"Too soon." He uttered the two syllables softly, with chilling authority, yet his voice came from every direction, as though fused with the Sword Sensibility of the entire mountain interior.
Shi Shaosheng held his fully drawn sword, his aged face cold as ice. "Who are you?"
That strangely icy authority clearly did not belong to the junior brother who had bid him farewell and entered the mountain ten years ago. He had been extreme yet passionate, the stubborn streak in his bones plain on his face, nothing like this demon's cold, downward gaze.
The man on the platform gave two cold, low chuckles. It was hard to imagine someone with the majesty of a ghost king displaying his feelings this way, but perhaps he truly had suppressed them for too long. "Stealthily Treading the Hidden... it has been twenty years."
With a long, hoarse sigh, the boiling Sword Sensibility within the mountain abruptly all but soared.
The peak masters simultaneously clenched their sword hilts, their bodies taut as iron as they watched their surroundings. This was no longer a scent or boiling water, but magma erupting with a furious roar. Something... something enormous was awakening.
Outside the mountain, in places beyond their sight-beneath the thick, cold mist at the rear cliff of the Law Enforcement Hall, at the bottom of icy streams in the ravines, within rocks, between graceful peaks, deep in the forests-throughout Kongtong, bright, cold swords slowly emerged. They had existed in concealment for twenty years, and now revealed their forms to the world.
They had already been roaming the landscape according to the harmonies of heaven and earth. Now they all joined the orderly waterways of the Five Peaks Lotus Heart, sharp, cold, gleaming white fish flashing past along the streambeds.
And the center outlined by this