High above the Sixth Peak, floating upon his lotus of sword intent, Supreme Sword Saint Du Cang felt the first tremor in his soul.
It didn’t arrive as an external impact. It wasn’t a physical blow struck against his chest or a spiritual magic charm exploding against his defensive aura. It originated from within—deep inside the core of his Sea of Mind. There, the five-hundred-year-old root thread of his sword Dao was anchored.
A sharp, needle-like pain stabbed behind his left eye.
Du Cang gasped, his hands reflexively clutching his temples. His golden robes flared with uneven bursts of silver light as his spiritual spirit veins experienced a sudden, violent surge of reverse pressure. The air around him churned with unstable vortex drafts, throwing his crane-white hair into wild disarray.
“What... What’s this?” the Sword Saint muttered, his high-born voice trembling with genuine disorientation.
In his mind’s eye, where he normally saw the nine thousand blades of his domain as a calm, orderly star-pattern of stars moving in harmonious sky-high paths, the star-pattern had gone mad.
At the center of the formation, two stars were flickering at an impossible, blistering speed. Pulsing thousands of times every second, their light bleeding into each other until they formed a blinding knot of white-hot spiritual friction. Around this central knot, hundreds of other stars were being dragged into the frenzy, their sky-high paths collapsing inward as they repeatedly queried the central pair for navigational map points.
