The Spine of Humanity

For eight hundred years, smoke from the cooking fires of Wushang Village has blackened the four characters “Nuwa's Legacy” on the old stone stele at the village entrance until they are faded and dark. Before the age of eight, Lin Shu never knew that the black stones his elders chipped apart and hauled to the county town were the remnants of tears shed by the stones Nuwa used to mend the sky. Until that night, when a cultivator's sword-light illuminated the mine. The flying vessel of the Zixiao Sword Sect crushed the threshing ground, a demon's bone whip snatched away crying infants, and a demonic cultivator's blood banner covered the ancestral hall. “Hand over the marrow of the Sky-Mending Stone, and we'll leave you vermin with your bodies intact!” With a flick of his finger, the blue-robed swordsman made the village chief's family records, held in his withered hands, burn to ash. “What secret treasure? It's just...” Before he could finish, his head had already rolled into the well with the flash of a sword. As Lin Shu's father shoved his son into the hidden mine passage, black stone dust still stained his palm. “Remember, stone is never harder than human bone!” Lin Shu's mother tore off half her bloodstained mulberry-cloth garment and wrapped it around him. The cultivators' competing spiritual light shone through its holes. Some cut open pregnant women's bellies to search for stone fetuses; others burned ancient books to locate the veins of ore... That night, the eight-year-old boy clutched half a piece of bloodstained mulberry cloth. An iron shard cut his palm, and the blood congealed into an unsharpened sword blank that would become a sword capable of piercing the heavens.