Lu Chen is a mortal.
A mortal in the Taixu Sect who couldn't even light up a spirit-testing stone. His senior brother Gu Changyuan had a sword heart as clear as crystal, his senior sister Su Zhao was peerless in formations, and his senior brother Ji Heng wielded an eighty-three-jin formation-breaking saber. Meanwhile, Lu Chen lived in a storage shed behind the mountain, chopping wood, drinking porridge, and crouching by the roadside to watch ants. The sect records had only nineteen characters to say about him: Entered in the seventeenth year of Qingli, personally accepted by the sect master, a spiritless body, no master, no cultivation level.
No one knew that he had found a fragment of an animal-hide scroll in a pile of junk. It showed a human figure with a vortex in its chest, beside which was an ancient character: “Life.” No one knew that every day before dawn, he got up to practice his sword, using a blade so rusty its original shape was unrecognizable. He repeated the simplest move for ten years. Sword One. Just one sword.
Until one day, Ji Heng insisted on sparring with him. Unable to get out of it, Lu Chen picked up his rusty sword and swung it once at the air. That night, Ji Heng found a crack running all the way through his formation-breaking saber, even though Lu Chen's sword had never touched it.
Deep in the mountains behind the sect, a heartbeat sounded once every thirty-four breaths. It was exactly in time with his sword swings.
