"What grand spirit!"
Hong Qianqiu emphasized it again. Yu Ci narrowed his eyes as he listened, finding the scene rather evocative: atop a lonely, frigid peak, a half-drunk burly man pointed out the lay of the land, his deep voice seeming capable of piercing twenty thousand years of distance. The only pity was that his words carried no small measure of sarcasm:
"Eight thousand sword cultivators—their soaring sword lights became a rainbow stretching ten thousand miles, crossing an endlessly vast distance. And what was the result? Heh heh, wasn't it just broken halberds sinking into the sand? Of the eight thousand finest sword cultivators, not even one in ten escaped back to the eastern bank of Sky Rift Gorge. Even among those few hundred, more than half were too ashamed to return east. They stayed behind in the Duanjie Mountain Range, petitioned our sect for a plot of land, and entered sealed cultivation there until death..."
"Hey, you can't be so cutting with your words!"
Li You slammed the wine flask in his hand, his face full of displeasure. "What do you mean, 'escaped back'? What do you mean, 'too ashamed to return east'? They launched an expedition against the Boundless Buddhist Kingdom, eight thousand sword cultivators against hundreds of millions of Buddhist soldiers. They fought bloody battles for a hundred days and turned that Glass Pure Land into an Avici Hell. In the end, if the Buddhist sect hadn't staked its very fortune, paying the price of thirteen ancient Buddhas perishing together to shatter the Six Paths Samsara, evolve three thousand worlds, and cast seventeen Sword Immortals into the Land of Eternal Damnation... could they have won?"
"Even if they lost, Senior Yuan Dao alone stayed behind to cover the retreat. Wielding the Xuan Huang Killing Sword, he swept