Tang San screamed.
It was not the scream of a frightened child. It was something older and stranger than that — a sound that made the black-robed soul masters pause in their looting and turn toward its source with sudden wariness. Even evil soul masters, whose cultivations were built on the suffering of others, recognized a sound that did not belong to the ordinary register of human pain.
Light exploded from Tang San's body. White light, edged in deep arterial red, pouring from his skin like he had swallowed a star and it was breaking loose. The soul masters shielded their eyes. The fires nearby guttered and bent away from him as though driven back by invisible pressure.
And in Tang San's right hand, between one breath and the next, it appeared.
The pommel was circular, smooth and white, like a closed eye waiting to open. The grip was wrapped in white that seemed almost luminescent, catching light that came from no external source. The guard was extraordinary — wide and dramatic, with two large crescent-shaped openings carved into either side, and from its edges projected sharp claw-like spurs that curved outward like a predator's fingers splayed in warning. From the top of the guard rose a crown of red horn-like spikes, extending upward and outward in every direction, giving the weapon the silhouette of something between a sword and a throne.
At the center of the guard was an eye.
It was white, iris vertical and brilliantly red, and it was open, and it was looking at things in a way that eyes typically did not.
The blade extended from this impossible guard in a sweep of pure white, long and slightly curved, its edges painted in red so deep it was almost black. And along the flat of the blade, in characters that burned as they formed, were words in a script so ancient that no one present could have read them even if they had tried.
Tang San looked at the sword in his hand with blue eyes that were no longer blue.
They were red. Completely, deeply red, iris and all, glowing faintly with the same light that was still bleeding from his skin.
His black hair had gone white at the roots and was spreading rapidly, the color draining upward strand by strand until every hair on his head had turned the color of fresh snow. His skin, already pale, had shifted further — past pale, into something cooler and more absolute, like paper, like marble.
He looked, to the evil soul masters staring at him from across the burning village, like something that had climbed out of a much older story than anything they had encountered in their careers.
He was also six years old and barely reached the nearest one's elbow.
"What—" the closest soul master began.
Tang San moved.
None of them could describe it properly afterward. The ones who survived, who were few, and who would never speak of it in public under any circumstances, said only that there had been light, and speed, and that the white-haired child had not looked like a child while it was happening. He had not been crying. That was the part that stayed with them. Six years old, standing over his dead parents, and he had not been crying.
He had been somewhere past crying entirely.
The Asura Sword sang through the morning air of the village, and Tang San gave the evil soul masters exactly what they had come to this village to harvest.
He simply inverted who it came from.