When Gu Chengming said the words "You can't touch me," he had very little confidence behind them.
The pressure of a Sixth Realm power packed every inch of the surrounding space like something solid. His heart slammed against his ribs hard enough to crack them, and the thick taste of blood rose in his throat.
He had said it partly to keep up appearances, and partly as a pure gamble with his own life to buy time.
He had to think of something. Even half a breath more, even one more mouthful of air, was worth having.
And then, to everyone's astonishment, that pale hand of the Eternal Life Sect Perfected One really did stop, hanging in midair.
Into the dead silence came a soft laugh.
"I can't touch you?"
The Perfected One turned the four words over slowly, as though he had just heard the greatest joke in the world, though his voice carried a note of condescending amusement.
"Before the majesty of the Sixth Realm, Fifth Realm powers kneel like ants. Yet you, a mere junior of the Third Realm, not only fail to have your liver and gall burst with terror, your bones turn out to be remarkably hard. This old man has lived a good many years and grown used to watching men scrabble and scheme. A brat like you, ignorant of death and bold beyond all sense, actually makes it a shame to crush you outright."
He hovered there as easily as a man strolling through his own courtyard, even taking the leisure to flick at the cuff of his moon-white and black-woven Daoist robe, as though waiting to see what other entertaining madness Gu Chengming might spit out.
Gu Chengming used the rare opening to swallow down the sweet-iron taste in his throat without a flicker, then lifted his eyelids and fixed his gaze on the man. "Since you'd hate to kill me, why not resolve a doubt for me instead? Why would the Eternal Life Sect go to such lengths to tamper with a Yunyue Sect sword art?"
At that, the hood tilted slightly, as if the Perfected One were surprised that the boy could still be this sharp in such a hopeless position.
"A sword art? You mean the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following?" The Perfected One shook his head with an air of vast pity. "Truly the view of an ant. You think this sect concerns itself with the trifling Yunyue Sect?"
"It isn't?" Gu Chengming pressed.
"You flatter them far too much." The Perfected One laughed softly. "The Dao Plague beneath the Emerald Screen Range must be nourished by baleful qi of the deepest, darkest kind. And in all this world, what could possibly serve better as a slop bucket for such filth than an inheritance descended from a Sovereign herself?"
At the words slop bucket, anger kindled in Gu Chengming's eyes.
The Perfected One noticed nothing of the shift in his mood or his breath. Sunk in satisfaction at ten thousand years of scheming, he went on.
"That sword art should have been the purest moonlight there is. Precisely because it was so clean, the baleful qi and resentment planted into it would produce the most extreme contrast, the most extreme effect. And those Yunyue Sect sword cultivators who revere it as gospel and drill in it day and night would be steeped in that baleful qi without ever knowing, driven helplessly into derangement, becoming the finest fodder of all."
"Such an exquisite method, and here you stand at death's door caring about some broken-down sword art that has been used as a slop bucket for a thousand years and pickled through to the bone? What a rather endearing thought."
Gu Chengming listened with his eyes lowered and said nothing. Something like fire was churning wildly inside his chest.
And yet in that very half-breath, as those words landed and the Eternal Life Sect Perfected One laughed, the tangle of clues in his mind snapped abruptly into light and order.
The Yunyue Sect. The Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art. The Dao Plague. And the charge the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign had laid on him in the Land of Nowhere.
In the Land of Nowhere, he had bluffed his way through the Sovereign's missing "half-move of feeling" with Infinite Love, rewriting the ending into Mutual Annihilation. Before she dispersed, the Sovereign had forcibly stripped the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following Sword Art out of the river of time, which clearly meant she knew it would one day find its way into his hands.
And that sword art had later been implanted with baleful qi and warped. On the surface it looked as though the Yunyue Sect had been the ones set up, but the hand behind it was almost certainly this lofty Eternal Life Sect standing before him.
If his guess held, the Sovereign's "dispersal" back then had not necessarily meant a true fall. She might simply have done to herself what she had done to her own sword art, stripping herself out of the river of time and hiding in the gap where the ending hung unresolved.
In other words, the reason that stroke of Mutual Annihilation had never truly been made fact in ten thousand years was that the Red Dust Immortal had still been clinging to life inside the Secret Realm until only a few months ago.
It was only when Gu Chengming rewrote cause and effect within that Secret Realm and erased the Red Dust Immortal completely that the ending of that stroke gained even the possibility of settling. And only the possibility.
To make that stroke's Mutual Annihilation fully real on the present timeline, to Reverse the Effect to the Cause, one thing was still missing: a trigger, a concrete act to set it off.
And as all of that came clear, another question that had troubled him for a long while surfaced with its answer.
Why did the Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art hate sword cultivators?
"The character of anyone who practices this art will be dragged, little by little, toward extremes..."
Every last cultivator of the Yunyue Sect who took up this art had slid without exception into obsession and madness.
That was never the fault of the sword cultivators. It was this forcibly altered sword art grinding away at their minds inch by inch, twisting them into vessels for holding baleful qi.
And what of the sword art itself?
What it hated had never been sword cultivators. What it hated was itself.
Every additional sword cultivator who took up the tampered version of it, full of hope, meant another current of stinking baleful qi flowing through its own body. Every additional genius who stumbled into the abyss of obsession because of it meant another bloody sin to carry.
It had been forced to become the blade in a murderer's hand. It hated sword cultivators because it was drowning in guilt, unable to look any of the ones it had ruined with its own edge in the face.
Gu Chengming slowly closed his eyes. Even without a system dialogue box popping up, he could feel with perfect clarity what the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following was feeling inside his Sea of Consciousness.
Like something soaked in filth for a thousand years that one day hears someone say, "How did you get so dirty?" and has not a single word of protest to offer, only buries its head deeper.
It struck him then, the memory of that night in the Land of Nowhere when he had finally mastered the true Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword, and it had said, out of nowhere, "Don't call me Little Flowing Cloud."
At the time he had taken it for a tsundere technique refusing to give him face. Only now did he understand. That had been the first time in ten thousand years that anyone had spoken its true name in earnest.
It had not been refusing him face. It had not dared to answer, terrified that the moment it did, it would drag those three words, Little Flowing Cloud, down into the filth along with it.
The hand hanging at Gu Chengming's side slowly closed into a fist. Where had the spirit veins beneath the Emerald Screen Range, steeped in baleful qi for ten thousand years, come from in the first place? And what had the Dao Plague been feasting on all that time?
Sword cultivators' baleful qi. All of it.
An entire great sect, the Yunyue Sect, had clutched the poisoned Flowing Cloud Moon-Following and drilled themselves raw with it day and night for ten thousand years. Every time they drew a sword, they were feeding fuel to the Dao Plague under the mountain.
A supreme sword art that should have been as pure as moonlight from the ninth heaven, as clear as clouds drifting ten thousand miles, boiled down by human hands into the Dao Plague's slop bucket.
The fire in Gu Chengming's chest burned lower and heavier. His plan had been to proceed step by step: draw out the scroll, activate the End Lotus, and use Infinite Love as the key to respectfully invite the Sovereign into the world.
That was his only path out, and the optimal solution as things stood.
But right now he wanted to do something else first, something possibly idiotic.
For a sword art that had been used as fodder and filth for ten thousand years, on the eve of its return to its origin through the Sovereign's hand, he wanted to swing even one stroke of what it truly was.
Let heaven and earth see it. Let that lofty Sixth Realm of the Eternal Life Sect, watching the show from above, see it. Let that turtle hiding its head behind the curtain see it. Let them all open their eyes wide and look.
It had never been filth or fodder. It was moonlight from above the ninth heaven, clouds furling and unfurling at will, that scrap of clean the Sovereign had gouged out of the river of time with her bare hands.
He knew it was a mantis raising its arms against a chariot. He knew this stroke, landing on a Sixth Realm venerable, would most likely fail to so much as scuff the hem of the man's robe. He knew that the instant it left his hand, the next moment would bring that palm down to crush him.
But today, this stroke had to be swung.
Because in a thousand years, no one else had ever been willing to swing it for her.
[Record of the Myriad Worlds: ...]
The Record of the Myriad Worlds, who a moment ago had been shaken to her core, tactfully swallowed every sound.
As a remnant of an old world she had watched countless fated tracks collapse, and cold detachment had long since become instinct. Yet as she watched the long sword in Gu Chengming's hand, something stirred in her that had not stirred in ten thousand years.
But the quietest of all was the Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art itself. It did not say a word.
It had been pretending for far too long.
Pretending to be the deformed, tampered freak. Pretending to be the vicious thing wrapped in baleful qi. Pretending not to care, that this filthy state was simply how it had been born. Somewhere in all those wasted centuries it had nearly forgotten what it had originally looked like.
Or perhaps it had never forgotten at all. Perhaps it simply lacked the courage to look at that clean self even once more.
"Little Flowing Cloud. I'm sorry. I made you endure this for so long."
Under a pressure so terrible that even the air had congealed, Gu Chengming bit through the tip of his tongue and, borrowing that sliver of clarity, raised his sword.
In that instant, pure silver-white moonlight came roaring up out of that scarred, scratched blade.
Ten thousand years, and every single time it had been forced from its sheath, it had had to peel its own moonlight away layer by layer and bury it in the mud, then churn up all that sickening baleful qi and hold it out front instead. It had grown used to playing the twisted, misshapen monster at other people's command.
But today the man behind it, the hands holding it, would not let it pretend any longer.
And so all that moonlight it had snuffed out with its own hand ten million times lit up along the spine of the blade, inch by inch, like a sky full of stars kindling at once, and swept outward with the force of something tearing the rotten world apart.
Clouds furled and unfurled. Moonlight poured down like a waterfall.
This was the full Flowing Cloud Moon-Following Sword Art the Sovereign had left on the ancient wall of the Penglai Immortal Sect's branch hall, made real again.
The cold, howling gale that never ceased in the Emerald Screen Range died away entirely the instant it touched that moonlight.
Even the arrogant Sixth Realm pressure that had four Fifth Realm powers pinned kneeling to the ground faltered for half a breath before moonlight of such utter clarity.
The sword fell. And a single thread of moonlight, clean past all describing, brushed lightly across the Sixth Realm Perfected One's shoulder.
A thin ripping sound.
The finely made Daoist robe tore with a whisper of parting silk.
A small gash opened there. And from the gash seeped a single drop of blood, dull in color, yet forced to give off a faint silver-white glow.
Outside the cavern the wind had stopped, and every gaze, from those standing and those kneeling alike, locked onto that one drop of blood.
That was the blood of a Sixth Realm Sovereign.
The Nameless Daoist's clouded eyes went rigid. Song Heng's pupils, always as still as an old well, shook violently. Qin Wuwang's knuckles, clawing at the ground, trembled without stopping. True Lord Baicang forgot to breathe altogether and murmured aloud in disbelief.
"He... he actually wounded that one?"
And in the depths of the Sea of Consciousness, the Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art had gone utterly, hugely blank.
Having come all this way at Gu Chengming's side, it had long since decided it was junk, the sort of thing that brought bad luck just by being taken out. It had accepted its fate early, certain the day of its vindication would never come in its lifetime.
It was used to being the foil. Used to bristling like a hedgehog, all mouth and defenses. Used to firing off a round of snide, sour mockery every time Gu Chengming actually put it to serious use, trying to use barbed sarcasm to put distance between itself and the techniques of the great orthodox schools.
Because it thought it was dirty. Because it thought it had no face to stand alongside clean things like the Hundred Bones Resonance or the Huiyuan Sword Formula. Every one of its sneers had been, underneath, a small and humble apology for what it was.
Sorry. It's the filthy, ruined, thoroughly unpresentable me again.
But that stroke just now had been the first time since it gained awareness that it had been gripped, steady and sure, by a pair of warm and unwavering hands, as its true self, as the Flowing Cloud Moon-Following.
In the next breath, the always-frigid technique panel in front of Gu Chengming erupted in dazzling golden light, chiming one crisp note after another.
[Flowing Cloud, Moon-Following Sword Art favorability: 90 to 100 (Faithful Unto Death)]
[The Flowing Cloud Moon-Following no longer despises sword cultivators. Because she is certain now that somewhere in this world there is one sword cultivator willing, in a hopeless place, to hold nothing back and swing her as she truly is.]
The ninety-point deadline had been nailed in place by the Heavenly Dao from the very moment, ten thousand years ago, when the Sovereign stripped the sword art out of time and severed it from its origin.
As a broken technique with damaged roots, it was fated never to reach Faithful Unto Death, because even its whole "self" had been shattered.
Until today, when Gu Chengming had forced the missing last piece of its origin back into place along the long river of cause and effect.
Gu Chengming's sword hand trembled faintly. He was gulping air in great ragged breaths, with no attention to spare for the newly unlocked CG scroll.
Because up in the air, that faint silver-tinged smear of blood was sliding slowly down the Sixth Realm Perfected One's shoulder.
And that Perfected One was watching him with a look that raised every hair on his body.
The Sixth Realm Perfected One was silent for a long while. The mockery drained out of his eyes, and killing intent surged up in its place.
Then, unexpectedly, he raised a hand and clapped twice, lightly.
"Fine sword art."
"Truly a fine sword," he said again, and this time there was undisguised admiration in his voice. "I had thought it lost. I never imagined the Sovereign's true trump card in those days looked like this. This old man has lived over a thousand years, and even I am seeing it for the first time."
He tilted his head slightly, a mild smile touching the corner of his mouth.
"What a pity."
"A peerless sword like that, and a nature as clear as yours. Today both are fated to perish here together."
Before the words were out, the sky-drowning pressure came crashing down like a collapsing pillar of heaven. Gu Chengming closed his eyes.
He knew perfectly well there was no receiving this blow. He had never intended to receive it.
What he had come to do was already done, and done fully.
What that half-move the Sovereign left behind in the Land of Nowhere had lacked was never sword intent. It was feeling. Gu Chengming had earlier bluffed his way through the feeling with Infinite Love, but that had only ever been a half-finished thing.
What truly made a great law of cause and effect like Mutual Annihilation stand was the killing stroke that followed naturally from that feeling. The stroke itself.
And the stroke Gu Chengming had just swung with everything he had was exactly that last, indispensable piece of the puzzle.
Untampered. Pure and unstained. The stroke the Sovereign had fished out of the long river of time with her own hands.
A low hum.
The killing move of the Sixth Realm Perfected One, carrying the weight to shatter heaven and earth, already poised above the crown of Gu Chengming's skull, froze in midair without warning.
As though someone had forced a stop button down on time itself across the whole of that space.
The entire Emerald Screen Range shuddered as if struck by lightning.
Outside the cavern, somewhere in the night sky above the deep peaks, a thread of moonlight so faint it was nearly transparent tore open a long rift without a sound.
The rift hung quietly in the heavens. There was no world-drowning storm of law, no world-shaking leakage of spiritual power. It appeared so naturally that not even the path of the night wind around it was disturbed.
Only the moonlight pouring down from it was far too clear. So clear that its mere shining down made every trace of filth, every fallen thought, every lingering echo of the dormant Dao Plague accumulated across ten thousand years in the Emerald Screen Range hiss and burn, recoiling in terror more than half an inch deeper into the earth.
Song Heng, Baicang, Qin Wuwang, and the Nameless Daoist, four Fifth Realm powers still forced to their knees, all raised their heads in the same instant.
None of them had ever laid eyes on moonlight of such perfection, on sword light that did not belong to this age.
And yet, the moment they looked up, every one of them knew what it was.
In the ancient texts and stone inscriptions of the Great Qian cultivation world, whenever the historians mentioned that dazzlingly gifted Sixth Realm power who held the Dao of Time in her hand, the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign, the words they chose were strangely, unanimously the same.
"The moon white as of old. The flowing clouds unchanged."
In that brimming, water-clear moonlight, a plain-robed figure crossed ten thousand years and slowly took shape out of the rift.
Her moon-white gown was without a speck of dust, and a strand of silver hair at her temple drifted in the wind. The sword hanging at her waist was identical to the broken blade enshrined in the main hall of the Penglai Immortal Sect's branch.
She said nothing. Her only action upon manifesting in the present world was to calmly lift a hand, close it around the hilt, and draw.
The motion was neither hurried nor slow, unhurried as someone admiring the moon over tea. But that casual-seeming gesture was, to a certain someone below, a death-calamity ten thousand years in the falling, and there was no dodging it.
"Flowing Cloud..."
Terror finally broke across the face of the Eternal Life Sect Perfected One, unchanged for ten thousand years. With everything he had, he only managed to force those two words out between his teeth.
The sword had already fallen.
As clean and clear as the stroke Gu Chengming had swung a moment before. That stroke which had always belonged to this world, the one that washed heaven and earth clean.
Only this time, the one holding the sword was its rightful, undying master of ten thousand years.
A wet, muffled sound.
The exquisite moon-white and black Daoist robe across the Eternal Life Sect Perfected One's chest was split cleanly open from left shoulder to right flank by a silver-white band of light, top to bottom, without the slightest resistance.
Those cloud patterns that had earlier tightened Gu Chengming's chest with their eerie shifting came apart in an instant under sword light that could purify anything, like snow slush hit with boiling water, without so much as a struggle.
Beneath the robe, that ruined husk that had eked out ten thousand years by feeding on baleful qi, no longer clearly man or monster, was struck as if by a hammer of ten thousand tons and driven seven steps backward through the air.
But no one ever got a look at the true face beneath the hood, because before it could be exposed, the residual might of that stroke's terrible law of time pinned him in place in midair, unable to move so much as a hair.
The Eternal Life Sect Perfected One clamped both hands over the wound running through his chest. What welled up between his fingers was no longer the silver-tinged drop of before, but thick, tarry black, gushing from the wound beyond any hope of stopping.
Under the bright moonlight, every ugliness of him lay bare.
The whole of the Emerald Screen Range fell into a silence in which a dropped needle would have rung.
The thread of moonlight in the heavens grew brighter and brighter, until it lit the whole night sky like day.
A figure took slow shape out of that moonlight.
Bright as the moon, her robes like flowing cloud, the woman finally looked toward Gu Chengming, something soft and unspoken in her eyes, and smiled without meaning to.
That smile, falling through the moonlight, was clouds furling and unfurling.
"Little friend..."
"You've waited a long time."
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉