In early spring of Sea Circle Calendar 1517, several months had passed since the forging of the divine weapon blanks began. Deep within Chang'an's imperial city, the Divine Arms Pavilion remained shrouded day and night in a hazy radiance and a faint humming. Chen Yu's T'ai A Sword blank and the weapon blanks of Guan Yu and the others already possessed their shapes and embodied their spirits, yet Mr. Ouye's words had been true-divine objects had spirits and needed to be nurtured with divine power and honed with the blood of battle. For these cold blanks to become living things that shared their masters' intentions and responded as naturally as their own limbs, they still needed to undergo the final and most crucial step: Spirit Awakening and Unsheathing.
In the forging grounds at the deepest part of the Divine Arms Pavilion, the Earthfire Furnace had gone out. In its place stood a huge circular platform. At its center, the T'ai A Sword blank hovered quietly in midair, slowly rotating.
Chen Yu sat quietly here for several hours every day. He held his hands on either side of the sword blank, Arceus's Power slowly flowing out like water-not ordinary Haki, but a strange energy containing the very essence of creation and order. Nurtured by this power, mysterious patterns faintly appeared on the sword blank's surface, drawing in and releasing the energy of the world as though it were breathing.
That day, Chen Yu sensed that the time had come. He dismissed his attendants and stood alone within the formation. He forced a drop of his heart's essence blood from his fingertip. Rather than bright red, it carried a faint golden sheen, containing tremendous vitality and Arceus's divine radiance of order. The blood fell onto the tiny crystal of Arceus's Power at