Du Cang was breathing in shallow, ragged gasps that produced a wet, bubbling whistle in his chest.
His spotless crane-feather robes were shredded at the shoulders and stained black with clotted blood. His long silver hair, once clean as ice-slow ice, was matted with grime, sweat, and crushed rock dust. His right hand was curled into a claw. The fingers shook with intermittent nerve twitches as leftover static charge drained from his burnt movement nerves.
Three paces away, lying half-buried in the crushed gravel, was the Sky-Severing Void Blade.
The legendary weapon—feared by three ages of royal fighters and whispered of in taverns across seventy-two prefectures—was fully dead. Its matte black surface, which had once swallowed all reflected light and warped surrounding gravity, was now a dull, scratched gray, coated with a fine layer of crushed granite dust. The terrifying spatial distortion around its edge had vanished entirely. A common black mountain ant crawled across the flat of the blade without being harmed, its tiny antennae twitching in the morning air.
Lin Tao glanced at the weapon for less than two seconds before turning his full attention back to the dying master. In the calculus of survival, a dead weapon had zero work. Meanwhile, a living sovereign possessed office clearance codes. Its matte black surface, which had once swallowed all reflected light, was now a dull, scratched gray, coated with a fine layer of granite dust. The terrifying spatial distortion around its edge had vanished. A wandering mountain ant crawled…
