The wind sweeping across the Seventh Peak was cool, fresh, and free of ozone. The morning sun climbed above the eastern spires. It cast long, golden shadows across the sea of fallen steel that carpeted the valley below.
Du Cang lay upon the cold granite, his left eye staring up into the clear blue sky.
In five hundred years of life, he had never seen the sky above Sword Saint Mountain without the shimmer of his own hovering blades. For half a millennium, he had lived inside a cage of his own making, believing that his nine thousand spirit swords were a crown of divine power, when in truth they were a huge, exhausting weight holding his soul prisoner to the mountain rock.
“An echo...” Du Cang murmured, the words forming with huge effort in his blood-filled throat. “An echo must return to its source.”
“Yes,” Lin Tao said, preparing a silver pressure drop hollow tube. “If you shout into a canyon, you must wait for the sound to travel back before you shout again. If you shout ten thousand times in a single second, the sound waves collide, the air compresses. The cave roof collapses on your head.”
Du Cang closed his eye for a moment. He listened to the gentle hiss of the mountain breeze drifting through the crags. In all his hundreds of years of martial training, he had never truly listened to the mountain itself. He had listened only to the sound deep ring of his…
