The Eastern District of Ironwood City was bleeding out, consumed by the frantic looting of poisoned soldiers and desperate civilians. But while the Vanguard army tore the Shen Consortium estate apart in a blind panic, the true victor of the night was already moving in the opposite direction.
Shang Jue did not immediately walk out of the city gates. The *Genesis of the Ultimate Truth* demanded evolution, and evolution required fuel. He had shattered the city's power structures, but to simply walk into the barren wilderness of the Buffer Wastelands without provisions would be a tactical error.
The Mo Syndicate's wealth was hidden in subterranean labyrinths, heavily booby-trapped and currently swarming with surviving shadow-guards. The Shen Consortium's wealth was locked behind a Grade-Four array that he did not have the time to slowly batter down.
But the Yan Clan Vanguard's primary military compound, located in the Northern District, was currently a ghost town. Commander Yan Kui had marched almost his entire fighting force to the Shen estate, leaving his own fortress critically undefended.
Shang Jue traversed the chaotic, burning streets with terrifying efficiency. He didn't bother with stealth. With his two-thousand-pound density, his mere forward momentum was a battering ram. He smashed through burning barricades and ignored the screaming mobs, arriving at the towering, dark stone gates of the Vanguard Headquarters.
Only a skeleton crew of guards remained, their faces pale as they saw the massive, iron-clad brute approaching out of the smoke.
"Halt!" a guard stammered, raising a repeating crossbow.
Shang Jue didn't break his stride. He lunged forward, the solid stone street cratering beneath his bare feet. He crossed the fifty-yard distance in a single, explosive burst of kinetic velocity that completely defied his massive weight. Before the guard could pull the trigger, Shang Jue's oversized, rusted broadsword swept in a horizontal arc, effortlessly cleaving the heavy steel gates and the guards standing behind them into pieces.
He stepped into the silent courtyard and made his way directly to the Commander's private armory and vault.
The door to the military vault was a foot-thick slab of reinforced spiritual steel. Shang Jue drove the blunt tip of his broadsword into the gap between the door and the frame. He anchored his feet, channeled the absolute totality of his eighteen-hundred-pound biological mass, and pried.
SCREEECH... SNAP.
The massive steel locking mechanisms violently sheared off. The heavy vault door crashed inward, throwing up a cloud of dust.
Inside, the Yan Clan's true military reserves were laid bare. Shang Jue walked past the racks of standard-issue armor and basic weaponry. He was looking for high-density value.
He found a row of heavy, lead-lined chests. Ripping the lids off with his bare hands, he found hundreds of high-grade, condensed spirit stones. They were perfectly cut, glowing with a deep, pulsing energy. These were the currency of the higher realms, used for activating massive arrays and purchasing legendary resources. He swept the entirely of the stones into his spatial ring.
Moving deeper, he found the logistics shelves. Here, neatly organized in jade boxes, were hundreds of rare herbs and medicinal roots. Commander Yan Kui had hoarded these to eventually refine body-tempering pills for his elites. There were Blood-Lotus seeds, Iron-Wood bark, and raw, unprocessed Earth-Marrow shavings. Shang Jue took them all. His raw density was immense, but to reach the Ten-Thousand Pound state without tearing his own body apart, he would need to learn how to refine these herbs to properly temper his internal organs.
Finally, in a locked glass display case at the back of the vault, he found the archives.
Shang Jue shattered the glass. Inside were several ancient scrolls. One detailed the construction of rudimentary kinetic-absorption arrays the very foundation of the Yan Clan's military shields. Another was an advanced alchemy primer, detailing the extraction of elemental properties from beast cores.
But the most valuable prize was a heavy, iron-bound manual titled: The Gravity Cleaver's Path. It was a high-tier heavy blade manual that relied not on Qi manipulation, but on understanding the terrifying physics of momentum and mass. It was completely useless to orthodox cultivators, but for Shang Jue, it was a roadmap to turning his rusted broadsword into an apocalyptic weapon.
With his spatial ring fully loaded with the operational wealth of an entire army, Shang Jue turned his back on the vault.
It was time to leave.
He walked out of the Vanguard Headquarters, the heavy chains clinking against his chest plates. He headed toward the towering, fortified outer walls of Ironwood City. He didn't bother using the main gates, which were currently choked with fleeing refugees.
He stopped at a quiet section of the fifty-foot-high outer wall.
Shang Jue bent his knees, allowing the absolute weight of his two-thousand-pound density to settle deep into the earth. The bedrock groaned in protest. Then, he uncoiled his leg muscles, unleashing a devastating, localized kinetic explosion.
BOOM.
The ground shattered beneath him, leaving a massive crater. Shang Jue launched himself vertically, clearing the fifty-foot stone wall in a single, terrifying leap. He landed heavily on the other side, the impact shaking the earth, before instantly transitioning into a dead sprint.
He ran across the dark plains with the speed of a falling meteor, his massive weight carrying him further away from the burning city with every explosive step. By dawn, Ironwood City was nothing but a memory of fire and blood behind him, and the vast, desolate expanse of the Buffer Wastelands the Ashen Plains stretched out endlessly before him.
....
.....
Thousands of miles to the east, far beyond the desolate Ashen Plains, the air was pristine. Here, in the Gatekeeper Marches the inner ring separating the wastelands from the Central Empires the spiritual energy was thick enough to condense into morning dew.
High atop a mountain peak that pierced the clouds stood the central pavilion of the Azure Peak Sect.
Inside the pavilion, the air was cool and silent, filled with the scent of burning sandalwood. This was the Hall of Tributes, a vast administrative chamber where the sect monitored the countless vassal cities and minor factions that paid them a heavy, annual tax for "protection" and trade rights.
Elder Feng, the Chief Administrator of the Outer Territories, sat behind an expansive desk carved from a single piece of ancient jade. He was a man of terrifying stillness, possessing a Peak Foundation Establishment aura that kept the scribes in the room shivering in constant fear.
Hanging on the massive wall behind him were thousands of small, glowing soul-slips and jade tokens. Each token represented the leadership of a specific vassal city or minor sect. As long as the token glowed, the leadership was alive, the power structure was stable, and the annual tribute of resources and spirit stones would flow smoothly into the Azure Peak Sect's overflowing coffers.
Suddenly, a sharp, crystalline CRACK echoed through the silent hall.
The scribes immediately stopped writing, looking up in alarm.
On the far left side of the wall the section dedicated to the impoverished Outer Rim a jade token was violently vibrating. It was the token representing Commander Yan Kui, the undisputed military proxy of Ironwood City.
Before anyone could speak, the token shattered into dust.
Elder Feng slowly looked up from his scrolls, his eyes narrowing into cold, calculating slits. The death of a proxy warlord in the Outer Rim was uncommon, but not unheard of. It usually meant a minor rebellion, easily suppressed.
But a second later, another CRACK echoed.
The token representing Elder Mo Han of the Mo Syndicate, the primary shadow-broker of the city, violently exploded.
Then, the token connected to the Shen Consortium's spiritual banking array began to flicker wildly, its light dimming to a sickly, unstable red, indicating massive, catastrophic asset withdrawal and structural collapse.
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the Hall of Tributes.
"Ironwood City," Elder Feng murmured, his voice as cold as glacial ice.
"Elder," a senior scribe stammered, rushing forward. "The entire triad of power in Ironwood has collapsed simultaneously. Yan Kui is dead. Mo Han is dead. The Consortium is compromised. The city's annual tribute is scheduled for next month. It consists of over three hundred pounds of raw Earth-Marrow and ten thousand spirit stones."
Elder Feng stood up, his terrifying aura flaring, causing the temperature in the room to plummet.
Ironwood City was a backwater, but its sheer volume of low-tier resources formed the base of the Azure Peak Sect's economic pyramid. The simultaneous destruction of its leadership was not a minor rebellion; it was an organized, targeted strike against the Sect's revenue stream.
"A power vacuum of that scale does not happen by accident," Elder Feng stated, his eyes locked onto the empty space on the wall where the tokens had been. "Someone has orchestrated a slaughter. A rogue cultivator, or perhaps the Crimson Furnace Valley trying to cut our supply lines."
He turned to the scribes.
"Send word to the Inner Court. Ironwood City has fallen. Dispatch a team of elite Core Formation investigators to the Outer Rim immediately. I want to know who broke my city. And if they have stolen the Sect's tribute..."
Elder Feng's voice dropped to a lethal whisper.
"...I want them brought back here, alive. I will strip the marrow from their bones to repay the debt."
....
...
Oblivious to the political storm gathering in the high heavens, Shang Jue walked across the cracked, arid earth of the Ashen Plains.
The temperature here was brutal, but the boy in the raw iron plates did not sweat. He was currently reviewing the *Gravity Cleaver's Path* manual in his mind, testing the principles of momentum by occasionally swinging his oversized broadsword.
He quickly realized the genius of the manual. It taught that true cutting power did not come from a sharp edge, but from the absolute manipulation of the weapon's center of gravity right at the moment of impact. If he could perfectly sync his own two-thousand-pound bodily density with the centrifugal force of the heavy blade, he could generate a kinetic strike capable of splitting a mountain.
Suddenly, his heightened senses caught a massive, rhythmic vibration deep beneath the dry earth.
He stopped swinging his sword. He planted his heavy feet on the ground and looked toward the horizon.
Thirty yards away, the dry earth violently exploded upward, showering the plains with rock and dust. A colossal beast, covered in thick, overlapping plates of jagged rock, erupted from the subterranean depths.
It was a Terra-Serpent, a Mid-Foundation Establishment demonic beast.
But it wasn't hunting. It was fleeing.
Shang Jue looked up into the glaring sun. Descending from the sky upon shimmering, translucent flying swords were three figures clad in pristine white robes embroidered with a blue mountain peak.
The orthodox disciples of the Azure Peak Sect had arrived, completely unaware that the ragged, iron-clad scavenger standing in the path of their prey was the very monster their masters were about to hunt.
Hovering thirty feet above the cracked earth of the Ashen Plains, Senior Brother Lin stared down at the impossible scene.
A Mid-Foundation Establishment Terra-Serpent a beast with scales thick enough to deflect standard sword Qi was currently rolling in the dust, choking on its own shattered fangs and acidic blood. And standing directly in front of the writhing leviathan was a gaunt, filthy boy wearing a dented iron mask and raw breaker plates.
Lin's aristocratic face twisted in confusion, which rapidly hardened into greedy realization.
"The beast didn't bite flesh," Lin declared to his two flanking juniors, his eyes fixed on the heavy iron plates strapped to the boy's chest. "That beggar is wearing a high-tier defensive artifact. Perhaps an Earth-Grade repelling mantle left behind by a fallen cultivator in these wastes. It passively absorbed and rebounded the kinetic force of the serpent's bite."
Junior Han, a haughty youth in pristine white robes, scoffed. "A mortal scavenger stumbling upon an Earth-Grade treasure? The heavens are truly blind. Such an artifact belongs in the Azure Peak armory, not covered in dirt and beast saliva."
"Then go retrieve it, Junior Brother," Lin ordered smoothly, casually drawing a silk handkerchief to wipe the dust from his scabbard. "Put the serpent out of its misery first. We need the beast core intact. Then, strip the beggar. If he resists, relieve him of his limbs."
"Understood, Senior Brother."
Junior Han and Junior Wei descended from the sky, their translucent flying swords leaving trails of elegant blue Qi. They landed gracefully on the cracked riverbed, ten paces away from the thrashing Terra-Serpent and the slouched, silent figure of Shang Jue.
Shang Jue did not look up at them. He kept his head tilted down, letting his massive, rusted broadsword rest heavily on the dry earth. He let out a low, pathetic, rattling breath.
Internally, however, the Mad Swordsman's mind was an ocean of absolute, terrifying clarity.
He was not looking at the disciples as human beings. He was analyzing them as equations. He noted the structural integrity of their flying swords, the flow of blue Qi through their meridians, and the arrogant, unguarded posture of their stances. They were Late Qi Condensation cultivators—fragile, reliant on external energy, and entirely ignorant of the laws of physical mass.
More importantly, Shang Jue was analyzing himself.
He had just read the *Gravity Cleaver's Path* hours ago. The manual explicitly stated: *'The fool swings the iron. The master lets the iron fall. True kinetic devastation is not born of muscle, but of aligning the weapon's center of gravity with the irresistible pull of the earth.'*
He needed a test subject to calibrate this theory. Junior Han was about to volunteer.
"Stand aside, trash," Junior Han barked at Shang Jue, not even bothering to draw his primary sword. He formed a sword-finger seal with his right hand, channeling a sharp blade of blue Qi.
Han swept his hand toward the dying Terra-Serpent. A crescent of condensed azure energy detached from his fingers, slicing cleanly through the thick, armored hide of the beast's neck. The serpent let out a final, gurgling hiss before its massive head slumped lifelessly onto the rocks.
It was a clean, efficient kill, demonstrating the undeniable lethality of orthodox cultivation.
Han turned his attention to the slouched boy. "Now. Unbuckle the iron plates and take off the mask. Do it quickly, and I will let you keep your hands so you can continue digging in the dirt."
Shang Jue didn't speak. He gripped the hilt of his oversized, rusted broadsword with both hands. He slowly dragged it an inch backward.
Screeech...
Han sighed, shaking his head in mock pity. "A brain-damaged mute. Very well. I will take it off your corpse."
Junior Han lunged forward. He didn't use a flashy martial art; he simply executed a standard Azure Peak thrust, aiming his glowing Qi-blade directly for the gap between the boy's iron mask and his collarbone. It was a strike meant to sever the jugular instantly.
Time seemed to slow down for Shang Jue.
He watched the glowing blue blade approach. He didn't rely on the brute durability of his two-thousand-pound density to tank the hit, as he had done with the Yan Clan soldiers. He was no longer a mindless anvil. He was attempting to become a swordsman.
Shang Jue applied the first principle of the *Gravity Cleaver*. He did not step back to dodge. He stepped forward and slightly to the left, pivoting his left foot entirely.
By shifting his localized, two-thousand-pound mass by a mere six inches, he subtly warped the atmospheric pressure around him. Junior Han's perfectly aimed thrust suddenly felt a micro-second of physical resistance, causing the Qi-blade to veer slightly off course, missing Shang Jue's neck by a fraction of a hair.
As the disciple overextended, Shang Jue initiated his strike.
He didn't swing the massive rusted broadsword with his arms. His arms remained relatively loose. Instead, he snapped his hips and dropped his center of gravity directly downward, pulling the heavy hilt of the sword with him.
He allowed the massive slab of iron to simply 'fall' upward in a reverse, diagonal arc, perfectly aligning the rusted blade's center of mass with his own bodily momentum.
It looked entirely clumsy. To Junior Wei, standing ten paces back, it looked as though the terrified beggar had tripped and accidentally flailed his oversized weapon into the air.
But there was no accident in the physics.
CLANG.
The blunt, thick edge of the rusted broadsword intercepted the delicate, Qi-infused steel of Junior Han's pristine flying sword.
Orthodox cultivators believe that Qi conquers all matter. Junior Han expected his superior energy to slice through the rusted scrap iron like wet parchment.
Instead, the kinetic reality of an eighteen-hundred-pound biological anchor, perfectly synchronized with a three-hundred-pound slab of iron moving at optimal centrifugal velocity, was transferred directly into the collision.
Junior Han's flying sword did not just break; it violently detonated into a cloud of metallic dust.
The blunt force did not stop there. The rusted broadsword continued its upward arc, completely unimpeded, and struck Junior Han squarely in the right shoulder.
CRUNCH.
The sound of the impact was nauseating. Han's protective Qi shield shattered instantly. The heavy iron blade crushed his collarbone, pulverized his shoulder joint, and caved in the right side of his ribcage.
The kinetic shockwave launched the arrogant disciple completely off his feet. He flew backward through the air like a broken kite, violently slamming into the scaly, dead carcass of the Terra-Serpent twenty feet away. He slid down the beast's flank, leaving a thick smear of blood, and lay completely motionless in the dust.
The dry riverbed fell into an absolute, deathly silence.
Junior Wei dropped his sword-finger seal, his jaw hanging open in sheer, unadulterated horror. He looked at the pulverized remains of his martial brother, and then slowly turned his gaze back to the filthy boy standing in the dirt.
Shang Jue stood perfectly still, the rusted broadsword resting over his shoulder.
Beneath the warped iron mask, his dark eyes analyzed the feeling in his wrists. The angle was imperfect, he concluded silently. I relied too much on hip rotation and not enough on gravitational drop. The kinetic transfer bled out into the air. I can make it heavier.
He was not celebrating a victory. He was reviewing empirical data.
High above, Senior Brother Lin nearly fell off his flying sword. The elegant aristocrat's face was pale, his eyes wide with disbelief.
"What... what demonic art is that?" Lin stammered, entirely abandoning his previous theory. That wasn't a passive defensive artifact. That was an active, devastating physical strike that had just instantly killed a Late Qi Condensation cultivator without generating a single ripple of spiritual energy.
Shang Jue slowly turned his masked face upward, looking directly at the hovering Senior Brother.
He reached down with his free hand and picked up the polished, jade spatial ring that had fallen from Junior Han's crushed hand. He slipped it into his tattered robes. It was a methodical, terrifyingly calm action. He was harvesting them.
"Wei! Fall back!" Lin shrieked, panic finally piercing his arrogant composure. "Form the Azure Restricting Array from a distance! Do not engage in melee!"
Junior Wei scrambled backward, his hands trembling violently as he tried to form the complex hand seals. Blue Qi began to spark nervously from his fingertips.
Shang Jue did not give him the time.
The Siege Breaker dropped his slouched posture entirely. He gripped the broadsword with both hands, lowering his stance until his raw iron chest plates almost touched the cracked earth.
He had tested the upward swing. Now, he needed to test horizontal velocity.
Shang Jue anchored his heavy feet and exploded forward, turning himself into a two-thousand-pound projectile aimed directly at the surviving junior. The true lesson of the Gravity Cleaver had begun, and the Ashen Plains would be the chalkboard.
Shang Jue exploded forward. The bedrock beneath his bare feet cratered violently, launching his eighteen-hundred-pound frame across the dry riverbed with the devastating velocity of a fired siege weapon.
Junior Wei, standing merely thirty feet away, panicked entirely. He didn't attempt to draw a physical weapon; his orthodox training had drilled into his mind that Qi was the ultimate absolute. He desperately threw his hands forward, completing the complex seals of the Azure Restricting Array.
A thick, glowing web of condensed blue spiritual energy erupted from the earth, attempting to snare the charging boy in a net designed to hold a thrashing Terra-Serpent.
Shang Jue did not attempt to dodge. He didn't raise his broadsword to cut the spiritual bindings. He simply lowered his shoulder and ran directly into the glowing blue web.
The collision between high-tier binding Qi and absolute physical density was instant. The spiritual ropes wrapped around his soot-stained arms and the raw iron plates on his chest, glowing blindingly bright as they attempted to halt his kinetic momentum.
SNAP.
The sound was sharp, like a tightly wound violin string breaking. The Azure Restricting Array simply shattered. The raw, localized gravitational mass of Shang Jue moving at a full sprint was too much for the ambient spiritual energy to contain. The blue ropes dissolved into useless sparks of light against his skin.
He closed the distance in a fraction of a second.
Junior Wei screamed, frantically trying to summon a Qi shield, but he was too slow. Shang Jue did not swing the heavy broadsword this time. He merely extended his left hand, grabbing the terrified disciple by the front of his pristine white robes.
Using his own forward momentum, Shang Jue didn't strike Wei; he simply drove the disciple backward into the massive, scaly carcass of the dead Terra-Serpent.
The impact was brutal. The sheer kinetic shockwave transferred from Shang Jue's arm through Wei's body pulverized the disciple's ribcage against the unyielding wall of beast scales. Wei went instantly limp, coughing a final, bloody breath before his eyes rolled back, dead before his body even slid to the dust.
High above, Senior Brother Lin witnessed the effortless slaughter of his second martial brother. The aristocratic arrogance had been completely burned away, leaving only the primal terror of a prey animal that had just realized it was in the presence of an apex predator.
"Monster!" Lin shrieked. He didn't attempt to avenge his juniors. He poured his entire Early Foundation Establishment core into his flying sword, pulling the nose of the blade sharply upward, intending to shoot directly into the cloud cover and escape toward the Gatekeeper Marches.
Shang Jue stood over Wei's body, looking up at the ascending cultivator. Lin was already a hundred feet in the air and accelerating rapidly.
Shang Jue did not panic. He applied the second lesson of the Gravity Cleaver's Path.
He planted his left foot firmly into the bedrock. He gripped the hilt of his oversized, rusted broadsword with his right hand, pulling the massive, three-hundred-pound slab of iron all the way back behind his shoulder. He coiled his torso, letting the absolute weight of his two-thousand-pound density settle into his hips.
Then, he threw it.
He didn't just toss the blade; he unleashed a rotational, kinetic explosion, turning his entire body into a biological trebuchet.
BOOM.
The air itself cracked as the rusted broadsword broke the sound barrier. The massive slab of iron shot upward like a dark, rusted meteor, defying gravity purely through the apocalyptic force of the throw.
Senior Brother Lin looked down over his shoulder just in time to see the spinning blur of iron expanding rapidly in his vision.
CRASH.
The heavy broadsword struck the center of Lin's translucent flying sword. The delicate, Qi-infused artifact was instantly obliterated, shattering into a thousand pieces of glowing shrapnel. The residual kinetic force of the blunt iron clipped Lin's right leg, cleanly severing it at the knee before the sword continued its upward trajectory, disappearing briefly into the clouds.
Lin let out a harrowing, gurgling scream as he plummeted from the sky. Without his flying sword, the arrogant cultivator was subject to the very physics he had spent his life ignoring. He fell a hundred feet, crashing violently into the cracked earth of the riverbed. His neck snapped upon impact, silencing his screams instantly.
A moment later, the rusted broadsword fell back to earth, embedding itself deep into the dirt a few yards away.
The Ashen Plains were quiet once more.
Shang Jue walked methodically across the battlefield. He didn't celebrate. He bent down and stripped the jade spatial rings from the fingers of Wei and Lin. He also picked up Lin's secondary weapon a standard, high-quality Azure Peak steel longsword, untouched and resting in its pristine scabbard.
He walked over to the shade of an overhanging rock formation on the edge of the riverbed and sat down heavily.
For the first time since he had descended into the mines of Ironwood City, Shang Jue felt the need to shed his armor.
He reached to his chest and unclasped the heavy, rusted chains. He let the three-hundred-pound raw iron breaker plates fall from his body. They hit the stone with a dull, heavy thud.
The plates had served their purpose. When he was fragile, they were his shield. When he was growing, they were his training weights. But now, with his cellular structure infused with Earth-Marrow and stabilized by the freezing Lunar-Cold Iron, his bare skin was infinitely denser and more durable than the crude iron itself. Wearing them now was not protection; it was a redundancy.
He rolled his shoulders, feeling an eerie, terrifying lightness. His two-thousand-pound mass remained, but without the bulky iron plates, his mobility was entirely unhindered.
Then, he raised his soot-stained hands to the warped, pitch-black iron mask.
He hesitated for a fraction of a second before slowly pulling it off.
The midday sun touched a face that had not seen light in months. He was a boy of twelve, gaunt and pale, his features sharp and aristocratic beneath the layers of dirt. But his eyes bottomless, abyssal voids of cold intelligence belonged to a creature entirely separate from humanity.
Yet, the most prominent feature on his face was not his eyes.
Right in the center of his glabella, resting directly over his Soul Sea, was a jagged, intricate brand. It looked like a tiny, stylized sword wreathed in golden flames. But the gold was not beautiful; it pulsed with a faint, sickeningly oppressive light.
It was the Soul Seal of the Heavenly Sword Sect.
Shang Jue traced the faint, burning scar with his thumb.
The iron mask had never been about hiding his identity from the minor factions of Ironwood. The thick, crude metal, combined with his chaotic, suppressed Qi, had acted as a physical dampener, muffling the spiritual emanation of the brand.
The Heavenly Sword Sect one of the absolute apex predators of the Central Empires, the masters who ruled behind the celestial barrier had placed this tether on his soul. It was a brand reserved for outcasts, anomalies, and subjects of ultimate heresy. As long as this seal rested upon his Soul Sea, any Elder of the Heavenly Sword Sect within a thousand miles could track his spiritual coordinate.
He could not walk into the Gatekeeper Marches, let alone the Central Empires, radiating the signal of a branded heretic. The moment he crossed the buffer zone, they would descend upon him.
He had the physical mass to crush mountains, but absolute density was useless against a chain forged of pure spiritual intent that was anchored directly into his soul. He couldn't punch the seal away. He couldn't crush it with gravity.
To sever a formless, spiritual tether, one required a conceptual weapon. One required the absolute, transcendent edge of true Sword Intent.
Shang Jue picked up the standard Azure Peak steel longsword he had looted from Senior Brother Lin.
He drew it from its scabbard. The blade was a masterwork of orthodox forging, perfectly balanced, humming faintly with spiritual conductivity.
In Shang Jue's hands, it felt as light as a blade of dry grass. He could snap it in half with a twitch of his thumb.
He held the sword out in front of him. He had spent months swinging a massive, rusted slab of iron, relying entirely on kinetic devastation and physics. He had absolutely zero understanding of the refined, profound art of the sword. He didn't know the forms. He didn't know the breathing techniques. He was a blank slate.
But a blank slate was the perfect foundation.
If I want to cut the karma of the Heavenly Sword Sect. Shang Jue thought, his dark eyes reflecting the gleaming steel, I must forge an Intent sharper than their arrogance.
He stood up. He didn't attempt any flashy maneuvers. He simply gripped the hilt with both hands, adopting the most basic, rudimentary stance of a beginner.
He raised the blade. He focused his mind not on the weight of the steel, but on the concept of the edge. He breathed in the dry, hot air of the Ashen Plains.
Slowly, deliberately, the Mad Swordsman initiated his very first, true vertical strike. He was no longer just a walking anvil; he had taken his first, quiet step onto the path of the sword. The journey to ten thousand pounds, and the forging of an Intent that could pierce the heavens, had officially begun.