On the bluestone street in Linyuan City, a child’s sugar rabbit was crushed beneath the hooves of the Sword Pavilion’s horses.
No one dared pick it up. The neighbors knew all too well what mattered more: a sugar figurine worth three copper coins, or those horses, those swords, and those red robes and gray armor.
At the end of the street, a wild child held the wailing toddler and stared at the pile of sugar crumbs. Then he asked a question no one could answer:
“What gives them the right?”
He didn’t know yet that an old man leaning on half a broken sword was making his way down the mountain road west of the city. The year the old man broke his sword, he had been the strongest swordsman in the world.
The old man said, “Kid, let me teach you something. Sword energy can range across thirty thousand miles, but there’s a wall in this world that most deserves to be cut down, and even thirty thousand miles can’t reach it.
“So, will you try to reach it for me?”
