novelraw Chapter 34 : Chapter 34
Chapter 34 : Chapter 34
Chapter 34
This was a blacksmith shop. Hanging before the door was an iron-cast sign reading “Liang Family Ironworks.” Exposed to wind and rain, it showed not a trace of rust. That alone was the finest advertisement.
The forge inside burned fiercely, as hot as midsummer. Liang Hu stood bare-chested, with only a towel draped over one shoulder, instructing two apprentices.
When the young man stopped at the doorway, he blocked the light. Liang Hu looked up in that direction, paused when he saw him, and then immediately gave the two apprentices the rest of the day off.
“How did you end up like this?” Liang Hu led him into the back courtyard and asked. The two of them had been old friends for many years.
The young man did not look well.
He had already shaved, bathed, and changed clothes. There was not a single part of him that was not neat and clean. Yet there were faint dark circles beneath his eyes, making him look tired and haggard.
But when he first came down from the mountain, those eyes had still been bright.
The young man did not answer. He only took out a long object tightly wrapped in gray cloth and handed it to Liang Hu.
Liang Hu unwrapped the gray cloth. Inside was a wooden case. He opened the case and found within it a strangely shaped sword, fixed in place like a saber. Stranger still, the sword was not merely stored inside the box, but secured into it. At the hilt, the wood had been carved into a perfectly fitted groove that locked the handle in place, while above and below the blade, wooden wedges braced tightly against the sword ridge. The whole case held the sword so firmly that it had no room to move at all, yet nowhere did the box touch the edge.
Liang Hu looked up at the young man and asked, “This is that treasured sword from the rumors, the one said to cut through iron like mud?”
Back when Cheng Zhan had suddenly risen to prominence and killed fifty-two experts in succession, what spread along with his name was that treasured sword, which could sever other people’s weapons in a single strike.
The young man nodded.
Liang Hu said, “Cheng Zhan is dead. Did you know that?”
The young man stared blankly for a moment. “I didn’t kill him.”
Liang Hu said, “When they found him, he was holding the hilt of your Frostflight Sword and had driven the broken blade into his own heart.”
The young man did not speak. He looked both surprised and yet somehow unsurprised, as though he had expected it all along.
Those two contradictory emotions appearing on him at once made Liang Hu frown. He asked, “What happened?”
“Because of this sword.” The young man’s gaze shifted to the weapon. “This is a demonic weapon.”
Before coming to Liang Hu, he had already experienced this sword’s power firsthand. It was affecting his mind. It wanted him to kill.
Now he understood Cheng Zhan. He understood why Cheng Zhan had kept challenging people to duels, why he had never shown mercy, why after losing the sword to him he had rushed at him like a madman trying to seize it back, and why... he had chosen suicide.
Anyone who obtained this sword could learn from it that sword art steeped in killing intent. During the process of learning the sword, it had already begun affecting its wielder. But at that time, the influence was like fine rain soaking into all things silently and without notice.
If the one who had obtained this sword had not been him, or if he had not noticed something wrong when he accidentally killed that bandit, then perhaps the sword’s influence over him would have remained as before, quietly changing his temperament bit by bit until he became like Cheng Zhan.
But he had noticed. So he put the sword away and deliberately refrained from killing any living thing, adjusting his state of mind. He wanted to see whether the problem lay with himself, or with the sword.
He had not expected the sword’s response to come so directly and so violently.
“An ordinary scabbard can’t contain it anymore,” the young man said. “Anything that touches its edge is gradually damaged by the killing aura. I could only make this wooden box to hold it for the time being.”
Liang Hu’s brows drew tightly together. He took the sword out of the wooden case and lightly brought his thumb toward the edge. His strength was perfectly controlled. He only barely brushed the blade, without even the slightest tremor in his hand. Yet the instant he touched it, he suddenly felt a sharp pain.
Liang Hu pulled his hand back and looked at his finger. His thumb was covered in thick calluses, the marks of many years spent forging iron. Now, across that layer of callus, there was an extremely fine line. Liang Hu squeezed his finger, and tiny beads of blood seeped from the cut.
Liang Hu’s face tightened even more. He stared at the sword.
He had not pressed the edge into his thumb, yet his hand had still been cut. It was as if beyond the visible edge, there was another invisible edge that had sliced open his finger.
The young man was looking at the sword as well. He could feel it. Killing intent was constantly emanating from the blade. It was that invisible killing intent that had cut Liang Hu’s finger, shattered every scabbard that touched its edge, and called to him to slaughter.
The sword had not been like this before. Perhaps it was because back then he had still been learning the sword, and the weapon had still had the patience to wait. But now he still refused to kill, so it intended to teach him something beyond mere swordsmanship.
“What do you want to do?” Liang Hu asked.
“Destroy it,” the young man said. “I’ve already tried many methods, but it’s too tough. I couldn’t find any material that could damage it. So I had no choice but to come to you.”
“I’ll try,” Liang Hu said.
He took out an iron ingot he had forged earlier, material he had planned to use for a treasured sword but had not yet put to use. He raised the sword and chopped down at the ingot. Without using much force, he split it cleanly in two, while the edge remained completely unharmed.
He was a forging master renowned throughout the world. Faced with such a weapon, he could not help feeling tempted. He asked the young man, “Must it really be destroyed?”
“It must be destroyed.” The young man looked at him gravely. “You don’t understand.”
His eyes shifted back to the sword, and he murmured, “Every moment, I can feel the urge to kill growing in my heart. It keeps telling me that in heaven and earth, there is nothing that cannot be killed. I want to kill people. If there are no people, then animals will do. On the way here, I already killed many wild beasts. Each time I kill one, I can only gain a brief stretch of peace.”
More and more killing intent seeped from the sword edge, as if telling him that if he still refused to kill, then it would do it itself.
Liang Hu sensed his determination. Though he felt regret, he still said, “All right.”
He put the sword back into the wooden case and led the young man somewhere else.
There was another furnace there. Its shape was different from the one in the shop, and it was far larger. It also burned much hotter.
Liang Hu threw the sword into the furnace. The flames burned all the way to their limit. Ordinary steel would already have melted into liquid iron by that point, yet this sword did not so much as deform in the slightest.
Liang Hu could not help feeling astonished. He drew the sword out with iron tongs and set it across two iron anvils, leaving a section suspended in the middle while the two ends were weighed down on either side. Then he gathered his strength and brought a pointed hammer crashing down on the unsupported section.
The sword bent slightly downward.
Immediately afterward, Liang Hu was driven back several steps by the tremendous rebounding force, and the slightly curved blade snapped back to its original shape.
“How is that possible?” he muttered, then turned to look at the young man.
The young man gazed at the sword in silence. Liang Hu somehow saw a trace of fear in his eyes and could not help asking, “Are you afraid of it?” He had never seen the young man afraid before.
The young man said, “I am. I’m afraid that one day I’ll no longer be myself. I’ll take it up and kill my family and friends, and I won’t even shed a single tear.”
Liang Hu was silent for a moment, then said, “It’s all right. I’ll help you.”
Over the next several days, Liang Hu tried every method he could think of. He practically assembled a complete demonstration of everything one should never do when forging a sword. If an ordinary blade had been tormented like this, it would already have become scrap iron. Yet this sword remained exactly the same as before. The young man grew quieter and quieter.
In order to destroy the sword, Liang Hu built a strange furnace with movable slots inside, capable of bending the blade.
The flames grew hotter and hotter, until the temperature reached its peak. Outside the furnace, Liang Hu activated the mechanism and added iron weights one by one. As the weight increased, the mechanism clamping the two ends of the sword inside the furnace also began to move. Gradually, the lever bearing the iron weights sank until it hovered only a finger’s breadth above the ground, while inside the furnace the blade had bent to the point that its tip and hilt were nearly touching.
And yet all this time, the furnace never produced the crisp sound of a sword breaking, and the lever outside never touched the ground.
There was no room left on the lever for any more iron weights.
In disbelief, Liang Hu said, “What kind of sword is this?”
At that moment, a tremendous cracking sound suddenly came from inside the furnace. The lever outside, loaded with countless iron weights, slammed heavily into the ground and smashed out a crater.
A burst of joy had only just risen in Liang Hu’s heart when the furnace body before him suddenly split open, and a line of red-white light shot toward him at terrifying speed.
He had no time to react. He only felt a sharp pain between his brows.
Then that streak of red-white light suddenly stopped less than half a finger from his face. Only then did Liang Hu see clearly that it was the sword. It had broken out of the furnace and flown straight for his head. Its killing intent had already pierced his skin, and a bead of blood seeped from the center of his brow and ran down along the bridge of his nose.
Only then did Liang Hu begin to feel fear after the fact.
But no sooner had that fear arisen than he understood why the sword had stopped so suddenly.
“Let go, now!” Liang Hu shouted in alarm.
The young man had already released it. The red-hot sword dropped to the ground, and smoke rose from the scorched earth.
Liang Hu rushed forward to look at his hand. It was a horrible sight. In that instant, the young man had realized what was happening and, at the very last moment, grabbed the hilt.
Without a word, Liang Hu spun around and dashed back into the room for medicine.
The young man was drenched in sweat. He let out a long, deep breath.
The sword lying on the ground gradually cooled. It was completely unharmed.
By the time the wound was treated, Liang Hu was already soaked through with sweat. As a blacksmith, he always kept excellent medicine for burns on hand. But even the worst burn he had ever seen was nothing like this—grabbing a sword heated red-hot with a bare hand.
He was not even sure how well such a severe burn would recover.
But his friend was a swordsman.
This was his right hand, the hand he held a sword with.
Liang Hu’s brows were tightly locked, and his expression was too complicated for words.
Yet the young man actually smiled. The pain made the smile look ugly. “I can still use my left hand.”
Liang Hu gritted his teeth so hard that the muscles in his cheeks bulged, but he could not force out a single word.
The young man added, “It’s not your fault. It wanted to kill you. I shouldn’t have brought it here.”
“No, it was me...” Liang Hu was still full of guilt and self-reproach. He thought there must have been something wrong with his furnace.
In that instant, the blade, bent to its limit, had shattered one corner of the slot restraining it. The blade had straightened in a flash and then burst out of the furnace on the force of that rebound.
The young man cut him off. “I felt its killing intent. Otherwise I wouldn’t have reached you in time.”
He had sensed the killing intent inside the furnace. There was nothing wrong with Liang Hu’s furnace. It was the sudden surge of killing intent that had shattered the slot.
No coincidence could have aimed so precisely at the center of Liang Hu’s brow. This was simply the sword flaunting its power once again.
“I should go,” he said.
Liang Hu said anxiously, “Your hand hasn’t healed yet. How can you leave like this?”
“My hand can heal on the road,” the young man said.
“But there are still so many people watching this sword!” Liang Hu said.
“That’s exactly why I can’t stay here. My left-hand sword is good too.”
Liang Hu could not stop him. Left with no choice, he packed his things for him and saw him off into the distance.
On the fourth day after the young man left, visitors came to Liang Hu’s blacksmith shop.
They were a group of well-equipped experts, and they surrounded the shop completely.
The leader pushed the door open and inclined himself slightly toward Liang Hu. “Master Liang, we’ve come looking for someone.”
Liang Hu said, “Whoever you’re looking for, he isn’t here.”
The leader smiled. “You haven’t even heard who I’m looking for, or what price I’m offering. How can you insist at once that he isn’t here?”
He waved a hand, and two men came forward carrying a chest. When they set it down, it hit the ground with a heavy thud. When they opened it, it was filled with gold ingots.
Another man stepped forward holding a case. He opened it, revealing two broken pieces of a sword inside—the Frostflight Sword.
“Where is he now?” the leader asked.
Liang Hu sighed. “Looks like I won’t be earning your price. I don’t know where he is.”
The leader said, “Master Liang, I suggest that you make sure you do. My price is not just this chest of gold. It also includes your shop and your life.”
Liang Hu’s eyes widened. “You think I’ll just let you butcher me?”
“Master Liang.” The leader smiled, calm and courteous. “You are a famous master under heaven. If there were any other way, we would not wish to offend you. But among the weapons that sword has severed, six were your works.”
Liang Hu drew a deep breath and said, “So you came for that sword. In that case, there’s no need for you to go looking for him anymore. That sword has already been destroyed.”
The leader’s face darkened. “Master Liang, that joke isn’t funny.”
Liang Hu said, “I’m not joking either. He came to me for the express purpose of destroying that sword. That weapon was indeed extremely difficult to melt and forge. I specially built a new furnace for it and spent several days on the job. What’s left of it is still in the back. You can go and look for yourselves.”
The leader gave a signal, and two men stepped out at once and went straight into the rear courtyard. A while later, they returned carrying some iron slag and scrap, reporting quietly to the leader.
Liang Hu sat unmoving.
He had stayed up several nights, repaired the damaged furnace, then taken out the meteorite iron he had kept in reserve and refined it together with other materials into slag. No one had ever laid hands on that sword before, so no one would know that these scraps were not truly its remains.
The leader’s expression grew ugly. Looking at Liang Hu, he finally lost the false courtesy he had worn before and said stiffly, “Why would he destroy such a sword, one capable of cutting metal and jade alike? And why would you agree?”
“Because he foresaw the strife this sword would bring,” Liang Hu said, meeting his gaze directly. “He believed that no matter who obtained this sword, they would end up no differently from Cheng Zhan. That’s why he came to me to destroy it. And I agreed because, though I am a craftsman, I am also his friend. I trust him, and I know him. Since you dared come looking for trouble for him, I assume you’ve already investigated him thoroughly. In that case, you should know very well that he really is that kind of man. He really would do something like this.”
The leader stared at Liang Hu for a long time, unable to determine whether he was lying. At last he said harshly, “If that is so, then Master Liang will have to come with us. Since you could refine it into scrap iron, surely you can also forge it back out of scrap iron!”
Liang Hu sneered. He pressed a hand against the armrest of his chair, and instantly the shop rang out with the sounds of countless mechanisms activating. “You think that just because you walked safely into my blacksmith shop today, that means you’ll be able to walk safely back out?”
He could not go with them.
If he did, his life and death would be in someone else’s hands from then on. He would probably never come out again.
Outside the blacksmith shop, countless crossbows were aimed at the place.
The two sides were locked in tension, on the verge of fighting.
Then suddenly someone hurried over, leaned to the leader’s ear, and whispered a few words.
After hearing them, the leader’s expression returned to normal at once. Looking at Liang Hu, he smiled and said, “Master Liang is a man of honor.” Then he waved a hand and led his people away.
Liang Hu’s hearing was good. He had caught what the man said.
Last night, before a crowd of witnesses, “Frostflight Sword” had slain the King of the Pingnan River Bandits, and in his hand had been that very treasured sword capable of cutting metal and jade.
Liang Hu said nothing. His expression was impossibly complicated.
Amid his worry, there was also a trace of pride that could not be put into words.
Liang Hu had wanted to create the illusion that the treasured sword had been destroyed, to help his friend fend off those who sought to seize it.
But his friend had already guessed his intentions, and had deliberately revealed before the crowd that the treasured sword was still in his possession.
That was his friend.
...
Kill!
Lang Qingyun opened his eyes, which were bloodshot all over. He sensed something moving nearby and instinctively tightened his grip on the sword in his hand, swinging it sideways—
His arm stopped abruptly.
What he had used was not the Blood-Rust Blade’s swordsmanship, but the young man’s swordsmanship from the dreams. That was why he had still managed to stop himself.
A small child with rabbit ears on his head had fallen to the side, staring at him in terror. His ears trembled violently, but he did not dare move. Lang Qingyun’s sword was stretched across his neck. Though it had not touched the skin, blood had already seeped out.
Expressionless, Lang Qingyun fixed his gaze on that streak of blood. The little rabbit yao was crying so hard that tears streamed down his face, yet Lang Qingyun’s overwhelming killing aura frightened him so badly that he did not even dare make a sound.
“You wanted to take my sword?” Lang Qingyun asked.
The little rabbit yao trembled as he spoke through sobs. “I-I-I didn’t, didn’t mean to. I thought, thought you were all, all dead...” Halfway through the sentence, his face turned white.
He was only a weak little yao, the sort who had never even heard of the Blood-Rust Blade. When he saw so many dead cultivators in the forest, he had assumed they were all dead and wanted to see if there was anything he could use. He had never expected that one of them was still alive.
This man was covered in killing intent. Just one look from him was more terrifying than a tiger. He had said the wrong thing, and he was a yao besides. This man was definitely going to kill him...
Lang Qingyun looked at him with blood-red eyes and barked in a low voice, “Get lost!”
The little rabbit yao’s mind went blank. Not even bothering to wipe away his tears, he twisted around and stumbled away in a panic.
Lang Qingyun’s hand loosened, and the Blood-Rust Blade clanged to the ground. After calming his mind a little, he picked it up again, did not spare a glance for the corpses all over the ground, and vanished with a movement technique.
Not long after he left, another group of cultivators arrived.
The leader was a cultivator in blue robes. Frowning, he said, “He got away again.”
Someone examined the traces and said, “He probably didn’t leave very long ago.”
Another inspected the area more carefully, then signaled with his eyes and quietly said to the blue-robed cultivator, “Senior Brother Zheng, I’ll go take a look.”
Senior Brother Zheng nodded, and the man flashed into the forest.
Senior Brother Zheng then turned to the person beside him and asked, “Junior Brother Wang, can your spirit beast locate the general direction?”
A cultivator with a long-nosed mouse perched on his shoulder hurried forward and said bitterly, “Senior Brother Zheng, it’s not that I’m unwilling to do my part. It’s just that the blood aura here is too heavy. The scent mouse can’t distinguish anything clearly.”
Senior Brother Zheng frowned but said nothing.
At that moment, the cultivator who had entered the forest returned, carrying a rabbit yao that looked like a small child.
They began questioning the rabbit yao about what he had seen. The rabbit yao trembled as he said everything he knew, but he had no idea where the person carrying the Blood-Rust Blade had gone. Senior Brother Zheng grew impatient and tossed the rabbit yao to Junior Brother Wang. “Junior Brother Wang, your Beast King Sect specializes in this sort of thing. I’ll trouble you with it.”
Junior Brother Wang agreed repeatedly, took out a stick of incense, lit it, and held it beneath the rabbit yao’s nose. Before long, the rabbit yao’s expression turned dull, and he answered whatever they asked. But after questioning him back and forth several times, Junior Brother Wang still got nothing new out of him. The little rabbit yao truly only knew that much.
Junior Brother Wang could only report honestly.
Senior Brother Zheng made no effort to hide the curl of his lip, his impatience and disdain written all over his face.
Junior Brother Wang could only endure it. Though they called one another senior and junior brothers, they did not come from the same sect. Senior Brother Zheng was from Five Spirits Sect, a sect on the verge of entering the ranks of the first-rate great sects, while the Beast King Sect that Junior Brother Wang belonged to sat only at the bottom of the second rate. Most of their methods depended on subdued spirit beasts. Their Beast King Sect had once been a mighty great sect that shook a whole region, but it had long since declined, and there were no spirit beasts left in the sect worth mentioning.
“Let’s wait and see. Junior Sister Liu still has another lead,” someone said.
What he meant was the clue provided by the Treasure-Seeking Map. Only after a certain interval would the Treasure-Seeking Map reveal a clue about the treasure again. Since the Blood-Rust Blade contained the unsurpassed Dao Canon, ordinary tracking arts and divination techniques were almost useless. Once they lost track of the person, all they could really do was wait for the Treasure-Seeking Map to provide more information.
With their trail cut off, the group of cultivators had no choice but to stand around chatting. Junior Brother Wang was the one keeping the conversation going and making the atmosphere less awkward, but although he kept smiling politely, none of the others treated him as someone worth taking seriously.
As they spoke, Senior Brother Zheng suddenly turned to him and said, “Junior Brother Wang, you’ve been out training away from your sect for quite a while now, haven’t you?”
Junior Brother Wang hurriedly replied, “More or less. In another two months, it’ll be three years.”
Senior Brother Zheng said, “Three years isn’t short. Don’t you want to go back and have a look?”
The smile on Junior Brother Wang’s face nearly fell apart. He understood what was meant. Senior Brother Zheng was telling him to leave. He did not want to keep bringing him along anymore. Forcing a smile, Junior Brother Wang said, “Going out to train is all for the sake of cultivation.”
Senior Brother Zheng said, “Your opportunity may not necessarily lie outside.”
Seeing the impatience in Senior Brother Zheng’s face deepen, Junior Brother Wang looked helplessly toward the others. But the expressions on those cultivators’ faces were either indifferent or contemptuous. None of them was willing to speak for him.
He knew that if he stayed any longer, things would only become more humiliating. So he could only force a smile and say, “Senior Brother Zheng is right. I should go back and take a look too.”
He bid the others farewell. They returned the gesture with casual cupped fists, preserving only the bare surface of courtesy.
After he left, someone said, “Wang Yu is finally gone.”
“He’s weak, his abilities are lousy, and he still managed to keep tagging along. His skin is really thick.”
“That’s only because Senior Brother Zheng is softhearted. If it were me, I’d have parted ways with him long ago.”
Using that as an opening, several of them openly or subtly praised Senior Brother Zheng a few more times.
Senior Brother Zheng said, “Enough. Since he’s already gone, there’s no need to keep talking about him. I don’t think there are any more clues here. Let’s move on and wait for news from Junior Sister Liu’s side.”
After the group of cultivators left, a gray mouse poked its head out of the earth and ran off in another direction. It crossed a mound of dirt and stopped in front of an old tree.
Behind the old tree, Wang Yu stepped out. His expression shifted dark and bright by turns.