Chapter 871: You’ve Fallen for It (5)

Broken-Sword Cliff was the sword trace the Martial-Heaven Great Emperor had left behind.

Qing looked at that trace and stole the form—

But that didn’t mean that when she stepped into Broken-Sword Cliff, some illusion of the Martial-Heaven Great Emperor would pop out of nowhere with a boing and start chatting with her.

In other words, to everyone else watching Qing, she just suddenly stopped where she stood—standing stiffly in place, staring at empty air with unfocused eyes, like a young master whose gaze had gone blank.

“Now, this is the Broken-Swo—”

“Shh.”

Just as a Supreme Elder was about to introduce the place now that they’d arrived, Gilun raised a finger to his lips to stop him—then pointed that same finger at Qing.

The Supreme Elder saw Qing staring off without focus and immediately clamped his mouth shut.

If you wanted to put it in a fancier, more imposing way, they called it entering a state of selflessness—so it seemed she’d gained some kind of realization the moment she saw the sword trace.

The Supreme Elder swallowed his awe... and then, suddenly, something surged up in him.

No, seriously—Gilun, you bastard. How dare you show this kind of irreverent attitude to a Senior Teacher-Brother as lofty as the heavens.

Because you’ve grown old together, you think you can treat him like an equal now?

This was the power of time—an old man’s astonishing insight.

Because Gilun really was thinking that.

Supreme Elder or Elder, they were all old men anyway—what difference did it make when time was already being cruel to them all?

Ten years and thirty years was a triple gap.

But twenty and forty was only double.

And once you got to sixty and ninety, wasn’t it basically fine to just be friends?

It was at that moment.

Everyone’s heads snapped around at once—some kind of pressure, or danger, rang an alarm in their senses.

SHRIIING—steel sliding from its scabbard.

With the soft rasp of fabric, everyone’s attention locked onto the back of the figure who’d yanked their blade tight.

And like a bowstring pulled to its limit and released—

An elbow fired with ruthless decisiveness, drawing a perfectly straight horizontal arc.

And then, a moment later—

SSSSSHK!

The young cypress that had regrown from cut stumps—still thin—shuddered all at once, branches scraping as they tilted—

And dozens... no, maybe hundreds of trees began to lean simultaneously.

Some to the left, some to the right.

Leaning in every direction at once, the space filled in an instant with the sounds of snapping and breaking.

“Hoooo......”

In the middle of it, Qing let out a long breath.

Her blue eyes—now glossy again, fully present—swept over the tangled, fallen cypress grove.

A forest wrecked to hell. Startled monkeys shrieked and fled, KIK-KIK-KIK, leaping wildly, and birds burst up with a frantic FLAP-FLAP.

Qing’s pupils trembled, tight.

Oh my god, is this... environmental destruction......?

The other Broken-Sword Cliffs might feel wronged.

It wasn’t like she was “disrespecting” them because they were rocks—the ancient, storied bedrock could be split and pierced and bored through and nobody said a word, but topple a few trees and everyone stares at her like she committed a crime.

But people were always like that—arbitrary and slippery.

In the middle of it—clap, clap, clap—a slow, unhurried applause.

Gilun’s harsh voice cut through.

“As expected. Excellent. To blow away a forest with one strike—so there was a sword hero of this age right here?”

Qing’s expression went sour.

Was that... praise?

That slow clap, clap, clap rhythm, and the way he spoke—anyone would hear it and think he was sneering.

But Qing decided to take it as praise.

Because it was Gilun.

He didn’t always know what he should or shouldn’t say, and he tended to say things weirdly......

“And the name of that sooooo impressive form is?”

“Solitary Nine Swords, Fourth Form—Sever Bonds, Cut Love.”

Somewhere, a groan escaped.

It was the Supreme Elders—long, heartfelt lamentation from men shocked by the words “Fourth Form.”

Because for Diancang, at least, they’d been quietly proud that it had to be nine forms—at minimum, something like the Sixth Form, second from the top among what remained.

“Mm.”

Gilun, though, looked like he’d sunk into thought, and then his brows bent the wrong way.

Wait—so it wasn’t praise?

That drawn-out “sooooo impressive” tone—was it actually, nice job destroying our forest?

But Gilun had only been purely impressed, and purely curious.

The reason he frowned was something else entirely.

“Mm. I didn’t know Senior Martial-Heaven was the type of great man who nagged.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sever Bonds, Cut Love—cut worldly ties. He came all the way to Mount Diancang, and the message he left behind is that? If that’s not nagging, what is? Sounds like: stop running around and focus on training.”

It was an astonishing insight from a martial artist who’d reached an unfathomable realm.

While Qing was still admiring that, Gilun added an explanation.

That Diancang was too worldly wasn’t some new criticism. People had been saying it forever.

It was even a recurring topic that popped up inside the sect whenever they got bored.

One of those “worldly” things was the Wandering Circuit.

It was a unique Diancang tradition born from how Diancang had once belonged to an entirely different country—so it developed in a way unlike the Central Plains.

A Diancang disciple, at least once in their life, had to go out into the Martial World and obtain one of three things, then deliver it back to the sect.

Kill an evil criminal and take their weapon.

Or duel a famed swordsman and bring back that sword.

Or—if you didn’t want to solve it with violence—find a talented child and bring them in.

“But if you ask why Diancang got involved with the secular world in the first place, it’s because back in the Dali Kingdom era, those monk bastards were unbearably arrogant. Do you know the Buddhist teachings are broadly divided in two?”

One side insisted you must actively spread the teaching and save suffering beings—the Great Vehicle.

The other said: beings will be guided by the Tathagata after immeasurable time anyway, so leave them; practitioners are pitiful beings barely capable of their own practice, so they should focus on their journey toward nirvana—the Lesser Vehicle.

Dali Buddhism was clearly the latter.

Worse, the royal family were devout believers, and they didn’t watch over the people very well.

So Diancang’s seniors, frustrated, stepped in—fine, I’ll do it myself—and the practice they adopted was the Wandering Circuit.

“In other words, they decided to become Mahagari. If you don’t know that story, Diancang can look like it pushes training aside and goes out into the secular world, obsessed with worldly things—whether it’s honor or money.”

Mahagari was another name for Mahakali—originally Shiva’s deity in India, but absorbed into Buddhism and remade as a guardian who protects believers from evil.

“At this point, I came for nothing. Sure, the form itself looks good, but we have Splitting-Radiance teachings too, so... honestly?”

Shock.

Daoist Master Gilun just said the form from Broken-Sword Cliff wasn’t really necessary.

If the Martial-Heaven Great Emperor heard that—after leaving Broken-Sword Cliff precisely because he’d decided to cut off lingering attachment and bestow it on juniors—his guts would explode and his heart would collapse.

But Qing just went, huh, I guess.

Splitting-Radiance Sword, huh.

She quietly searched it—Thirty-Six Splitting-Radiance Swords. Purple-bordered.

Mm. See? If you were a major sect, you really did hoard purple martial arts.

Diancang’s Sun-Shooting Sword Art was famous for its extreme, kill-you-or-die-with-you aggression—and its speed—so it stood out as a distinctive style.

But even aside from that, it was a prestigious sect stacked with divine arts.

Splitting-Radiance Sword Art was one of them, and from the name—cutting through sunlight pouring down through gaps in clouds—you could guess its speed.

Other divine arts included the Sun-Piercing Spear Art, the Falling-Sun Saber Art, and a Finger Art that fired sunbeams from the fingertips: Single-Sun Finger.

Single-Sun Finger in particular was the strongest of Finger Arts—so strong that even the Heavenly Demon’s death ray would have to lower itself by a move.

It looked like they were obsessed with the sun, but—

They were the descendants of Sun-Shooting, who killed the sun.

That was Diancang Sect.

Qing looked at Daoist Master Gilun.

Over the few days Diancang spent gathering the Supreme Elders, she’d observed him—and he was... very unhurried.

If you wanted to put it nicely, he was carefree.

If you put it bluntly, training my ass—he was always lying down somewhere, or sitting and drinking, or carving a Buddha statue, just eating and lazing around the entire time.

By the Martial-Heaven Great Emperor’s logic, someone like Gilun—already in the Manifest Realm—should have been the person who trained the hardest to reach that realm.

Wasn’t he the one most directly exposed to Sever Bonds, Cut Love’s scolding?

So Qing carefully opened her mouth.

Gilun wasn’t her master, and it could be a sensitive question.

“Daoist Master Gilun... why did you start learning the sword?”

“Hm? Someone said they’d teach me, so I got excited and learned. Why wouldn’t I? They said they’d teach me.”

“Huh.”

“I was a farmer’s kid. And like most farmer’s kids, I figured I’d just rot in place, stuck digging dirt until I died. But in a world this dangerous, it didn’t feel like I could just leave home and live somewhere else either.”

Then a Diancang martial artist appeared and urged him—your talent is exceptional, do you want to come to Diancang?

Live your whole life flipping soil—

Or live as a Diancang martial artist, using incredible martial arts.

“Obviously the second one. What idiot on earth would refuse? Of course I followed him, thrilled out of my mind. But once I started learning, martial arts weren’t that hard. I just did what I wanted, and I ended up here. And Manifest Realm? It’s not a big deal. If you’ve got a little talent, you can reach it. The road ahead is still ninety thousand li. Martial arts starts at the Manifest Realm—the part before that is just warm-up.”

The Supreme Elders listening nearby almost choked with rage.

Because they were the ones who’d grown old without touching that “little talent,” never reaching the unfathomable.

So now they’d become people who’d spent their whole lives doing warm-ups.

But if they complained, it would be admitting they had no talent. And if they just listened, their anger boiled......

Still, it was normal whenever Gilun opened his mouth, so the Supreme Elders had learned to just accept it.

“Sever Bonds, Cut Love. It tells you to cut attachment. But if you cut worldly ties and devote yourself to practice... isn’t that just becoming attached to practice? So you don’t need to carry such a burden either.”

“A burden?”

“If you’re the youngest-ever Transformation Realm, you’ll have your heart suffer, won’t you? You know—if you’re the youngest-ever Transformation Realm and then you grow old and die at Transformation Realm, what do you think people will say? They’ll say your first burst was just a dog’s burst—like, they thought you were some heaven-sent super-super-super genius, but in the end you couldn’t even hit the Manifest Realm and died an ordinary person.”

Daoist Master Gilun: BOMB STATEMENT.

Transformation Realm? Transformation Realm?? What—who’s Transformation Realm?

At the sudden, thoughtless reveal, the Supreme Elders stirred in an uproar, trading looks in a frenzy—

How old is the Heavenly Flower Sword this year? Wasn’t she just barely over twenty? Then yeah, of course it had to be secret.

And since they were Supreme Elders, they immediately understood why someone so young would hide her realm.

More important—

Then what was it, that Half-Sword Twin-Blade Society or whatever? When they sent disciples out on the Wandering Circuit, shouldn’t they send a clever kid?

They’d heard there was some secret training gathering the Heavenly Flower Sword built—top one percent of the martial world—

While they were thinking that—

Qing scratched her chin.

Mm. She’d never thought about it that way.

But hearing it, it did sound right.

Back home, people mocked things like that by comparing them to a projectile launching itself by water pressure—

And come to think of it, her master was also expecting her to become the greatest woman, then the greatest under heaven.

Suddenly, it felt like a burden she didn’t have before was forming.

“So just do what your heart wants. Train if you want to train. Play if you want to play. Eat if you want to eat. The most dangerous arrow is the arrow with no aim—others call it a blind arrow, but to me it looks like the sharpest one.”

Daoist Master Gilun grinned, mischievous.

A childish smile that showed even in middle age—people said men stayed children no matter how old they got.

Laozi wrote in the Dao De Jing that the one who grasps the Way returns to being like an infant.

And Zhuangzi said that a great person does not lose the heart of a child.

“And if you go where your heart takes you, then even if the place you arrive isn’t the place you wanted... you won’t regret it.”

Qing fell silent, sinking into thought.

Sever Bonds, Cut Love... mm. The Martial-Heaven Great Emperor’s—no, the test-maker’s intention wasn’t exactly that, but “cut attachment”...

It felt like she was starting to get it.

Like something was almost within reach—almost.