Past midnight, the lamps in the Long Willow Inn went out one by one.
The drinking games downstairs had long since fallen silent, and the kitchen stoves had been shut down.
A Pacification Guard stood at each end of the corridor outside Yi Yang's room. They changed shifts during the fourth watch, their sabers resting against their hips. No one passing his door could escape their eyes.
Inside Yi Yang's room, Tiger Roar stood upright beside the bed, its blade wrapped in coarse hemp cloth.
He sat cross-legged on the bed, both hands resting on his knees.
His breaths alternated between long and short, their rhythm steady.
Yi Yang had not gone to sleep. He was making the most of his time to cultivate, seizing every chance to grow stronger.
At that moment, his mental power extended from between his brows, contained within three zhang of the room.
Deep within his spiritual altar, the Golden-Furred Ape opened its eyes, scratched behind one ear, and flicked its tail twice.
The patterns on the Beastskin Paper were broken down anew.
The ape flicked its tail twice behind it, darted from a corner of his sea of consciousness to the center, and rested its forepaws on its knees. Tilting its head, it watched the phantom saber momentum woven by Yi Yang's mental power.
The Four Symbols Six Directions Saber.
The Azure Dragon belonged to spring, its momentum long and unbroken.
Yi Yang guided his mental power along the flow of the first symbol's qi.
Seventy-two nodes lit up in sequence. With each one, the phantom saber momentum in his sea of consciousness grew more solid. When he reached the thirty-ninth node, a slight deviation appeared in the qi accumulated earlier, and the phantom began to blur from its middle.
Rather than force his