Epigraph: Enthralling Spirit Prelude-Jin Dynasty: Wang Zhe
In idle moments I roamed, unhindered. Alone I gazed at Brocade Waves and Green Dai. Turning back, I suddenly saw beyond the Wildwood.
A little heap of skulls lay amid green sedge. Who presided over their lonely misery, arranging rites for them? In vain they flaunted their two wide eyes, clogged with dust.
Rain drenched them, wind blew upon them, sun scorched them, and starlight faced them. As karma turned, burden upon burden accrued. In this foreign land, guests from what place, from what age?
Having encountered the Enthralling Spirit Prelude, what could they do?
(Wang Zhe seems to be Wang Chongyang... er...)
Heavenly Light Peak Summit was very quiet.
The clouds that had drifted toward the other peaks gathered back together, as pale as Zhao Layue's face.
She had fallen before Fang Jingtian's sword.
Strictly speaking, Fang Jingtian had not drawn his sword, because she had not drawn hers either.
Nobody thought Zhao Layue had overestimated herself, nor did anyone dare look down on her-even without the Unthought Sword beside her, she had still displayed an extraordinarily powerful, even terrifying mastery of the Sword Dao. That was what made the acquired formless-body sword so frightening.
Any other powerful cultivator at the sea-breaking peak might not have been her match at that moment.
The problem was that Fang Jingtian was a Great Figure of the heaven-connecting realm, already beyond the mundane, towering above the sea of clouds.
There was little blood on the summit, because Zhao Layue had already shed too much on the snowfield a few days earlier, and because Fang Jingtian could not possibly strike with his full strength.
First, his status demanded it; this was the bearing he ought to show. The second, more important reason was... a