Old Wu narrowed his eyes and instinctively looked up at the roof beam.
He found nothing unusual.
But he noticed something: at some point, a black cat had crouched in the alley outside.
The cat did not have a single stray hair on its body. It was black from head to toe, save for its amber eyes, which stared straight at him.
These days, stray cats and dogs filled the streets. After the Red Moon, many people had died, and plenty of beasts had survived. It was nothing unusual.
"Where did this stray cat come from?"
Old Wu met the black cat's gaze for a moment, then looked away toward the windowsill.
A sword lay across it.
This sword had been in his hands for a full three years.
Three years ago, he had spent a fortune buying it from a Rogue Cultivator, thinking he had stumbled upon a massive bargain.
A hiltless flying sword, black all over, seemingly formed by nature itself.
No matter how he looked at it, it did not seem like an ordinary item.
Later, he sought out several knowledgeable cultivators to appraise it, but not a single one was willing to make an offer.
He had tried blood-binding it as his master and refining it by every method he knew. None of it worked.
The sword was like a dead thing, yet not an ordinary dead thing.
Old Wu could not put that feeling into words.
Sometimes, when he could not sleep in the middle of the night, moonlight would stream through the window and fall across the blade, and he would feel as though the sword were breathing.
But he had once thought it was merely his imagination. Yet after it happened too many times, even he began to doubt himself.
He had been