying, blinding intensity. The gentle ringing hum of fourteen kilohertz transformed into a shrieking gale of sound violence that shattered the rime ice from every cliff face within three leagues.
Five hundred blades from the tertiary sky-high ring detached at the same time.
They didn’t form an echelon. They didn’t dive toward Lin Tao’s ledge. Instead, they lined up themselves in a terrifying, nonstop level line that stretched five hundred paces across the sky, their edges linked like the teeth of a titanic lumberjack’s saw.
