Eighteen years ago,
The Blade Manifest Peak didn't just stand among the great sects.
It stood above them all.
Lin Qingfeng became Peak Master at twenty-five—the youngest in a thousand years of history.
When he unified the seven blade techniques into a single transcendent path and his sword intent touched the threshold of Dao comprehension itself, the martial world needed someone to lead it forward.
They gave him a title that made even ancient monsters pause before speaking his name:
The Blade Emperor.
Under his guidance, Blade Manifest Peak became untouchable. Dimensional beasts fled at the sight of their banners. Demonic cults crumbled beneath their righteous crusade. The other four great sects—proud, ancient, powerful in their own right—looked to him for guidance in an age where humanity teetered on the edge of extinction.
The martial world entered something resembling peace.
A golden age, some called it.
Then came the summit at Heaven's Peak.
Five sect masters. One goal: unite their forces for a final push against the dimensional rifts, seal them forever, end the threat that had plagued humanity for three generations. Lin Qingfeng brought the people he trusted most—not just allies, but the ones he'd have died for without hesitation.
Zhao Tiexian, his sworn brother from Vajra Temple. They'd bled together in a hundred battles, saved each other's lives more times than either could count. Brothers in every way that mattered.
Xue Qianxun of Profound Ice Valley, his childhood friend. She'd known him before the titles, before the power, when he was just a boy with a wooden sword and dreams too large for his small hands.
Murong Xue, his fellow disciple who'd trained beside him since youth. Who'd stood with him through every trial, every breakthrough, every impossible battle when the world said they'd lose.
People he would have died for.
People who smiled as they stabbed him in the back.
---
The poison came first.
Subtle. Treacherous. Designed specifically to corrupt blade cultivation—to turn his spiritual energy against itself, to seize his meridians like rusted chains wrapped around living flesh.
Lin Qingfeng felt it crawling through his veins before he even registered the shift in Zhao Tiexian's eyes. The change from warmth to something colder. Calculating.
His meridians seized and his qi turned rabid inside him, thrashing like a caged beast that couldn't tell predator from prey. His hand twitched toward his sword—the blade that had never failed him, the extension of his will made steel.
Too slow.
The world thickened like honey while agony raced through him like lightning finding the tallest tree.
"Why?"
The word came out broken. Desperate. His body collapsed, knees striking stone hard enough to crack it, but his mind stayed sharp enough to see Zhao Tiexian standing over him. He has no expression and regrets. Just the calm of someone who'd already made peace with what came next.
"Because you're too strong." His sworn brother said it quietly, like discussing the weather or the quality of tea. "One man holding all the power? That's not balance, Qingfeng. That's tyranny waiting for the right moment to show its face."
Lin Qingfeng tried to speak—tried to argue that he'd never wanted dominion, he only wants a peace and protection for humanity—but his tongue wouldn't obey.
"The rifts—" he managed to gasp. "Who'll seal them if we—"
"We will." Xue Qianxun's voice cut through the haze, cold as the ice techniques she'd mastered. She wouldn't meet his eyes. "The five sects working together. As equals. Not kneeling before one emperor who gets to decide humanity's fate alone."
"You'd destroy everything we built?"
Lin Qingfeng's gaze found Murong Xue, desperately searching for denial, for doubt, for anything human in those familiar eyes.
"Everything we sacrificed for?"
She finally looked at him.
For just a moment, something flickered across her face—pain, maybe, or regret—but it vanished so quickly he might have imagined it.
"The sect will survive," she said softly. "Under a new Leadership that understands cooperation instead of domination."
They left him there.
Lin Qingfeng's body is paralyzed but he still alive. His body is broken but conscious—aware enough to hear them descend from Heaven's Peak, He knew what kind of story they would spin in the martial world that awaited below.
The Blade Emperor had been corrupted by power. He'd attempted to seize control of all five sects, to place himself as supreme ruler over the entire martial world. They'd been forced to stop him. For the greater good. For humanity's future.
The evidence appeared by morning. Manufactured but convincing—spiritual signatures that "proved" he'd been practicing forbidden techniques, documents that "showed" his plans for domination, witnesses who came forward with tearful testimonies of his cruelty.
All of this is lies.
But all of them believed.
People wanted to believe because tearing down one man was easier than admitting that four sect masters had conspired to commit murder. Because heroes were supposed to fall dramatically, not die quietly while speaking uncomfortable truths.
Within days, Blade Manifest Peak was declared a threat to the martial world.
Within weeks, armies surrounded his mountain—disciples he'd trained personally, sects that had once begged for his guidance, warriors who owed their lives to his protection. All of them turned against him at the word of the four who'd orchestrated his fall.
Lin Qingfeng's disciples fought.
Gods, they fought.
He could hear their battle cries echoing through the stone corridors. He could also smell the incense from their morning prayers mixed with blood and burning wood and could still see the way the sunlight shone on the young blades during training sessions, painting everything in gold and promise.
They'd been outnumbered ten to one. Outmaneuvered by enemies who knew every weakness in their techniques. Betrayed by allies who'd trained beside them for years and knew exactly where to strike.
They fought like cornered wolves anyway.
And they died defending a master who couldn't even lift his head to watch them fall.
Lin Qingfeng lay paralyzed in his cell, forced to feel each death through the spiritual bonds that connected master to disciple. Like watching his own children be slaughtered one by one while invisible chains held him motionless.
In the end, only one survived.
A young outer disciple named Mo Wuhen who'd been away on a mission when the betrayal came—too junior to matter, too insignificant to hunt. One person escaped to carry the truth forward into a world that had no interest in hearing it.
And Lin Qingfeng?
They threw him into the Abyss of Eternal Night.
Not execution and not imprisonment. Worse—a dimensional rift leading to nowhere, a void where spiritual energy cannot exist, where even immortals would eventually starve and disappear into nothingness.
A death sentence that would take decades to complete.
They threw him into darkness and walked away.
That was their first mistake.
---
The Abyss wasn't empty.
Lin Qingfeng fell through darkness that had weight, that pressed against him from all sides like being buried alive in silk. His body began dissolving almost immediately—cultivation unraveling, meridians breaking apart, dantian collapsing into uselessness.
He should have died within hours.
Would have, if something hadn't been waiting there.
Something that had existed since before humanity crawled from the mud, since before the first animal learned to use tools, since before the concept of weapons had crystallized into reality.
A blade.
Not metal. Not spirit. Not even energy in any form he recognized.
Pure concept made manifest—the philosophical origin point of all cutting, all separation, all division. The very first blade that had ever existed, when "blade" was still just an idea floating in the void of pre-existence.
It had no physical form.
And it had been alone in the darkness for eternities beyond counting, waiting for someone worthy enough—or desperate enough—to accept what it offered.
"You want revenge." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, resonating directly in Lin Qingfeng's dissolving mind. Not words. Pure meaning transmitted like lightning through water. "You want power to punish betrayal."
"Yes." Lin Qingfeng answered with what remained of his voice, his body barely holding together enough to think.
"Then understand what I offer. This is not power you wield—this is power you become. You will not hold a blade. You will be the blade. Everything you are will be sacrificed to become what you must be."
"What will I become?"
Silence stretched. Then:
"Something that cannot be betrayed again, because betrayal requires trust, and blades do not trust—they simply cut. Something that cannot be stopped, because stopping requires resistance, and true edges face none. Something that will divide this world until truth and lies are finally, irrevocably separated."
Lin Qingfeng thought of his disciples dying while he lay helpless.
Thought of the people he'd called friends smiling as they destroyed everything he'd built.
Thought of eighteen years—maybe more—dissolving in this void with nothing but rage and grief for company.
He had nothing left to lose.
Nothing left to sacrifice that hadn't already been taken from him.
"I accept."
The Primordial Edge consumed him.
Not slowly. Not gently.
His cultivation shattered like glass under a hammer—years of advancement, decades of refinement, all the power he'd accumulated through blood and discipline, gone in an instant. His meridians dissolved. His dantian collapsed into a singularity of nothing. His physical body broke apart at the molecular level.
Everything that made him Lin Qingfeng—the prodigy, the Blade Emperor, the man who'd unified seven techniques into one path—ceased to exist.
And from that absolute death, something new took shape.
Something that would spend eighteen years in the void learning what the blade truly was beyond physical form. Mastering techniques that transcended mortal comprehension because they weren't techniques at all—they were fundamental truths about severance and division made manifest through will alone.
Something that prepared, in perfect darkness and absolute silence, for the day when it would return to the world that had thrown it away.
Not for justice.
Not for righteousness.
For something purer and more terrible than either.
Truth separated from lies by the sharpest edge imaginable.
Revenge.