Li Heng’s ancestral blade crashed to the stone, and the silver light shimmering along its length winked out. His shoulders and arms ached, and a sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead. He heaved a breath, and he picked the weapon up once again.

“Three,” Old Guo said. The disapproval contained in that single word set Li Heng’s teeth on edge.

“Again,” Li Heng forced out. He raised his sword into a guard position.

Across from him, the old cultivator curled his hand into a fist. In Li Heng’s spiritual sense, Old Guo was a tree, ancient and strong, and his fist a knotted branch blackened by fire and lightning both.

For the purposes of their training, Old Guo had limited his cultivation to the peak of the Body Refining stage. His presence wasn’t anywhere near the overwhelming spiritual weight that had crashed over Li Heng when the old cultivator had chased off King Hao and his bandits. Old Guo’s strength was still more than Li Heng could handle, but he supposed that was the point.

Old Guo took a step forward and crossed the dozen or so yards between them, just as he had hundreds of times in the past days. His gnarled ancient fist slammed into Li Heng’s jian. Silver light flared along the length of the blade, and the weapon’s weight increased a hundredfold. Already aching arms and shoulders strained, and Li Heng poured qi into his meridians enforcing his arms with the simple enforcement technique He Yu had taught him.

He shoved aside the wound to his pride at the thought. He shoved aside the shame at thinking poorly of the commoner he’d come to regard as a friend. He was better than this. Better than such thoughts, and certainly better than this failure to master the most basic aspect of his family’s art. Old Guo had seen his deficiency in an instant. Now he had spirited Li Heng away to this mountaintop to train. Train and admonish.

A second impact sent shockwaves up Li Heng’s arms, then a third. Once more, Li Heng dropped his jian after the third strike, the spiritual weight of holding onto that much power too much of a strain. He fought the urge to scream his frustration to the heavens. A noble had to maintain his decorum, even in the face of hardship.

“Again,” Old Guo commanded.

For what seemed the thousandth time, Li Heng settled into a ready stance. Wind whipped around them, exposed as they were atop some lonely frozen mountain. Old Guo hadn’t needed to explain why he’d brought Li Heng here to train away from He Yu and Yan Shirong. Even without the week of training his foundation on the Stonewrought Pines, Li Heng was advanced enough that his presence had taken on the aspects of his family arts—lunar and ice qi swirled in his dantian and coursed through his meridians.

The peak Old Guo had taken him to was easily high enough that it was capped with snow year-round, even this far south. As soon as they’d arrived, the old cultivator had told Li Heng they’d be training at night, so daytime was for cultivation and any sleep he may need. Now, under the light of the near-full moon, and standing atop a flat rock surrounded by windswept snow, Old Guo began a lecture Li Heng had grown all too familiar with. Each word accompanied another relentless blow from the old cultivator’s fists.

“The core of your family art is balance. Receive the attack, then return it. This much is clear to anyone who has fought a Li. What use are you if you can’t accept an attack of even the Third Realm?” Old Guo began.

Li Heng didn’t think that was quite fair. It wasn’t that he couldn’t receive an attack of the Third Realm. It was that he couldn’t take an attack from a higher realm than his current cultivation. Which made him no different than any other cultivator. Even at the late Foundation stage, there was a significant difference in power between him and an early stage Body Refining cultivator. He’d said as much almost as soon as the two of them were alone, but Old Guo hadn’t agreed.

“I fought your grandfather,” Old Guo continued, circling where Li Heng stood waiting for the inevitable attack. “We were both at the middle stage of Nascent Soul. I had more than enough insight to study the flows of Li Renshu’s qi during our battle. The difference between you and your grandfather couldn’t be more clear.

“Tell me, scion of the Li family—raised in luxury and taught by scholars and bureaucrats—when was the last time a foe truly pushed you? When was the last time you stepped up to your limit, and then went beyond?”

A disquiet deep in Li Heng’s spirit quavered at the question. It wasn’t one Old Guo had asked him previously.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

“When I spar with Princess Tan,” he said. It was the most immediately obvious answer.

Old Guo said nothing. In the silence that followed, it felt as though someone had stuffed cotton into his mouth.

While it was true that Tan Xiaoling was stronger than him, and a better fighter if he were honest, did she really push him? Was sparring with her the sort of test Old Guo was asking about? Sure, she could push him. Given time she could always overwhelm him, the flashing of her paired dao eventually becoming too much for him to handle, too many successive strikes for him to reliably defend against.

Something would always slip through his defenses, then he’d find himself on the back foot. She would press that advantage with a savagery he’d never found in anyone else, and then he’d be forced to yield. Usually, not before they’d tumble to the dirt—Li Heng turned his thoughts away. He was here to train, not daydream.

No, he admitted to himself, Tan Xiaoling didn’t push him to the edge of his abilities. If anything, he never really tried against her. Not fully. He couldn’t say if it was more due to respect for her station, or to the fact that he was enthralled by the sense of danger that clung to her like a gown of the finest silk.

He was forced to admit to himself that even though she was stronger, she wasn’t so strong that she could push him in the way that Old Guo had asked after. Nor would she. Their sparring was part training, part something he was too unsure of himself to focus on. Despite her strength, she was never actually trying to truly hurt him. Thus she would never truly push him.

An uneasy certainty settled over Li Heng at that thought and he returned to Old Guo’s question. When was the last time he’d gone beyond his limits? With the serpent in the forest? No, certainly not that. He’d been able to rely on He Yu and Yan Shirong then.

In fact, despite being of the highest cultivation of the three, he’d let He Yu act as bait for the stratagem that had felled the beast. For the thousandth time, he shoved that particular thought aside. He could focus on that—and its implications—once they returned to the sect.

Li Heng turned the question over again and again, even as he defended against the rain of blows from Old Guo. With each attack, with each clash of fist and iron, he reached further back in his memory. The further back he reached, the more his disquiet grew.

Never. He’d never been pushed. Never been tested. Not truly. He released his breathing technique and allowed his head and shoulders to slump forward.

“Stand up,” Old Guo snapped. “Clearly you’ve taken the wrong lesson.”

Li Heng did as he was told.

“You’re not fit to carry your grandfather’s sword. To carry the blade that nearly killed me.”

He looked down at the jian held in loose fingers. Maybe Old Guo was right, and he didn’t deserve this blade. So lost in his self-doubt, that he barely reacted to the attack in time.

When he spun away from Old Guo’s punch and looked into the old cultivator’s eyes, Li Heng’s blood ran cold. Old Guo still had his cultivation suppressed to that of a peak Third Realm, but now his spirit radiated killing intent. The spirit of an ancient forest, wild and dark, churned around Old Guo. He attacked again.

Li Heng dropped his sword after only the second strike this time, its power far too much now that Old Guo’s attacks had been reinforced with his killing intent. The old cultivator lashed out with a snap kick that caught Li Heng in the side of the head. Stars exploded in his vision, and a gnarled fist slammed into his chest.

He sailed through the air for a dozen or more feet—he couldn’t tell anymore—before he slammed into the ground. His jian, the ancestral blade of the Li family, lay somewhere out of reach. Old Guo rushed him like a charging boar.

Li Heng activated the White Hare Dance. He flashed over to where he’d dropped his jian. When he turned to face his opponent once more, Old Guo had already crossed more than half the distance between them, and had his arm cocked back for yet another blow.

Silver qi sang along the length of Li Heng’s blade as he deflected yet another devastating punch from a cultivator operating at a full realm’s advantage. The weight of his blade was once again too much for him to bear, and as he spun away a second time, he knew deep in his spirit that this was his only chance.

Mid spin, even as he increased the distance between himself and Old Guo, Li Heng pointed his jian at the old man. Sword light streamed off the blade in a torrent of power. Old Guo’s spirit flared, and he became a thousand-year redwood. He blasted Li Heng’s attack apart with a counter of his own, but Li Heng didn’t relent.

He couldn’t. He was going to die here—of that much, he was certain now. But at least he could do so in a way that wouldn’t bring shame to his family.

He swung his jian in a broad sweeping cut and activated the White Hare Dance. He appeared behind Old Guo with the blade in mid-swing and only inches from the old cultivator’s neck. Old Guo’s fist snapped up.

Something stirred in Li Heng’s spirit. He allowed the strike against his blade and activated the Winter Moon Reflection. This time, however, instead of spinning away as he normally did, he let the momentum from Old Guo’s attack lead him into another strike. His blade sang with silver light, and the Lunar Mirror Sword Art joined the chorus.

Li Heng’s spirit buzzed with excitement and power. His sword felt light. Lighter than it ever had, yet he could feel the power in it, the strength and sharpness of a blade once carried into battle by his family founder, Patriarch Li Renshu.

Old Guo took the most powerful attack Li Heng had ever delivered, and shrugged it off like nothing. Still, though, he retreated. The old cultivator settled into a more guarded, but still aggressive stance.

“Good,” Old Guo said, still holding onto his refined killing intent. “You're beginning to learn.”

Without another word, Li Heng attacked.