The Bamboo Grove courtyard was a wreck, with puppet fragments strewn across the ground.
Song Yan sat cross-legged where he was, breathing lightly.
That single finger strike had instantly drained every last wisp of Sword Qi from the Sword Mansion of the Dao-Subduing.
The faint tingling in his fingertip had yet to fade completely, while a hollow sensation spread along his meridians into every limb and bone.
A year had passed.
Ever since Xiao He had left with Bai Qi to search for Between Mountains and Seas, Song Yan's life had returned to an ascetic's rhythm of cultivation.
Over the past year, aside from consolidating his cultivation realm and cultivating the Sword Dao, he had spent almost all his time comprehending this finger technique.
The instructions for the sword finger were right there, yet Song Yan had still taken two or three months just to read through the entire text with a rudimentary understanding.
Leaving aside its archaic, obscure wording, the sword finger technique's Qi circulation route was extraordinarily complex, involving flows between numerous minute meridians and apertures.
When he first began practicing, he could not even guide a single wisp of Sword Qi through that prescribed route in its entirety.
Every attempt was a fumbling exploration. The slightest carelessness sent his Qi and Blood surging and his Sword Qi rebounding, jolting the web between his thumb and forefinger numb and leaving his meridians aching faintly.
Despite his Foundation Establishment middle-stage cultivation, his profound reserves far surpassing cultivators of the same realm, and his exquisite control over Sword Qi gained through years of Sword Dao Alchemy, he still found it this taxing.
Only then did he understand why the actual contents within the wooden figure demanded such a high threshold.
After calculating carefully, he judged that activating this finger technique