Sword Sweeps the Universe

The phrase "seeking the Way through slaughter" is no simple term; behind these four short characters lies an endless storm of blood and carnage.

If the Way is not attained, dying along the path is one thing, but if it is attained, it is truly a path to the heavens paved with corpses. Moreover, these corpses cannot be ordinary people; they must be true masters of swordsmanship, or even peerless powerhouses.

As for using the lives of ordinary people to sacrifice to the sword in order to hone killing intent and accumulate a murderous nature, there were many powerful figures in ancient times who used such methods to train the youth of their families.

However, facts have proven that swordsmanship honed in this way, while possessing a murderous nature and baleful aura, is far too weak. It may have a certain advantage when dealing with the weak, but when facing the strong, it collapses at the slightest touch.

The true meaning of seeking the Way through slaughter is to kill the strong to seek the Way, to find life within death, and to pursue self-transcendence in that split second between life and death, thereby surpassing oneself time and again to forge the ultimate sword.

Of course, such a sword also carries the danger of being so rigid that it easily snaps.

Throughout the five thousand years of the Yanhuang Celestial Dynasty, the essence of its civilization lies not in blind rigidity, nor in blind softness, but in finding a balance between the two, seeking a harmony of Yin and Yang.

But the transformation of Yin and Yang is easy to speak of, yet how difficult it is to truly achieve!

Most people have limited talent; to hack through the thorns and open a path, one must take an unconventional approach.

If one chooses the middle path, it will only result in something neither Yin nor Yang. True harmony of Yin and Yang is one sword, one thought; one thought, one sword. The path of the sword can be extremely masculine and rigid, or extremely feminine and soft, or even a fusion of Yin and Yang—being both at the extreme, and ascending to an even higher level.

Thus, throughout history, there have been no shortage of people who have walked the path of seeking the Way through slaughter. Many powerhouses have even successfully traversed this path.

Upon reaching the realm where one is so rigid that they break, they snap their own swords. Only after breaking can they truly affirm that they have reached the extreme of rigidity.

As for what follows, there are two possibilities.

One is to be crippled then and there, never again able to wield a sword as sharp as before.

The other is to be reborn from the ashes, for the demon to become a Buddha, for the Asura to lay down the butcher's knife and instantly become a Bodhisattva.

This latter type is terrifying to the extreme. From then on, there is no killing intent in the heart, nor in the sword; every move and every stance contains compassion.

Yet this compassion is by no means weakness; the path of the sword only becomes more lethal.

Because their swords have transformed from killing for the sake of killing into swords of compassion that kill to protect life, cutting away karma rather than cutting down people.

This is what is called using extreme softness to govern extreme rigidity.

And above this lies the essence of the five-thousand-year Yanhuang civilization: the sword of the middle path, where Yin and Yang are balanced.

The middle path is not mediocrity; it is the golden curve that perfectly divides Yin and Yang.

Once this sword is forged, one is both Buddha and Demon, and can also be the Daoist Ancestor. With one thought, compassion; with another, Asura. One acts as one pleases. It is no longer Yin governing Yang, nor Yang governing Yin, but "I" governing everything.

The reason why the Yanhuang of this world is powerful, with masters of swordsmanship emerging in endless succession throughout history, far surpassing those outside Yanhuang, is evident even from over a hundred years ago, when the allied forces of the great powers bombarded the national gates with artillery.

But what they faced afterward was the Western Expedition of eighty thousand Swordsmen.

Of course, these eighty thousand Swordsmen first swept through the Great Shun established by Li Zicheng and purged the imperial court. Out of respect for Li Zicheng's past contributions in saving Yanhuang from peril, they did not exterminate everyone, but only executed those who preyed upon the people and abused their power, leaving behind a bloodline that was still relatively clean.

Afterward, under the leadership of the founding Emperor Li Kaiyuan, they established a new dynasty. The new dynasty adopted a new system but took the ancient as its mandate, honoring Yanhuang as the primordial ancestor and naming it the Yanhuang Celestial Dynasty.

Swordsmanship is something that requires the spirit as a vessel to possess power.

Thus, Yanhuang has never had the concept that "kings and nobles are born of noble blood," because even if kings and nobles possess the best resources, no amount of resources can forge a powerful spirit.

Therefore, the corrupt Great Shun court had no power to resist those Swordsmen who were determined to save the nation, possessed of incredibly firm spiritual convictions, and filled with ideals and dreams.

In the past life, it was because the spirit was incredibly difficult to transform into tangible power that revolution was so arduous, but here, spirit is power!

This is also why the history of this world shares similarities with the world of the past life, yet contains many differences.

In history, once the internal situation was barely stabilized, Li Kaiyuan organized a coalition of eighty thousand Swordsmen. Relying on captured warships, they pointed their swords toward the West, slaughtering their way through, settling old scores and grievances.

Today, Yanhuang colonizes the entire world, drawing blood from the whole world to nourish itself, which has created the current prosperity of Yanhuang.

At the time of the founding, the population of Yanhuang was no more than forty billion, but today, it is nearly two hundred billion.

And such a massive population can still maintain an eight-hour workday, a two-day weekend, and high welfare where ordinary people can buy a house with ten years of wages, and dual-income households with five.

All of this is the foundation laid by that Western Expedition.

At the level of high-end martial power, the advantage brought by the depth of civilization is simply too great.

A spiritual civilization that is too short and shallow simply cannot produce the supreme powerhouses.

As for the so-called supreme powerhouses, that is the term used by Western nations for the myths of Yanhuang swordsmanship.

After the Primordial Spirit is forged, one can not only kill from a thousand paces away—and this "thousand paces" is not the thousand paces of an ordinary person, but the thousand paces of a Sword God.

One can also sense danger and avoid it without seeing or hearing it; the ultimate weapon of civilization's destruction, the nuclear bomb, is completely ineffective against them.

In the later stages of the Western Expedition, the West had already developed nuclear bombs, but they dared not use them at all.

Because if they didn't use them, they could just sign some treaties; if they did use them, the entire upper echelon would ascend to heaven to meet God.

The Sword God is truly a person who can rival a nation.

Therefore, such figures are called supreme powerhouses; they are things with more deterrent power than nuclear bombs.

Even if Western technology was superior to the Yanhuang of that time, things on the spiritual level are by no means cold data; their civilization's spiritual foundation could not support the birth of a supreme powerhouse.

"The backward get beaten"—here, this is reflected to the fullest.

This backwardness is the backwardness of spiritual civilization, the evil fruit of a history that is too short.

The more powerful the realm of the sword, the more it requires the support of philosophical dialectics.

Yanhuang is now vigorously promoting swordsmanship, also because it dares not fall behind. The spread of knowledge is always rapid; once the power of the supreme powerhouses was known, the whole world began to draw nourishment from the Yanhuang civilization.

If Yanhuang were to fall behind at this juncture, the consequences would be unimaginable.

As for why Great Shun chose to close its borders and follow the same path as Zhao Cheng's past life, the reason is quite simple.

It is a chronic ailment of feudal dynastic rulers; in fact, as early as the eighteenth century, the imperial palace already possessed sophisticated muskets and exquisite steam engines.

However, what the rulers feared was not the technology itself, but the belief that Western ideologies would undermine their reign.

After all, many Western nations did not have such a thing as an emperor.

Thus, the borders were closed and the country locked away; although there were top-tier experts capable of crossing the oceans single-handedly, they remained focused on the path of the sword while domestic affairs were stable, having no interest in lands without emperors—especially since the emperor could not reach them anyway.

It was not until the Western powers expanded and Great Shun had spent centuries rotting to the core, compounded by constant domestic natural and man-made disasters, that such turbulent times finally ignited the patriotic fervor of the Swordsman class.

Later, a formidable leader emerged to consolidate this power, which led to the subsequent events of purging the nation from within and sweeping across the globe from without.