Another Way to Sharpen a Blade

Ink and an inkstone—those could be used to sharpen a blade?

For a moment, Du Chengfeng thought he had seen wrong. No matter how he looked at them, those two things had nothing to do with blades. Yet just as he was baffled, an aged hand picked up the Broken Horse saber.

The aged hand stroked the blade, just as Du Chengfeng had done moments ago.

After that initial appraisal, a brush touched the body of the saber.

Ink spread across the blade. The aged hand sent the brush dancing like dragons and snakes, and before long, the entire saber was covered in writing: a classic exhorting people to study.

Afterward, the Broken Horse saber was placed atop the inkstone.

Outside the window, the clear sound of reading aloud rose up.

There were small children reading, teenagers, young adults, even old men. Their voices were disorderly, yet strangely unified. Accompanied by that recitation, the Broken Horse saber, which was being steadily ground against the inkstone, gradually lost some of its murderous chill and gained a trace of bookish ink fragrance.

This saber was actually reading along with them.

At that moment, Du Chengfeng sensed it with incomparable clarity.

Yet it was precisely because he clutched at that sensation so fiercely that his already faint perception grew even blurrier—fortunately, before the vision fully faded, Du Chengfeng finally saw the last step of this sharpening process.

It was to wipe the ink from the blade with a book, then bow deeply to the Broken Horse saber.

"...That works too?"

Once he came back to himself, Du Chengfeng felt his head buzzing.

It was not that the perception had put any strain on his body. It was simply that what he had just sensed was far too abstract.

He could more or less understand those scenes, but when it came to sharpening blades, he could not make heads or tails of them.

"So ink replaced the water used to soak the whetstone, and the inkstone replaced the whetstone?"

Drawing on his own experience with sharpening blades, Du Chengfeng tried to make sense of it.

But that was as far as his understanding went. Whether it was the words written upon the blade, the reading outside the window, or that final deep bow, all of it lay beyond what he could comprehend.

Du Chengfeng could roughly guess that this might be some kind of blade-sharpening procedure, but why anyone would sharpen a blade in such a performance-art fashion was beyond him.

So he decided to try it himself.

"I should have bought brushes, right...?"

After turning boxes and chests upside down, Du Chengfeng finally found the brush, ink, paper, and inkstone he normally had no use for, buried at the very bottom of a crate.

Once he had ground the ink and loaded the brush, Du Chengfeng prepared to carry out the first step: writing. As for what to write, he could not remember. The Encouragement to Learning he had sensed just now differed quite a bit from the one he remembered, and never mind that version he had only skimmed over—even the Encouragement to Learning from his memories was not something he could recite.

So after thinking for a moment, Du Chengfeng decided to just write something at random first.

Then he picked up the heavy broadsword beside him.

It could not be helped. With handwriting as ugly as a dog's crawl, he truly could not fit many words onto the relatively slender Broken Horse saber. At hand, only this two-handed war blade with its comparatively broad body gave him enough room to write a few more strokes.

"So, we're brothers who know each other inside and out. You definitely won't mind, right?"

The heavy broadsword lay quietly in his hand, showing no sign of annoyance.

And Du Chengfeng began inscribing it.

"Before my bed, bright moonlight; I suspect it is frost upon the ground... I'm only testing the brush! What's the rush!"

Seeing the broadsword in his hand about to smash down onto his foot, Du Chengfeng hurriedly wiped away the ink with a rag, then wrote a few different lines.

"Ten paces, one man slain; a thousand miles, no trace left behind. When the deed is done, I brush off my sleeves and depart, hiding both body and name."

This time, the heavy broadsword did not come crashing down on his foot. Instead, it rested quietly in his hand, as though quite pleased with the inscription.

He had managed to muddle through the first step, so Du Chengfeng began preparing for the second. He could not produce the sound of many people reading aloud, mainly because he did not have that many people. It was not as if he could not call everyone from the Yang family over to read, but doing that in the middle of the night would be rather lacking in public decency.

After hesitating for a moment, Du Chengfeng decided to try reciting a couple of lines himself.

It was only an experiment, after all. Maybe it did not matter if the process was a little watered down.

"A Zhao knight wears a tasseled cap; a Wu hook shines bright as frost and snow. Silver saddle gleaming on a white horse, swift and sweeping like a shooting star..."

As he recited The Chivalrous Swordsman, one of the few poems he could still more or less remember, Du Chengfeng sharpened the heavy broadsword in his hand.

Come to think of it, this blade really did need sharpening. Although he had sharpened it not long ago, he had chopped down more than two hundred Hu men afterward. Even though that move, Butcher's Pig Dissection, allowed the blade to travel through the gaps between bones and thus protected its edge as much as possible, after cutting down over two hundred people in succession, some tiny, imperceptible hidden damage was unavoidable.

Yet during this round of grinding, Du Chengfeng vaguely felt that those imperceptible hidden wounds in the blade were gradually being repaired.

This made him pause. The situation before him had gone somewhat beyond common sense. After all, everyone knew that a blade only grew thinner the more it was sharpened. So-called edge sharpening was, put plainly, simply grinding away the old edge to reveal a new one.

Just as people were born, aged, fell ill, and died, blades often had their own limits as well. When the steel edge had been ground down nearly to nothing, when the entire blade could no longer be sharpened any further, then it was time for that blade to reach the end of its life.

Of course, when people faced aging, sickness, and death, they could still fill prescriptions or nourish themselves with tonics, perhaps dragging themselves through that fatal trial. But could a blade forged of steel do the same?

"It can! It really can!"

The more he sharpened, the more alarmed Du Chengfeng became.

Sharpening should have worn down the steel edge, yet the heavy broadsword in his hand seemed to have received some sort of nourishment. Not only had the rolled edges and chips returned to normal, but the edge itself even seemed to have grown sharper.

Du Chengfeng lifted the broadsword and lightly tested its edge.

Before his finger had even brushed against the blade, a line of blood had already seeped out.

"Then comes the final step..."

Though doubt still lingered in his heart, Du Chengfeng began recalling the process he had just witnessed and prepared to finish it.

If he had to wipe the blade with a book... he did not have one. How could a rural market possibly sell something as precious as books? He could perform the bow afterward, but after looking at the broadsword in his hand, Du Chengfeng felt that this blade, which already knew him inside and out, did not need him to bow to it at all.

On the contrary, he felt that what this broadsword needed right now was wine.

Thanks to Chu Shi Ru Jian for the recommendation ticket and monthly ticket; thanks to Book Friend 20200420203612765 for the monthly ticket; thanks to Guan Qi Bu Yu_dA, Guo Qu De Bei Ying, Book Friend 20200620150917175, Hai Shan Shu You Jun, and xiaoxyy for the recommendation tickets. Thank you all for your encouragement and support. Also: please recommend and save the new book. If everyone can keep following along, that would be even better. Du Kang offers his thanks.