After who knew how many games of chess, Qin Wangchuan finally learned this senior's name—
Shuyu.
An Ancient God.
Her slender hand brushed lightly over the chessboard, her starry eyes shifting slightly. "Just call me Yuniang."
The two had once used a Chess Game as their wager. If Qin Wangchuan won, Yuniang would acknowledge him as her master.
In the end, he won.
But in Qin Wangchuan's eyes, that wager did not count.
She had gone easy on him.
And not just a little.
Even if she was a sword from beyond the heavens, at her root, she was still merely an artifact.
A masterless artifact could not unleash its full strength, nor could it escape this rift of the Myriad Realms.
Yuniang said she had been trapped here for endless ages, so long that even the divine sword had dimmed and grown rusty.
At first, she would clean it from time to time. Yet the rust would return after fading, fade after returning, like loneliness she could not shake off. Later, she grew weary of it and simply let it climb along the Sword Spine, like scabs formed by the passing years.
When she occasionally trembled, even the sword cry had become hoarse, leaving only endless loneliness sighing in her throat.
She had once believed she would sit forever atop the sword tomb, watching coldly as countless cultivators collapsed along their Dao Path, until her spiritual light finally scattered in eternal solitude.
Yet Qin Wangchuan's arrival was like a Sword Light at daybreak, piercing through the endless night of Yuniang's long wait.
It had come a little earlier than expected, but fortunately—
He had done it.
At the peak of the sword tomb, gilded heavenly radiance poured down like a waterfall.
Next came preparations to comprehend the sword.
Yuniang