I Seek Immortality with the Slow Sword

The Tianyan Sword Sect has stood for four thousand years, and never produced an oddity like Shen Qingci.

She was born with a flawless sword heart, yet learned to read and write slowly and drew her sword even more slowly. While others built their foundations in ten years and formed their golden cores in a century, she shattered her own golden core and started over because of a tiny flaw in her qi sea. Amid the wind and snow on Tianxuan Peak, three thousand zhang high, she gripped a three-foot-two-inch length of lightning-struck jujube wood and practiced the first beginner's sword form for three hundred and twenty years.

Everyone on the mountain laughed at her stupidity and stubbornness, and at that charred piece of wood that would never amount to anything.

Until the year of the Nine Sects' spring trials, when Su Wanqiu, the Beast Taming Sect's peerless, brilliant, and unfailingly calculating chief senior sister, came walking through the snow.

She bent down to pick up Shen Qingci's wooden sword, cracked from use, wiped away the snow and mud with her moon-white shawl, and softly praised how well-worn its hilt was.

That year, one was a slow-sword inner disciple whom her sect dismissed as a blockhead; the other was a righteous leader renowned across the Nine Provinces, the one who would divert the Celestial River of All Spirits.

Over the next two thousand years, they stood shoulder to shoulder, guiding a hundred thousand living beings through the snowbound Taihua Sword Pass; fought their way against the black tide atop the back of a mountain-bearing Black Tortoise in the depths of the Cangming Abyss; shed their immortal bones to spend thirty years together amid the ironworks and medicine shops of an ordinary town's Old Elm Lane; and, at last, were joined as life-and-death Dao companions before the witness of the Nine Provinces' myriad sects. They lived together for a thousand years at Crane's Return Ferry and transplanted the winter plum blossoms of Tianxuan Peak into their courtyard.

Shen Qingci thought they would guard this land of mountains and seas until their lifespans ran out.

Until the day the Abyssal Seal shattered and the war between immortals and demons erupted in full.

The Ninefold Demon-Slaying Formation broke, and blood and fire rained down over Taihua.

Shen Qingci stood before the formation, holding the jujube-wood sword she had refined into a Nascent Soul Dao sword. With her own eyes, she watched the companion who had shared her bed for a thousand years, gentle as jade, shed her immortal sect's blue robes before the assembled armies and reveal the bloodstained vestments of the Netherworld's ruler.

Their two thousand years of tender moments were real. So were the plum blossoms simmering in snow, and the willingness to risk their lives for one another.

But so, too, was the staggering plot that had used the ancient paths of all spirits to measure the mountains and rivers of the Nine Provinces, used Shen Qingci's flawless sword heart to conceal the truth from Heaven, and pushed the Nine Sects step by step into a deadly trap.

"Qingci, I spent my life calculating the fate of all living beings. The only thing I ever loved was you, and that was no lie."

Amid the bloodstained snow, Shen Qingci, who had never spoken harshly, simply raised her wooden sword and, before the immortals and demons of the Nine Provinces, severed the soul pact that had bound their lives together for a thousand years.

"Su Wanqiu, you protected me for two thousand years, so I will not kill you today. But from this moment on, I will use this slow sword to collect, one by one, every debt you owe this world."

[Reading Guide]

1. Epic storytelling spanning three thousand years of fate | Cool-headed, stubborn slow-sword heroine Shen Qingci x gentle, unhinged, calculating chief senior sister Su Wanqiu.

2. Intense emotional push and pull: the sweeter and more certain their two thousand years together are, the more explosive the day their pact breaks. They tame each other. One-on-one romance. Happy ending.

Theme: The world seeks speed and victory, but if you hold fast to your heart and never waver, even a slow journey can reach the mountains and seas.