The moment Pan Long stepped forward, the middle-aged man surnamed Ma went pale.
No one else present knew why he had waited until Jin the Master of Ceremonies asked for objections one last time before the Golden Basin Retirement. He had not been waiting for the right moment. He had been afraid.
Or rather, the Demon Blade had been afraid.
The Demon Blade had a spirit. Before they came to Kindness to Others Manor, it had been raring to go, thirsting for slaughter and blood. It had taken nearly every ounce of his willpower to keep the blade from leaping out of its sheath and massacring every living thing around it.
His secret method for forging the Blood-Sacrificing Demon Blade was incomplete. The instructions for sacrificing to the blade lacked nothing, but those for controlling it were only partly intact. That was why he had chosen to kill his own blood relatives, forging the blade with the blood and lives of people bound to him by blood.
Had the method of control been complete, he would have slaughtered hundreds or thousands of people and built a blood pool for the sacrifice.
According to the method, sacrificing to the blade with a blood pool was the orthodox approach. Using blood relatives was a last resort, with nothing to recommend it except that it made the blade somewhat easier to control. A true Blood-Sacrificing Demon Blade could snatch chestnuts from the fire amid a war between two nations. Once fully forged, even a True Person Grandmaster could do nothing against it. How could it end up as pathetic as his?
Yet even incomplete, the Demon Blade brimmed with savage killing intent. Its spirit constantly stirred, wanting nothing but to kill.
To keep his secret from getting out, he had spent the past