Volume 4, Chapter 57 – Qin Wuyang Proves the Sword

At this very moment, in Huang Province, in Guanling Circuit, this fortress city had already been almost completely deserted. It had thoroughly become a dead city.

But strangely enough, it had not suffered much destruction. The streets and buildings, and even the outer city walls, were all still largely intact. Old newspapers and trash lay scattered in many places, and the streets were clogged with great numbers of carts and cars. All of this showed that before it had been abandoned, it had still been able to support nearly a million people living there.

Whoosh… whoosh…

The wind from beyond the frontier swept in dust and sand, lifting old newspapers and scattered plastic trash bags into the air. Through the yellow sand, two figures could vaguely be seen walking forward at an unhurried pace. Both wore simple right-lapped ancient robes, held at the waist only by a worn cloth strip gone fuzzy with age. From that strip hung a longsword and a wine gourd, and on their feet were straw sandals woven from vines and grass.

“Master,” one of them spoke up. It was a woman. “I remember what you told me before… that you and he had best not get too close.”

The wind and sand parted, revealing a face that looked a little dusty and travel-worn, but whose natural features were in fact fine and dignified.

The newcomer was none other than the sword leader of Qingping Dao, the only disciple of Qingping Dao in this generation, the “Senior Sister Qin” Zhao Feng had once mentioned.

As for the other person, there was no need to ask. It could only be her master, Qin Wuyang.

“That was then, this is now.” Qin Wuyang paused, took off his gourd, drank a mouthful of wine, and looked at the endless yellow sand as he murmured, “In this great age of contention, all things are changing at every moment. Even the eternal order of sunrise and sunset may be altered, much less a mere judgment made by a sentient being.”

At first glance, his words sounded completely nonsensical. Especially now, with the blazing sun high overhead, apart from the heavier dust and wind, everything looked perfectly normal, making him seem thoroughly incoherent.

But that was not actually the case.

Because right now it should not have been daytime at all. The clock hands pointed to two in the morning.

“Then, Master…” Senior Sister Qin tilted her head and looked at the old man from the side. “Does this so-called change also happen to include you planning to find me a younger brother?”

“Uh… well…” Qin Wuyang had been putting on the bearing of a lofty expert one moment, only to flush bright red the next. Stammering, he said, “Your master hasn’t really thought it through yet… I just felt that you might grow lonely in the future…”

“And how did you figure it out?” he suddenly reacted, looking at Senior Sister Qin with some surprise. “Did I show some sort of abnormality?”

“The way you found me back then, did you forget?” Senior Sister Qin curled her lip. “‘Dividing the sword to know a person’… as if this were the first time you’ve used that trick.”

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“I only…”

“All right, I’m not picking a fight with you.” Senior Sister Qin explained on her own initiative. “Actually, you’re right. After all these years, living only with an old wreck like you really is rather monotonous. If you want to find me a younger brother, or a junior brother, I don’t object.”

“The only thing I want to know…” Here she took a deep breath, as if finally summoning the courage to voice what was truly in her heart. “…is whether you’re afraid that if ‘we’ keep living like this, I’ll feel lonely, or whether you’re afraid that after tomorrow, when it’s only ‘me,’ then I’ll feel lonely.”

Because the word lonely was usually only used for someone who was by themselves…

For all those years, she and the old man had gotten by together, and he had never once said she would be lonely. For him to say such things now, and then come to a place this close, made it very hard for her mind not to wander.

Faced with the question, Qin Wuyang fell silent, which was rare for him.

“I won’t lie to you either.” He let out a sigh. “After meeting him today, I truly do not know whether the me of tomorrow will still be me.”

“You…” At last hearing it admitted by the man himself, Senior Sister Qin’s eyes instantly reddened. “Is this meeting really that unavoidable!?”

“It is unavoidable.” Qin Wuyang met her gaze with complete seriousness.

Because of her origins, this disciple of his had matured early. Yet for the same reason, it had not been suitable to pass down the Emotion-Forsaking Dao to her too soon. She still needed to experience more trials and tempering.

Ah. In truth, she should be able to guess. This was all for the greater cause of the Sword Dao.

“They all say that Sword Dao is an imitation of other paths.” Qin Wuyang turned to look at the city wall ahead. “And ever since Patriarch Qingping founded this school, the lifelong pursuit of him and every Qingping Sword Lord after him has in fact been to change that reality.”

“It was never just a simple yearning for longevity… though that was one of the aims as well. On this road, mere selfishness alone is not enough to make so many people go forward one after another, following the same path, charging against it again and again, only to return without success again and again.”

“Remember this, Yuchen.” He narrowed his eyes. “Whenever you see such a thing happen, then behind it there must be something deeper and heavier driving them, something that makes them willingly do it.”

Senior Sister Qin lowered her head and said nothing.

The truth of those words was something she actually understood too. It was just that when the moment truly came to face it, she discovered that she could not remain as calm as she had once imagined.

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Couldn’t they… simply not take another road?

She badly wanted to ask Qin Wuyang that.

She did know, after all.

That Path of Qi.

Whether it was the fact that this had already begun spreading to some extent in recent days, or the fact that she herself had received a Spirit-pointing transmission of the method from the creator of the Dao even earlier, Senior Sister Qin knew it all and had watched everything unfold.

But she could not say such words.

Just as Qin Wuyang understood her pride, she also understood his. She knew that this little old man was absolutely not the sort who, just because another person’s orthodoxy was better, would go over and cling to it and learn it. He would only praise it, summarize it, then think of every possible way to draw nourishment from its strengths and feed that nourishment back into the path already chosen by himself and all the Qingping Dao Lords.

“Enough.” Qin Wuyang suddenly grinned. “Nothing has been decided yet. What’s the point of discussing it now?”

“Come on. This too is a scene rarely seen. Only you have the chance to witness it. No one else is fit to come this close.”

Though he spoke with reckless boldness, after only a few steps Qin Wuyang changed tone and began speaking to Senior Sister Qin about ordinary household matters.

“You should drink less in the future.”

“Don’t be like me and end up with a body full of ailments.”

“You should put a little more effort into your appearance.”

“You’re a girl, after all. Who knows, you may marry someday. Even if you don’t, you should at least please your own eye. Don’t waste such good natural features… look at you, look at the pearls you’re dropping. Really, you…”

He rambled on endlessly in front, while Senior Sister Qin walked behind him and cried, tears falling soundlessly.

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And so, in fits and starts, the two of them crossed the fortress walls and entered the even more desolate frontier wilderness.

The wind and sand there were fiercer still. And it was from this dividing line onward that everything in sight seemed to become veiled in a faint layer of blood mist, and the farther they walked, the deeper that bloody color grew.

After they had walked for a while, Senior Sister Qin had more or less cried enough. She wiped her face and forced herself to collect her spirits, but she showed none of the worry that, to outsiders, she ought to have shown.

Because she knew perfectly well that there was no danger in this sea of blood.

On the contrary, for the aberrant, sinister things that tried to pass through here, the “person” stationed at the center of the wasteland ahead was the true danger.

Gradually, the two crossed one hill after another, passed through dried canals and great pits in the ground.

Along the way they often saw heaps of rotting corpses and white bones piled on the earth. Some of them were obviously not human bones, and in terms of number they even exceeded the human remains.

The farther forward they went, the more there were. After fifteen hundred paces, the piles had already risen to half a person’s height. The bloody mist in the air had grown so thick that it could block a living being’s sight, and they could only vaguely make out an enormous pit up ahead, with what seemed to be a human figure standing at its very center.

“It has been a long time.”

His voice carrying a trace of emotion, Qin Wuyang slowly walked up and bowed deeply to the figure.

“At last the time has come.”

“Sword cultivator Qin Wuyang.”

“I ask my Dao-friend to turn around.”

Senior Sister Qin did not dare descend into the great pit. She stayed above, watching the development there with nervous focus.

She could not make the figure out clearly. All she could sense was that the outline and bearing resembled the old man, yet its hair and beard were pure white, and the whole person seemed to be constantly radiating an edge of sharpness outward. Merely looking at him made her eyes ache.

What will happen…?

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Though they had split apart and no longer shared thoughts and intent,

in essence, they were still one person, weren’t they…?

“It truly has been a long time.”

The white-haired old man’s body trembled, and movement slowly came from ahead.

He turned around, revealing not only a white robe and a Yu-made sword, but a face exactly identical to Qin Wuyang’s.

Only it looked colder, like ice at the uttermost extreme that had not melted for ages beyond counting. There was no trace of human feeling or vitality in it.

“Please.”

Qin Wuyang drew his sword and offered a swordsman’s salute.

The other said nothing, but he too raised his sword in return.

The two stood there facing one another for a long while.

Just when Senior Sister Qin thought this scene would never change, both of their figures suddenly blurred for an instant.

It looked as if two afterimages had crossed in midair and, in the instant of crossing, momentarily joined together into a single complete outline.

Then only one shadow remained.

And before that shadow, a graphite-black sword was planted upright in the earth.