Sword Sect

The fourteenth day of the fourth month.

Five days remained until the night market at Spirit Source Marsh that he had arranged to visit with Granny Qin.

Inside his cave abode, Song Yan sat cross-legged, his eyes closed.

At that moment, his Divine Sense was undergoing an immense change.

Within a boundless darkness, a dozen or so traces of light slowly arranged themselves into a pattern resembling a small game board.

The game-board-like phantom suddenly transformed again.

It was like standing on an ancient battlefield, soldiers and enemy generals locked in bloody combat.

Like sitting deep among the clouds, a recluse lost in the mountains and waters.

Like a child gazing up at a sky full of stars beneath the silent night.

"The master of generative numbers occupies their utmost point and sets the four directions in motion..."

"Borrow heaven and earth as the board, mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees as the pieces; join the five-element arts as the ground, mark the five stellar meridians as the configuration, and seat oneself at the heavenly center..."

"This is... Five-Star Pulse Seizing."

At a certain instant, he felt his Divine Sense tear into dozens, even hundreds of tiny fragments. Excruciating pain instantly drowned out all his other senses, and a thunderous roar filled his mind.

Only after an unknown stretch of time did the roaring gradually subside.

Inside the cave abode, Song Yan slowly opened his eyes.

"Does this count as... a breakthrough?"

This Divine Sense cultivation mnemonic called "Five-Star Pulse Seizing" contained only methods of cultivation and visualization, without any particularly complete system.

So he had no idea what level his Divine Sense had reached.

Song Yan extended his Divine Sense. It could reach roughly twenty-four or twenty-five zhang, taking in even the scenery outside his cave abode.

Falling leaves, insect calls, dewdrops-every movement and sound was magnified many times over in his eyes and ears, giving him a faint sense of

control.

"So this is the effect of strengthening Divine Sense. Truly wondrous."

When he first learned this mnemonic, Song Yan's Divine Sense had improved rapidly. In just a few days, he had progressed from three or four steles to being able to cleave twelve.

But after returning to the sect, he soon discovered that his Divine Sense cultivation was growing slower and slower...

In more than a month, he had only gone from twelve steles to fourteen...

After painstaking cultivation, only today had his Divine Sense undergone a change. He must have broken through some minor bottleneck.

After regulating his breathing for a while, Song Yan took out the stone bead. It had turned white again. Sinking his Divine Sense into it, he entered the Two-Pole Realm once more.

Turning slightly, he looked at the seventeen ring-shaped ink marks on the stone stele, then raised his gaze to the enormous ink stele taking shape in the sky.

His Divine Sense became a blade, easily cleaving through the first stele.

Now, Song Yan could spare some attention to carefully experience the sensation of turning Divine Sense into a blade...

Marvelous.

Each time he shattered an ink stele, a ring-shaped ink mark lit up.

By the time the seventeenth ink stele formed, Song Yan could already feel signs of his Divine Sense running dry. Driving it with all his strength, he still formed a blade to meet the plummeting giant stele.

Boom...

"..."

At last, with all seventeen ink steles shattered, all seventeen ring-shaped ink marks lit up completely!

Song Yan was already struggling to hold on, but he still refused to leave the Two-Pole Realm, staring fixedly at the ink stele on the ground inscribed with the Five-Star Pulse Seizing mnemonic.

Yet the first thing to change was not that stone stele, but the sky.

Song Yan looked up toward the sound. The shattered black "ink traces" were slowly drifting together, as though about to form some kind of pattern.

Humm-

Song Yan focused his gaze and saw that the seventeen strands of Divine Sense that had cleaved the ink steles had not dispersed.

They were now humming in unison, gradually gathering and combining into two large characters, archaic yet bristling with sharpness...

At the same time, the stone stele inscribed with the Five-Star Pulse Seizing mnemonic finally changed as well.

The words and diagrams on it seemed to dissolve like ink, and those two characters gradually took shape, imprinting themselves upon it.

Song Yan looked up. In the distant sky, black and white had actually outlined a magnificent, immense phantom of an immortal sect!

"Sword Sect..."

Song Yan murmured.

He was no longer entirely ignorant; he did understand some basic common knowledge.

There were quite a few sects in the cultivation world called something-or-other Sword Sect. Even their Chu Kingdom had a few insignificant minor sects, such as the "Clear Source Sword Sect" and the "Numinous Bond Sword Sect."

Most of their members were cultivators who primarily practiced sword-control arts or delved into methods of forging flying swords.

But naming a sect simply "Sword Sect"-was that not a little ostentatious...?

While Song Yan stood dazed, the phantom scenery of the sect dissolved like ink spreading through water.

Inky symbols, scriptures, and diagrams sprang out of that ink, circling around Song Yan.

At a certain instant, the first inky rune flew straight toward him and burrowed between his brows.

Song Yan instinctively retreated several steps, but within this space, he was merely a strand of Divine Sense, too slow to keep pace with the inky rune.

Then all the inky runes rushed toward the space between his brows, scrambling over one another before vanishing into it.

He had already been struggling to continue after releasing seventeen consecutive Divine Sense blades, and now the inky runes poured into his mind.

Song Yan felt a stab of pain and lost consciousness.

Four days later, early in the morning.

The rising sun ascended in the east, and purple qi abounded. Most disciples who were not overly lazy would rise early to cultivate slowly, breathing purple qi in and out.

Song Yan had found no account in the Qi Condensation Section explaining how this purple qi of the morning sun differed from ordinary Spiritual Qi, nor did he really know what was so extraordinary about it.

Yet gathering Qi in the morning sun seemed to have become a tradition throughout the Dongyuan Sect.

According to Senior Brother Lin Qing, this tradition had been passed down ever since Daoist Li Jun first came here to establish the sect.

At Sunwatch Rock on the eastern mountain of the outer sect, Song Yan sat cross-legged in a secluded corner and slowly opened his eyes.

"To formally practice this 'Sword Planting Art,' I actually have to disperse my cultivation and start over..."

"..."

"This couldn't be some demonic cultivation method, could it?"

Song Yan kept muttering inwardly.

Recalling what had happened that day, he was full of questions about this strange sect.

"Sword Sect..."

After losing consciousness in the Two-Pole Realm that day, he had only slowly awakened a full three days later.

But his mind now held a message resembling a letter, along with a peculiar cultivation method.

The message contained many terms that Song Yan did not understand, or whose meanings were vague and difficult to determine.

So he could only interpret it according to his own thinking.

As he personally understood it, this sect was named the Sword Sect, and specialized in the Dao of the sword.

Only, the sect's disciples had suddenly met with a great calamity, and every last one had died, their Daos extinguished.

As the sect master, the person who had left the letter could not swallow this insult in silence, and had gone to settle accounts.

But the sect had been passed down from its founding patriarch, and its lineage had ended after a mere four or five generations. The sect master felt he had failed all the ancestral patriarchs.

Thus, he had bestowed the Sword Sect's token upon someone brought to it by fate, so that when the patriarchs of past generations laid blame upon him, he would at least have an answer.

However, since the Sword Sect had already been destroyed and there was no guide to test his character and aptitude, he could only be granted the status of an outer disciple and study the rudiments of some of the sect's cultivation methods.

If he had the chance to advance to Golden Core in the future, he could enter the sect's secret grounds on his own, formally become an inner disciple, and rebuild the Sword Sect.

"...Golden Core..."

Song Yan was speechless, words choking in his throat.

With his aptitude, he would already be thanking heaven and earth if he could establish his Dao foundation within his lifetime.

Golden Core? He did not even dare dream of it.

The letter said that only four or five generations had passed since the sect's founding.

Combined with its current circumstances-not a single disciple remained apart from himself, who had stumbled into this windfall, while the remaining sect master's whereabouts and survival were unknown...

Song Yan thought this was probably an obscure sect from High Antiquity. In terms of scale alone, it likely could not even compare with the Dongyuan Sect.

That would also explain why it possessed a precious secret art capable of cultivating Divine Sense, such as Five-Star Pulse Seizing.