[Pure plot, with little to no introduction, explanation, or inner monologue. Please forgive any shortcomings.]
Long Yan was kneeling amid a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, licking the blood from his sword when the tip of his tongue tasted the first trace of spiritual energy. On the neck once bound in black iron shackles, vermilion stains still remained from the night his master’s family was slaughtered. They were the last fragments of the souls of three thousand slaves, who turned to ash when a cultivator burned a city with a snap of his fingers.
The only sacrificial offering to crawl out of that purgatory alive, he clutched half a bloodstained coarse porcelain bowl and dug up half a worm-eaten copy of the Earth Treasury Mantra in a mass grave. Cultivators scoffed at the yellow-grade technique, so shabby even beggars wouldn’t want it. They had no idea that the hands whose meridians had been eaten away by slave marks were refining the turbid energy others discarded as worthless into a towering blaze of baleful flame.
“Feelings? They ran dry along with my master’s blood long ago.” As he cut open the dantian of a cultivator blocking his way, he still held in his palm the jade token of love given to the man by his beloved.
In the far northern ice fields, he met Jiang Yuting. With a single sword strike, she shattered the karmic obstacles surrounding him, yet the hair at her temples carried the same fragrance of locust blossoms as his mother had worn before she died.
“You’ve swallowed too much filth.” She held a broken blade to his heart, while the ten thousand sword tombs behind her mournfully rang out. Long Yan suddenly realized he was counting the frost crystals on her eyelashes. For the first time in thirteen years, he had truly seen the face of a living person.
[Dear readers, please feel free to share any suggestions. If they’re reasonable, I may consider making changes. Thank you very much.]
