After Failing My Tribulation, I Became a Rogue Cultivator

At eighteen, Lin Yu was at the peak of Foundation Establishment and the Purple Sky Sect's greatest prodigy. He should have been able to open the gates to the Golden Core realm with a single sword strike.

During his Golden Core tribulation, a streak of black light attacked from the shadows and shattered his dantian. His Golden Core cracked, and his cultivation fell all the way back to the late Qi Refining stage. His senior brothers mocked him, his fellow disciples kept their distance, and he plunged from the clouds into the mire. With a rusty sword he'd found and half of a broken soul jade pendant, he left the sect alone.

Asleep inside the pendant was an ancient sword cultivator from three hundred years ago. Beneath the rusty sword, innate runes would shield him from a fatal blow at the brink of death. And unbeknownst even to him, two utterly different forces were suppressed within his body: one could draw down the stars, pure and majestic; the other could devour the sun's yang energy, cold and bone-chilling. The Star Firmament sought to open the gates, while Sun Erosion fought to keep them shut. The two forces clashed inside him day and night.

He made a name for himself in the martial arena. The back alleys of the black market hid deadly dangers, and deep within the misty forest's Guixu ruins, someone used him to kill, while someone else waited for him to become the sixth "vessel." The Blood Demon Sect coveted his bloodline, the Shadow Cult lurked in the mist, and a starfallen girl disguised as a boy traded half a sentence at a time with him as they strode side by side toward the gate no one had opened in three hundred years.

Who was he in his previous life? How long had the shadow beneath the well been waiting? When the whole world wanted to borrow his hands, Lin Yu had only one thing to say:

**These hands are mine, and so is my life. Anyone who wants to borrow them can ask the rusty sword in my hand first.**