The Night My Clan Was Slaughtered, I Borrowed My Mother's Power

All 127 members of the Shen family were wiped out in a single night.

Their only son, Shen Du, listened to the sounds of blades falling from inside a water jar, clutching the half of a jade pendant his mother had slipped him.

A golden power was hidden inside the pendant. It let him kill thirteen sword-wielders from the Heavenly Order Bureau in an ancestral hall, and pull nineteen members of his clan out of the Abyss Prison.

But every time he used it, he lost years of his life.

The first time, three years. The second, ten. The third, thirty.

He was nineteen years old, and had already lost forty-three years.

He had done the math: at this rate, he wouldn't live to see thirty.

But the Heavenly Order Bureau wouldn't give him time to die slowly. The sect master was looking for a new blood source, the sword-wielders were hunting down those close to him, and the girl A Jin, who had infiltrated his circle, wasn't telling the truth: her father hadn't been killed by the Heavenly Order Bureau at all.

The truth that awaited him was even colder: the Shen family weren't guardians of the jade. They were its sealers. For three hundred years, generation after generation of the Shen family had fed their blood to a monster called "Heaven's Dao." Every time he used the golden power, he wasn't sacrificing his lifespan. He was shortening the time left on the seal. The stronger he became, the sooner that thing would awaken.

Some urged him to become a sacrifice and trade his life for peace throughout the land. Others urged him to kill Heaven's Dao and shatter its rules.

Shen Du chose a third path.

He would neither kill Heaven's Dao nor become a sacrifice.

He made himself into a new Heaven's Dao.

But that day, A Jin stood before him and asked, "Do you still remember me?"

The wind came from the east, carrying no scent at all.