Chapter 18

A moment later.

Lin Sheng sat in the kitchen, carefully examining the Black Sword he had taken from the Rotten Swordsman.

The Black Sword was about an arm's length long and a palm's width across. Its surface had a smooth, glasslike coating, and its hilt had a black crossguard. Like the silver longsword from before, it had a cruciform blade.

Near the hilt, a vertical-pupil mark sat in the middle of the blade.

It was exactly the same as the one on the silver longsword.

"Looks like that Rotten Swordsman was probably Ravel." Having seen a few fragments of memory, Lin Sheng could more or less identify him.

"The craziest part is, I can actually absorb someone else's memories!?" He reached out, grasped the Black Sword's hilt, and lifted it gently.

The Black Sword was a little heavier than the silver longsword—about one and a half times its weight.

Lin Sheng held it and gave it a few light swings. To his surprise, it felt just right in his hand.

A strange familiarity stirred in him. He steadied his grip, and his muscles seemed to draw strength from one another. Power flowed from his legs to his waist and abdomen, then through his shoulders and arms, as he thrust forward with all his might.

Whoosh!

The Black Sword shot forward in an instant, tracing a black line as it pierced the air ahead with precision and control, making a faint whistling sound.

"??!" Lin Sheng stiffened. "What's going on?"

The way he had just thrust the sword had been utterly smooth, almost instinctive, without the slightest hesitation.

It was as if he had practiced it countless times.

After a pause, Lin Sheng swung the sword again, trying out some other movements.

But no matter how wildly he swung it, he felt nothing from any of the movements except that first thrust.

So he decided to practice the thrust instead.

As he practiced over and over, faint whistling sounds rang through the kitchen.

He could tell that the move was definitely powerful.

"Wait! This feels a lot like the move that Rotten Swordsman used!"

Lin Sheng had died to that thrust. Now, as he practiced it repeatedly, it began to feel familiar.

Whoosh!

He thrust forward again.

It was a simple, basic move, but when he put his whole body into it, it was far more powerful than any basic move should have been.

"The target is the same, too: the left side of the chest, right over the heart."

Thinking back to the memory fragments he had seen, Lin Sheng had a vague feeling that this might be the Rotten Swordsman's final bodily memory.

"If I could get fragments of the Rotten Swordsman's memories, then getting his body's memories isn't that hard to accept. It's all happening in a dream, after all. Anything's possible."

Lin Sheng steadied himself, then quickly began to enjoy the feeling of suddenly becoming much stronger.

Holding the Black Sword, he walked slowly out of the kitchen and checked the Rotten Swordsman's corpse in the hall again. Once he was sure nothing was amiss, he grabbed the corpse by its clothes, dragged it outside, and shut the door, sliding the bolt into place.

There was no water in the manor, so Lin Sheng used a curtain as a rag and scrubbed the black blood off his hands.

Only then did he return to the study, sit down, and prepare to continue memorizing the swordsmanship manual.

But not long after sitting down, he was surprised to find that he understood a few groups of words in the manual.

By combining the context with the illustrations, he could even guess his way through some pages and make out their general meaning.

"It has to be because I just absorbed Ravel's fragmented memories!" Lin Sheng was overjoyed. Killing a monster that had once been human in his dream had even brought him this kind of benefit.

He immediately began skimming through the book.

Before long, he had finished scanning the entire swordsmanship manual. As he had suspected, it contained pitifully little about swordsmanship.

Only a few pages with illustrations mentioned Ravel's signature sword technique: Angry Strike.

Lin Sheng used the text around those pages to get a rough idea of what they said.

"Rather than being Ravel's signature technique, Angry Strike is just a common longsword technique. Ravel was simply very good at using it, which is why he became famous for it."

He turned the pages, his eyes moving over the text.

"This book calls itself a swordsmanship manual, but aside from briefly mentioning a few methods of practicing sword techniques, most of it is about Ravel's travels, battles, and experiences. Most of it is just him bragging and exaggerating."

Lin Sheng shook his head and put the book down. Now that he had a few of Ravel's memories, he could at least recognize quite a few words in the books he had studied for so long.

He stood up and scanned the bookshelves again.

Soon, he found another book he could read.

Unlike the other hefty volumes, it had nothing on its cover. When he opened it, he found that only the first half had any writing, most of it in a hurried scrawl.

Lin Sheng carefully turned to the first page and began reading.

"Looks like a journal?"

At the top of the first page, line after line of writing was faintly visible.

".The sky has gone dark again. Tang En came again."

"He plans to leave this place and look for a way to get help. But it's already too late to turn things around. If he leaves, the consequences will be even more terrifying."

Below that was a blurred line of writing, too indistinct to make out.

Lin Sheng simply turned to the second page.

"The nights are growing longer, and the wind is growing colder. Tang En has left. My last and dearest friend, I hope you'll be safe."

The words and phrases were simple, so Lin Sheng found the journal surprisingly easy to read.

He began turning the pages and browsing through them.

"I'm old, and my strength is fading fast. Baoli has grown up, too. Today, she knocked my sword away for the first time. I'm very pleased."

"More and more of the manor's chickens and ducks have been disappearing lately. I don't know if they're dead or if something else happened to them."

".The wind is about to freeze over."

"I wish everything could go back to the way it was."

As he turned the pages, Lin Sheng noticed that aside from the parts he couldn't read, most of the journal recorded everyday life.

It was all about the little things in the daily lives of Ravel and his granddaughter, Baoli.

But it seemed that some immense danger in the outside world was steadily drawing closer.

A faint sense of despair and oppression showed through between the lines of Ravel's writing.

He kept turning the pages until he soon reached the last few that were still legible.

"Something happened to the patrol troops in Black Feather City, too? Even the last bastion has... There's no hope left. Looks like I'll have to go to LS Bell to get my new sword. The old longsword can barely hold up anymore."

"Baoli will be all right. With my Sergeant Armor protecting her, she'll definitely be able to escape safely."

After that, the writing grew blurred, and he couldn't make out anything.

Lin Sheng frowned.

From this journal, he had learned a few important things.

First, this place was probably somewhere called Black Feather City.

Second, the place where Ravel had gone to get his sword was called LS Bell. It was probably somewhere that specialized in buying and selling weapons. Maybe he could find some protective gear there.

After spending a week checking in at the club, Lin Sheng was no longer completely ignorant about weapons and gear like these.

He had also looked up information online, so he knew exactly how much a full set of good armor could improve one's chances of survival in an era of cold weapons.

"Black Feather City. LS Bell." Lin Sheng felt that this dream was growing more and more realistic. And more and more interesting.

He could hardly wait to find out what had happened in Black Feather City, and why Ravel had gone from being a second-level swordsman to the rotten monster he was now.