Prologue: The Sword Bone Burns the Heavens
In the autumn of the 473rd year of the Cangwu calendar, blood rained down over the Qinglan Mountains in Dongzhou.
Within the sword mound that guarded the Xuanxiao Sect, all seventy-two spirit swords fell silent. Atop Tianshu Peak, the Starfall Formation split open a ravine three thousand zhang long. Lingxiao Zhenren, the last sect leader, sat alone on the Sword-Transformation Platform, gazing at the natal sword pill cracking apart in his palm. Suddenly, he burst into laughter. A hundred thousand streams of sword qi erupted from his crown, and the instant they shattered the ninefold lightning tribulation, half of the Starwatch Pavilion in Tiandu, Central Zhongtu, collapsed.
For a hundred years thereafter, no one in the five great domains could summon the sword’s cry from the nine heavens.
Some said that day the demons rose and the righteous waned, and the blood banners of the Jiuyou Demon Sect covered the seven stars of the Northern Dipper. Others said that the Zixiao Daoist of the Qingyun Sect had seen Lingxiao Zhenren sever the left arm of a great figure from the Immortal Alliance before he passed into the Dao. Only the wordless stele at the bottom of Dongzhou’s Sword Burial Abyss remembers that when the Heaven-Burning Sword Intent pierced the void, an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes was cast into the mortal world.
Now, an ant struggling in the cracks between flagstones scrapes at half a piece of broken jade with bloodied fingernails. The old Daoist hanging upside down in the curtain of rain would never guess that within this body, its ribs shattered by the Black Tiger Gang, sleeps a sword intent powerful enough to cleave the cycle of reincarnation.
After all, in the world of cultivation, the day a broken sword is reforged is often more painful than the day its edge first appears.
