The golden-white flame laws blasted the flesh on his back into curling strips, leaving it charred black, yet his speed did not slow in the slightest.
By the time he charged before Yan Wuji, the flaming meteors behind him had already stopped falling.
Because the edge of his sword was already resting against Yan Wuji's shoulder.
That sword did not come down.
The sword tip hovered three inches from Yan Wuji's shoulder, its dark-silver sword light flickering in and out.
Yan Wuji looked at him.
"Why didn't you bring that sword down?"
"Because if I did, you would be dead."
Xiao Xuan's gaze was calm and resolute.
His voice was soft, but it carried absolute certainty.
The certainty that Yan Wuji would die beneath that single sword.
Yan Wuji held Xiao Xuan's wrist and looked into those pitch-black pupils, where the dust of years was slowly dispersing. The smile at the corner of his lips was gentle and certain.
"If you bring down that sword, you can let it go."
"The grievances of those fifteen people, the hatred of the Three Great Sects, the loneliness of wandering the Boundary Sea for thirty thousand years—you can cut them all away together."
"Because I am standing before you."
"What you see in me is a living person willing to walk beside you."
"Not the hatred that kept you alive until now."
Xiao Xuan's wrist stopped trembling in Yan Wuji's palm.
He lowered his head to look at the hand gripping his wrist. It was broad, scorching hot, and covered in calluses burned by blazing flames.
Then he raised his head and looked into Yan Wuji's eyes. There was no pity in them, no charity—only an open frankness, as direct as the blazing sun shining upon ice.
He suddenly withdrew the greatsword from