Spiritual swords at Cang Qiong only came from one place: Wan Jian peak. The entire process of getting a sword was generally unknown to the beginning disciple. All most knew was that the sword was the physical manifestation of a cultivator’s qi. It was fascinating to think about, but that didn’t mean she thought she was ready to have her own sword.
Liu Feng had made it an issue.
“Honored shizun, this unworthy disciple has a request.”
Wang Huo looked up from his tea with a quirk on his lips. He smiled benevolently as he gestured before him. “Ah, Han-er,” he said brightly. “Pray, be seated, and tell this master what brings you before him today. Would it happen to have something to do with young Liu Feng?”
Oh, there was something all right. That something made it feel dreadful to ask her shizun for this. He should be telling her when she was ready, not this way. Li Hanyi tucked her robes delicately under her as she sat across the table from him, buying time before she asked the worst question by pouring her shizun a new cup of tea. “This disciple would like to ask shizun’s permission to go to Wan Jian peak.”
“Wan Jian peak?” He hummed as he sipped at his tea. “Ah, so it is time then.”
Wait, what? No moral lesson on how she was putting the cart before the horse? Nothing about how she was letting some patient influence her decisions in the worst possible way?
“You should have gone months ago. Most disciples of Qian Cao that begin work in the clinic already have their swords before their first day.” He sipped his tea serenely, a placid smile on his face.
Li Hanyi wanted to smash her face against the table. “Shizun, do you mean to tell this disciple that I should have gotten a sword just because I’m on punishment detail?”
“This master was under the impression that Han-er simply wanted to take his time in progressing his cultivation.”
Li Hanyi was not ashamed to say that sometimes she picked some things up slower than other disciples. Ancient fantasy China required an adjustment period, and she was truly doing her very best. But she would have noticed a bunch of fifteen-year-olds roaming about with flying swords.
Wang Huo continued to sip calmly at his tea, humming in delight at the flavor. “Han-er was just having so much fun learning all about how to use his acupuncture for more than its prescribed use.”
When was playing with a magic sword considered normal for a fifteen-year-old? Apparently? Only if said fifteen-year-old was a member of a righteous cultivator sect. But Li Hanyi had decided that doubling down on her acupuncture was a better use of her time, and her shizun had just allowed it.
“Don’t look so betrayed Han-er.” He put his teacup down with a gentle clink of porcelain. “All children develop at different rates. And, quite fairly, Han-er has become remarkably skilled at his chosen alternate weapon. Many cultivators struggle to adapt to anything other than their personal swords, whereas Han-er will never be left defenseless.”
Wang Huo reached across the table and patted her hand. “This master would much rather his personal disciple was as prepared as possible before this master allowed them to take any missions, decide if they want to become a wandering doctor, or stay on the peak for whatever reason.”
Reasonable, yes, but Li Hanyi was still annoyed that she hadn’t even figured out that any of this was up for debate. She thought she was just supposed to be told when her shizun made an appointment for her or something. “And… shizun didn’t think to tell this disciple any of this?”
He hummed and patted her hand again before withdrawing his hand. “Well. Han-er never asked,” he said with that same placid smile. “If Han-er wishes to take on the world without this master’s help, who is this master to stop him? If Han-er never asks for help, how is this master supposed to know what Han-er wants?”
She paused, blinked twice, and resisted the urge to curse. All this had been a lesson. A test that she hadn’t even known that she was taking. Well, shit. She meekly bowed, fist in her palm. “Then, would honored shizun be willing to help this disciple go to Wan Jian and earn this disciple’s personal sword?”
Wang Huo inclined his head gracefully. “Of course. Let us have lunch and we can go after we are properly fortified for the trial that is to come.”
***
Wan Jian peak was beautiful. It was picturesque in every way as it rose from the pastel-tinted clouds. Most of the peaks were like that, but Wan Jian took the aesthetic to a whole new level. It was a place where magic happened, true magic and not that made-for-TV CGI nonsense, and she found herself wanting to hold her breath so that she didn’t break the illusion.
The silence was comfortable as the ambient qi all but enveloped them in welcome. Hundred of Cang Qiong disciples had come here before her, each one leaving a bit of themselves behind as they walked away with their very essence made manifest. The peak pulsed with it; the weight of martial siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins she’d never met reached out like her ancestors. They beckoned her to join them, to make her mark on the great sword wall, and join a family without end.
“Oh,” she breathed out as her shizun helped her off his sword. On a logical level, Li Hanyi had known that she belonged to a martial cultivation sect. But this? This was her gateway into becoming an official member of the martial family. She’d been giving lip service to the deference and mannerisms before now, and she’d never be able to go back to that blissful ignorance.
Shang Fenhua, Airplane in another life, already had his sword.
He’d come to Wan Jian with the knowledge that he would betray his sect to save his own hide and still walked away from this place with the intention to keep going. She despised him, just a little, now that she knew the lengths that he would go to. Understood it now, how so many people (once fictional characters in a web novel) would curse him to death for turning his back so easily on Cang Qiong.
Here were her ancestors now, the benevolent ghosts of generations past, who would weigh her very soul and guide her to the shape of it. They would know her to her core, every secret and lie laid bare. Her worthiness, potential, temperament… everything would be on display.
Her shizun’s hand, warm and alive, was the only thing keeping her from bolting off the mountain peak in a gibbering mess. “Take a moment if you need, Han-er.”
Li Hanyi breathed in deeply, her heart thudding in her ears. The revelation struck her that she could be more, better, kinder, and wiser if she just stayed here and meditated on it. Just throw herself in peaceful meditation and contemplation until the Heavens opened up and showed her true enlightenment.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
She turned her head to look over her should at her shizun, ash gray eyes wide as he gave her a gently paternal smile. “What,” she managed to stammer out through the hazy fog of sudden clarity.
“Ah, at last. This master had wondered what it would take for Han-er to have such a breakthrough.” His hand on the small of her back grounded her enough at the moment for his words to register. “Come, Han-er, and let’s see what shape you will take.”
There were other voices, buzzing around them like sparks of electricity, rising and falling in some ritualized cadence. The Wan Jian cultivators guided the pair through the peak and handed her tea to drink that tasted somehow like sunshine on freshly tilled earth. Her meridians soaked it up like a sponge, and that extra energy bolstered her every step forward.
Li Hanyi was a thing of this world and the next, drifted along towards a bright beacon that called her home. Here, the ghosts of her ancestors-to-be whispered, here is where she would be forged anew. Her feet stopped, the guiding hand on her back was still and patient. “Here,” came the strange echo of her voice across time and space. “I need to be right here.”
This spot, right up against the sword wall, where she could lean up against stone and touch the tips of her fingers to the metal hammered into the stone in a complex array. Where the Heavens themselves would see, watch her defy them. Where the System’s bleating messages were drowned out by the thrum of the world itself beating around her. She dropped where she stopped, legs folded up under her, her hands careful and sure as she shaped them just like she had done hundreds of times before and would thousands of times more.
There were no instructions on how to get a personal sword because no Cang Qiong disciple needed any. It was a conversation, a demonstration, a stripping of the old to make way for the new. She’d have a new name, that of the blade that deemed her worthy, and a place she’d made all for herself. Outer or inner didn’t matter when she’d finally stepped away from her old life and into this new one. Li Hanyi, a disciple of Qian Cao.
Her qi settled in her meridians, flowed out from the mountain to her own body and back again, and Li Hanyi cultivated.
***
Li Hanyi came back to herself slowly and all at once, her bones hollowed out to make room for the weight of the world. It had been noon, bright and cheerful with the faintest touch of magical cotton candy clouds when she had begun. The stars twinkling overhead, bright and bold as only a map of infinite universes could be, was enough to tell her that she’d been cultivating for at least four shichen.
Her body should have ached from staying still in one spot for that long, her stomach should have been so empty it tried to fuse with her spine. But instead? All she felt was a tranquil peace and the knowledge that she could survive on the energy of the world. Making her foundation had been by tooth and nail, with the tiniest amount of B-Point-driven assistance from the System, and all the pride she could manage. But forging her sword and reaching the beginning stage of golden core formation? That was nothing but an alignment of the cosmos for one brief and glorious moment.
The blade in her lap was nothing short of a miracle. It was slim, the ash-gray sheathe and whitish blade not even as thick as her waist. The sheathe itself bore a solid black series of geometric patterns, an obsidian inlay that glimmered under the starlight, unassuming and ominous all at once. Its hilt was wrapped in the same gray, capped with that same obsidian inlay pattern. Her sword, all hers and unusable by anyone else, sang out thinly as she drew it. A line of silvery metal, like white smoke in front of the stars above, her jian was perfect in every way.
It was made for her, by her, wrested free from the sword wall by nothing more or less than everything she was, could, and would be. All hers, with no System to mess it up for her. She had never loved anything more than she did the first time she looked down at it. And, oh, oh how she understood how so many cultivators would go to war for their swords.
Sword forms had never been her specialty. Her needles had always been enough. This sword would complement them nicely, light enough to be wielded in one hand and swift enough to be just the right shade of dangerous for her tastes. Graceful and feminine in all the ways Li Hanyi could never allow herself to be, her sword would be her unfaltering partner until the day she died or it shattered beyond repair.
She let herself, just this once, indulge in quiet childish wonder. The sword danced in the starlight and moved obligingly with her as she fumbled through forms she hadn’t practiced nearly as diligently as she should have. Her sword probably didn’t deserve to be held in the hands of an incompetent idiot. It demanded a silent perfection that Li Hanyi couldn’t offer it. Yet.
The future War God of Bai Zhan had offered to train her just so her could fight her at her best. And she hadn’t figured out why until she held her naked potential in her hands.
This was the sword of someone sneaky, ghostly, someone who slipped in and out of conflict with surgical precision. Someone who needed a double-edged sword to cut away the world’s worst like it was nothing more than necrotic tissue. A quick and clean cut to excise all signs of infection. Not the sort of thing Liu Feng would find much of easily on Bai Zhan.
A throat cleared, familiar in its genial politeness, and she turned to face her shizun in a whirl of robes. “Ah, Han-er. It’s lovely.”
She smiled, bright and wide like she hadn’t since she first felt the touch of her own qi, at her shizun. Li Hanyi was prepared to move heaven and earth for this man, her mentor of six years who might as well be her uncle, who had been the entire reason she could hold a sword of her own. “Isn’t it?”
Wang Huo returned her smile with all the grace of a proud father at his child’s first recital. “Come, let us find what name such a sword bears.”
Whatever it was, that would be her title now. There were only three times that Cang Qiong disciples would acquire a whole new name: their guan li or ji li and subsequent courtesy name befitting their station, receiving their personal sword, or deeds so great that they reached the ears of the Heavens. Li Hanyi had no desire to be deemed an adult woman, nor did she wish to be known so to the Heavens, and so the only new name she would ever bear would be that of the sword that had just chosen her. Once she learned that name, she would be sent off to meditate on what that name meant to her before she was officially enrolled in the Cang Qiong registry under that name.
Wang Huo waited patiently for her to leave the lightning-scorched stones, the burn marks the only lingering signs of the Heavenly Tribulation she had gone through while she meditated. She did not strictly need his hand on her arm to guide her as she had when they had ascended the peak, but appreciated it nonetheless. “Come, come,” he beckoned for one of the Wan Jian disciples to come closer. “Your martial brother would like to know his name.”
Li Hanyi watched the dark green-robed teen run off as if his life depended on it to fetch his own shizun, still reeling as she took the chance to read the latest (and thus most immediately pressing) messages from the System.
[Mission “Acquire Spiritual Sword” has been successfully completed. You have received the “Huànxiàng Gǔ Sword.”]
What kind of dumb name was that? The characters for it were fantasy, elephant, and bone. What kind of weird name was that? Was this supposed to be a reference to some obscure idiom? A joke she wasn’t in on? Li Hanyi wasn’t a scholar of ancient Chinese. How was she supposed to know what it meant? Huànxiàng Gǔ? Was she even reading it right? Was the System even reading it right?
[The “Huànxiàng Gǔ Sword” is also mistakenly called the Gui Baigu Sword.]
She stared uncomprehendingly at the text boxes hovering in front of her. That explained absolutely nothing. How did you get Gui Baigu out of Huànxiàng Gǔ?
Wait a minute. Airplane was just as dumb as she was, only he liked to use a thesaurus to make himself sound smarter. The alternate name was something about the bones of the dead. If she twisted her brain like Airplane and thought about what the original name was supposed to mean?
The System had essentially given her a sword named Bones of a Dead Ghost. But some thesaurus version of it. So it was probably something stupid like Phantasm Bone, Wraith Bone, Apparition Bone, Shadow Bone, or something else painfully irritating. Couldn’t it just have been called the Gui Gu Sword? Wait, no, that kind of alliteration was far too similar to the sounds a baby might make. Fair enough, Airplane, fair enough.
She didn’t want to ever admit her sword’s name out loud where Airplane would hear about it. Because, of course, she had been saddled with some edgy named sword with all kinds of creepy meanings to the characters of its name.
Well, at least it matched her uniform.