Jiang Ding stayed in the Great Yin-Yang Sword Realm for another thousand-odd years.
He did little else during that time. Each day, he sought guidance from the Sun Sword Lord and discussed swordsmanship with the Lunar-Solar Sword Heir.
He spent the rest of his time cultivating, studying new sword techniques, and drawing insights from them to understand new cultivation arts. Like a man starving for knowledge, he enriched his foundations in the immortal path.
Among the texts he studied was the Great Yin-Yang Sword Realm's supreme classic, the Taiyin-Sun Sword Scripture.
The Sun Sword Lord had not withheld this inheritance earlier out of stinginess.
He had feared that the fully matured Taiyin-Taiyang Sword Dao would overwhelm and absorb the newborn Great Sun Sword Dao in an instant, robbing it of its identity and leaving behind a path that was neither one thing nor the other.
It would have neither the Great Sun Sword Dao's self-consuming destruction and unstoppable drive forward nor the Taiyin-Taiyang Sword Dao's mutually sustaining yin and yang and undying nature. It would be a creature with four mismatched limbs.
Now, the Sun Sword Lord judged that the Great Sun Sword Dao had reached sufficient heights to resist assimilation by the Taiyin-Taiyang Sword Dao, so he opened that inheritance to Jiang Ding as well.
Jiang Ding naturally returned a peach for a plum: he copied out the latest edition of the Great Sun Sword Scripture and placed it in the scripture repository.
Successive Great Sun Sword Lords had all revised the Great Sun Sword Scripture, and this generation was no exception.
This generation revised it far more frequently. Roughly every ten thousand years, the Great Sun Sword Scripture underwent enormous changes; the version from ten thousand years earlier was entirely different from the one that followed.
The young