The plump old man remained silent for a long time.
He remembered the years gone by.
His father, uncles, and other elders had fought and killed alongside the ancestor. They had sworn brotherhood and never failed one another. At their poorest, they would rather forgo their own cultivation than spend the money they were saving to buy the ancestor sword-forging materials.
No, that had not been their poorest hour.
In their fathers' and grandfathers' day, the Thunder-Yang Sword Sect had once run out of spirit stones altogether. They had gone bare-chested to hunt demons, served the Immortal Order like dogs, and risked their lives. Many brothers had died before they earned a single sum of spirit stones.
Sometimes they received no spirit stones at all. The cultivators of the Immortal Order were greedy and vicious, and withheld even the pay they owed them for risking their lives.
In the final battle before the Thunder-Yang Sword Sect became the Thunder-Yang Heaven Sword Realm, his father and the Light-Thunder Heavenly Lord's grandfather had died together. Along with many brothers, they had fallen just before the dawn.
Before his father died, he had told him to look after everyone's children, his little brothers. Blood ties meant nothing, his father had said. They were worth less than dogshit. The bonds between these brothers were what mattered.
The plump old man's gaze grew distant.
In the Spirit Transformation cultivator before him, he seemed to see the figures of his father and the others. Familiar faces appeared one after another, laughing as they gripped their swords and charged toward the battlefield without looking back.
"Why..."
"Little Radiant Thunder, why do this?"
The plump old man's voice was dry and somewhat hoarse. "With the ancestor here, with an expert unmatched under heaven, what do we have to