The rear-mountain courtyard of the Huiyuan Gate, deep in the night.
Gu Chengming sat cross-legged beneath the old tree in the yard, palms turned upward, eyes lightly closed.
Ever since his last round of experiments — testing each cultivation technique as a foundation for a Sword Domain, and accidentally propping open that pink expanse with the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy, a domain that had lasted less than two breaths — the matter had been gnawing at him.
It wasn't that he didn't want a Sword Domain. It was that the way this particular domain expressed itself was, frankly, a little hard to say out loud.
Pink. Ripples. Soft, suggestive light. However you looked at it, that was not the sort of domain a proper sword cultivator ought to possess. It was more like something belonging to some old devil of the Harmonious Joy Sect.
Never mind. Whatever color it came in, we sword cultivators do not confine ourselves to convention.
Having consoled himself with the classic we-sword-cultivators method of consolation, Gu Chengming began to circulate the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy within his body.
Spiritual power turned slowly through his meridians. He tried to project that force outward in the manner Elder Han Che had described — "externalizing the trait" — and a ring of extremely faint pink light rippled outward around him.
This attempt went slightly better than the last. The ripples spread to a radius of roughly two zhang, but they still held for only three breaths before collapsing.
So where was the problem?
He cast his mind back to how Elder Han Che had looked when he unfurled his own Sword Domain.
"Project your inner will out into outer reality."
Gu Chengming turned the words over on his tongue, and all at once the crux of it came clear.
When Han Che spread his Sword Domain, his whole being radiated, from the inside out, a temperament identical to that domain. If one's state of mind clashed with the nature of the technique, of course the domain could never hold steady.
In other words, if he wanted to build a Sword Domain with the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy at its core, then for as long as the domain was open he had to make his own state of mind fit the character of that technique completely.
…Which was to say, he had to make himself very "Harmonious Joy Sect."
Gu Chengming was silent for a moment.
Inside his Sea of Consciousness, the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy was already stirring eagerly.
[The Yin-Yang Creation Strategy is looking forward to this quite a lot.]
[Uh-oh. It seems to know what you're thinking.]
Gu Chengming drew a deep breath and emptied his mind of stray thoughts.
He closed his eyes again and once more set the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy turning. The pink ripples spread outward a second time.
This round held steadier than the last. The domain expanded to about three zhang. Within it the leaves of the spirit bamboo swayed gently, the air turned soft, and even the moonlight seemed to pass through a filter, taking on a faintly tipsy warmth.
Four breaths. Five. Six.
The domain was still slowly widening.
A flicker of delight rose in Gu Chengming — and then he sensed unstable fluctuations creeping along the domain's outer edge.
He reined in his spiritual power at once and the domain dispersed. Still, he had a rough conclusion now.
This road could be walked. It only demanded practice, again and again, until his state of mind and the technique wore each other smooth and moved as one.
As for how to practice…
Gu Chengming rose to his feet and began trying to swing his sword while circulating the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy at the same time.
Sword light cut the night sky, trailing a barely-there wisp of pink radiance. With every stroke, the air around him rippled faintly.
It was still nowhere near a true Sword Domain, but the step of folding a technique's nature into the sword arts themselves — that step he had taken.
The deeper he practiced, the more absorbed he became. His sword momentum grew fluid, and the initial forced awkwardness faded away, until it felt less like drilling and more like dancing with a partner.
Under the moon, sword light and pink radiance wove together, sketching across the little courtyard a scene one could not quite decide was hazy or gorgeous.
What Gu Chengming performed was the Huiyuan Sword Formula, yet it was unlike any ordinary Huiyuan Sword Formula — as though he were leading, arms about the waist of some petite young woman, the two of them turning in graceful circles beneath the moonlight.
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula has gone dizzy, filled to the brim with bliss: Chengming is holding me while we dance… heehee.]
Gu Chengming himself was startled and delighted. He had never imagined there was such a way to merge, spirit to spirit, with a cultivation technique.
Whether or not this Sword Domain ever came together, simply gaining one more way to interact with someone he was fond of was enough to make a man happy.
[The Yin-Yang Creation Strategy nods in satisfaction: Now that's more like it.]
[The Qingxin Formula, cupping its chin and watching for a long while, says: Chengming looks so good when he practices the sword.]
[Then the Clear-Heart Formula sighs. Such a pity it isn't a sword art. No enjoying that kind of treatment.]
[Flowing Cloud Moon-Following sees all this and lets out a soft snort: It's no big deal.]
[It is not envious in the slightest. Only foolish sword arts would be envious.]
Gu Chengming sank deep into this wholly new state of sword practice.
He intended to spend the next several days polishing this embryonic Sword Domain exactly this way.
As for what this sword art actually looked like to an outsider… that was a question he hadn't gotten around to considering.
Night wind swept across the rear mountain of the Huiyuan Gate, quietly scattering that faint trace of pink sword intent. And several peaks away, in another patch of territory, a round of gossip about him was quietly getting underway.
The Daoning Gate, side hall of the main peak.
Several white-robed female disciples walked the mountain path back toward their quarters in twos and threes. Daoning Gate rules had always been strict and the disciples rarely chatted idly, but now and then they still gathered like this to trade interesting news from inside the Wenjian Sect.
"Senior Sister went again today." The one who broke the silence first was a young disciple with her hair in twin buns. She kept her voice low, worry threading through it.
No one needed to specify which "Senior Sister," and no one needed to specify where "went" meant. Every person there knew perfectly well.
Dao-Child Su Qingmeng had gone to the rear mountain of the Huiyuan Gate again today, to spar with that Gu Chengming.
"She comes back with fresh injuries every single time." Another disciple knit her brows. "The day before yesterday it was bruises on her wrists. Yesterday it was a sword cut across her shoulder. Today I watched her walk, and even her footing was unsteady."
"What exactly is that Gu Chengming thinking? It's a spar between fellow sect members. Does he have to strike that hard?"
"Do you think — could Senior Sister Su be under some kind of threat from him?"
At those words, every footfall on the mountain path stopped at once.
Several gazes met in the dim lantern light. Not one of them denied it right away.
In truth the guess hadn't come out of nowhere. Ever since Su Qingmeng emerged from seclusion, the whole of the Daoning Gate had sensed a string of things that didn't add up.
First, the leader chosen for the Grand Tournament had abruptly changed. The Dao-Child of the Daoning Gate had always been the undisputed standard-bearer of the Wenjian Sect's younger generation, yet this time she had been replaced by a disciple of the Huiyuan Gate. Elder Jingxuan had made her position clear before all the disciples, saying there were "no further objections" — but how could the disciples below not have thoughts of their own?
Second, there was the matter of Su Qingmeng going off to the Huiyuan Gate to get beaten up, every single day without fail.
As the Daoning Gate disciples understood her, Su Qingmeng was cold in temperament and proud to the bone. Their Dao-Child had always cultivated within the Daoning Gate's own training grounds and never once sought out an outsider for a match. Now, all of a sudden, she was running to a male disciple's residence day after day and coming back covered in wounds each time. However you looked at it, something about it felt indescribably off.
Then you added in that old business from two years ago: Gu Chengming had asked Su Qingmeng to her face to become his Dao-companion, and been refused.
That affair had never been trumpeted around the Daoning Gate, but plenty of people knew about it all the same.
Sought and denied, nursing a grudge — and now that he'd climbed high, he meant to take his revenge by humiliating her?
It was a cliched plot, but in the cultivation world it was hardly without precedent.
The disciples walked a stretch of road in silence, until at last it was the twin-bunned girl who sighed first.
"Enough. Guessing blindly out here does us no good. We all know Senior Sister's temper. If she didn't want to go, nobody in the world could force her."
"But what if that man used some kind of method on her?"
"Our Dao-Child Senior Sister cultivates the Dao Sword. Illusions and charms are useless in front of her."
"Then what if it isn't an illusion? What if it's coercion? What if he's holding something like the Grand Tournament over her head?"
The theories grew wilder and wilder — and the wilder they grew, the tighter the Daoning Gate disciples' brows drew together.
"In any case, that Gu Chengming doesn't look like a decent sort to me."
The twin-bunned disciple bristled with indignation. "Third on the Hidden Dragon List, so what? Just listen to what they call him — the Murderous Demon of the Northern Territory. The louder a man's reputation, the less you can afford to let your guard down."
A disciple beside them who had stayed quiet for a long while suddenly spoke. "Everything you've all said — I agree with it."
They turned to look. The speaker was a slender, clean-featured young woman named Shen Yingxue, one of the earlier intakes among the Daoning Gate's senior sisters, her cultivation already at the late Second Realm.
She spoke little day to day, yet among the Daoning Gate's younger generation she carried considerable weight.
Shen Yingxue glanced around at her fellow disciples. "But there's no point standing here guessing back and forth."
"What does Senior Sister mean?"
"Rather than trade hearsay, let's go see with our own eyes what sort of person this Gu Chengming really is."
Shen Yingxue was not an impulsive woman.
In fact, among the Daoning Gate's young disciples she might well have been the steadiest of them all. But where Su Qingmeng was concerned, she found absolute composure hard to hold on to.
It wasn't out of any private affection. It was that Su Qingmeng held a significance for her that ran far beyond mere fellowship of sect.
Shen Yingxue still remembered how it had been when she first entered the Daoning Gate.
It was late autumn. Back then she had been nothing but a girl of mediocre talent who had drifted over from one small, obscure school after another, standing before the Daoning Gate's snow-covered mountain gate with both legs trembling faintly from cold and nerves.
The Daoning Gate's entrance trial was brutally severe. Shen Yingxue passed it, but not gloriously.
Her gifts ranked in the lower-middle of that batch of new disciples. The reason they kept her had less to do with talent than with that streak of near-obsessive tenacity in her.
The sword path the Daoning Gate cultivated demanded that disciples cast off stray thoughts and sever worldly ties. For the prodigies raised inside the sect from childhood, who had tasted little of the mortal world's smoke and fire, that might not be difficult. For someone like Shen Yingxue, who had come to it late with too many worldly attachments packed into her heart, it was another matter.
The elders' verdict on her ran along the same lines every time: "Sword-heart impure, too many stray thoughts. If she cannot break through within half a year, let her depart of her own accord."
More than once she had sat through the small hours gripping her sword and staring at nothing, with no idea what the point of persevering even was.
Until that day. An ordinary morning, with Shen Yingxue practicing alone in a corner of the training grounds.
Just as she swung the sword for who knew which hundredth time, a figure in white came walking from the far end of the grounds.
It was Su Qingmeng.
By then Su Qingmeng was already acknowledged as the Daoning Gate's foremost prodigy, breaking through realms faster than anyone of her generation, and rumored to be in seclusion comprehending some profound mystery of the sword.
Shen Yingxue had never expected the Dao-Child, who never showed her face on the public training grounds, to appear here — still less that she would practice her sword in a place like this.
Watching that sword, Shen Yingxue stood in her corner and forgot entirely about the one in her own hand.
The white figure rose and fell and ranged across the grounds, the long blade tracing arcs like flowing water and drifting cloud.
Shen Yingxue watched, spellbound.
Su Qingmeng practiced for about half the burning of an incense stick, then sheathed her sword, turned, and left. From first to last she never glanced at Shen Yingxue once — very likely she never noticed there was anyone crouched in the corner at all. But from that day on, Shen Yingxue never wavered again.
She knew she might never in this life reach Su Qingmeng's height. That didn't matter. What mattered was that she had seen that sword.
It was the most beautiful swordplay in the world, the most beautiful she had ever seen.
Shen Yingxue pulled herself back from the memory and looked down at the long sword in her hand.
In truth, when she made the decision to "go take a look at this Gu Chengming," there had been very little aggression behind it.
She simply wanted to confirm what, exactly, gave the man who beat Su Qingmeng bloody every single day the right to do so.
"Senior Sister Yingxue, we're coming too."
Behind her, several of the young Daoning Gate disciples spoke up one after another.
Shen Yingxue counted heads. Five, including herself.
"We can go, but there are rules." She turned around, her tone stern. "We only watch. No trouble, no provocation. We're going to see what kind of person he is, not to pick a fight. The Daoning Gate can't afford to lose face."
The others nodded again and again.
A quarter of an hour later, five white figures slipped soundlessly out of the Daoning Gate.
The whole way the younger disciples kept their mouths firmly shut, but the glances they traded still carried a certain nervousness.
They were afraid of being caught red-handed by an elder on night patrol — and equally afraid of actually running into that legendary, ferociously savage "Murderous Demon of the Northern Territory" and starting a fight.
In that mingled state of apprehension and curiosity, the group finally felt their way into Huiyuan Gate territory.
The rear mountain of the Huiyuan Gate.
Shen Yingxue led her four companions along a seldom-trodden mountain path that curved around to a high slope on the rear mountain.
The spot looked down neatly over the small bamboo-ringed courtyard below.
"This is it?" The twin-bunned disciple looked left and right. "Isn't this awfully remote? Dao-Child Senior Sister runs this far every day?"
"Hush." Shen Yingxue made a silencing gesture.
She drew in the fluctuations of her own aura. The five of them crouched behind the shrubs at the crest of the slope and looked down at the courtyard.
The gate stood open. Beneath the old plum tree in the middle of the yard, a young man in a blue-green robe stood with his sword in hand.
"That's Gu Chengming?" one disciple asked under her breath.
Shen Yingxue didn't answer. She was studying him carefully.
Across that distance she could make out his general outline. Tall and lean, bearing composed — from his stance alone he did have something of the sword cultivator about him.
But that was all. Nothing especially remarkable stood out.
And just as she was thinking so, the blue-robed man in the courtyard below moved.
…
Gu Chengming at that moment was in a state of self-forgetting absorption. He had sensed auras drawing near, but he paid them no mind.
After several days of repeated practice, he could now circulate the traits of the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy and fold them into his sword arts with reasonable fluency. It was still a long way from a true Sword Domain, but the step of "carrying a technique's nature upon the sword" he had mastered to a considerable polish.
And tonight he meant to try pushing one step further.
Not merely smuggling the technique's traits into his sword strokes, but reversing it — the technique's nature as the body, the sword strokes as the vessel.
Put plainly: unfurl the domain first, then swing the sword inside it.
Gu Chengming closed his eyes, evened his breathing, and let his state of mind sink wholly into the character of the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy.
Up on the slope, Shen Yingxue's pupils contracted sharply.
In the small courtyard below, centered on Gu Chengming, a pale pink halo visible to the naked eye was slowly spreading outward.
Wherever that glow covered, the spirit bamboo in the yard stopped swaying, falling leaves hung suspended in midair, and even the moonlight seemed dyed a soft, warm shade.
Then Gu Chengming drew his sword.
The sword light swept out, light as a hand skimming the surface of water, yet it left behind in the air a long, luminous trail. That trail did not vanish at once. Like a drop of ink falling into clear water, it bled slowly outward through the domain, dissolving into drifting threads of light.
Then the sword momentum settled lower, and the threads of light crossed and coiled about one another.
Standing at the crest of the slope, Shen Yingxue forgot to breathe.
The four disciples beside her had frozen where they stood.
As Gu Chengming's sword found its stride, the air inside the domain seemed to turn into some warm, liquid medium. Every stroke left clear ripples behind, and those ripples layered and interwove until, beneath the moon, they composed a picture that flowed on without end.
It was as if someone had taken sword light for a brush and moonlight for ink and written a soundless verse across the empty air.
Shen Yingxue felt something inside her mind crack open with an audible snap. She remembered how it had felt, years ago, watching Su Qingmeng practice from that corner of the training grounds.
That beauty that made a person forget everything. No matter how many dazzling, brilliant sword arts she had witnessed since, she had always held that there was only one most beautiful swordplay in the world.
But now, watching that blue-robed figure rise and fall through the pink radiance below, only one thought turned over and over in her head.
The most beautiful swordplay in the world — it seemed it wasn't Su Qingmeng's anymore.
Her lips parted. She wanted to say something to refute that absurd idea in her own skull, but her throat felt stopped up, and not a single word would come out.
Just then a rustling stirred beside her, and Shen Yingxue turned her head.
The four fellow disciples beside her were each, in their own way, quite a sight.
The twin-bunned disciple, who had been the most righteously furious of the lot, now had her face cradled in both hands, the flowing light below mirrored in her eyes, her pupils practically turning pink.
The two younger junior sisters had their mouths slightly open and had been holding that expression for a very long time, as though someone had hit them with an immobilization spell.
The last one, normally the most tight-lipped of them all, was clutching her own sleeve in a death grip, red all the way from her ears down to her neck.
Shen Yingxue: "…"
Into that uncanny silence, the red-eared junior sister's lips suddenly moved.
"I—"
Her voice was tiny, so tiny the mountain wind nearly carried it off, and she stammered a long while before forcing out one complete sentence.
"I think it's actually pretty good, having Senior Brother Gu represent the Wenjian Sect."
Once the words "Senior Brother Gu" landed, the atmosphere on the slope turned instantly, exquisitely delicate.
On the way here, the name in their mouths had still been "that Gu Chengming."
Two breaths of silence.
"Right, right!" The twin-bunned disciple was the first to follow, nodding so hard she looked like a chicken pecking rice. "I think so too! Senior Brother Gu is clearly this impressive — we just didn't understand him before!"
"Senior Brother Gu is so beautiful…"
Who said that one no longer mattered.
Shen Yingxue looked at the four fellow disciples who moments ago had sworn up and down to win justice for Su Qingmeng. From their posture now, they had leapt straight from "righting a wrong" to "falling in on the spot."
The speed of that turnabout beat flipping the pages of a storybook.
She felt that, as the eldest of the group, she had a duty to preserve the last shred of reason among them.
But when her lips parted, the figure swinging that sword through the flowing light rose in her mind again, unbidden.
"It does seem…"
Shen Yingxue heard her own voice crawl up out of her throat, as though drawn along by something, entirely beyond her brain's control.
"It does seem to be so."
Five people crouched behind the shrubs and lapsed, collectively, into silence.
The mountain wind blew past and the leaves rustled, and nobody brought up "winning justice for our Dao-Child Senior Sister" again.
Nobody so much as mentioned the reason they had come in the first place. In the end it was the twin-bunned disciple who stood up first, brushing bits of grass off her skirt.
"I think it's rather good that Dao-Child Senior Sister comes to spar every day. Cultivation's like that, isn't it — you progress fastest when you spar with each other."
"Right, right."
"Mm-hm."
"Senior Sister has a point."
Shen Yingxue drew a deep breath, cast one last look at Gu Chengming still practicing below, then turned and quietly led her four wholly-converted companions away from the slope.
Not one of the five spoke the entire way back, but every last pair of ears among them was burning red.
With the uninvited guests gone, quiet settled over the slope again.
And below, beyond the reach of their sight, that pink radiance which had captured them so completely at last faded with the return of the final wisp of sword qi, dispersing slowly into the cool night wind.
In the courtyard below, Gu Chengming sheathed his sword and stood still.
It still fell short of a true Sword Domain, but for someone at his present realm to have come this far was already no small feat.
[The Yin-Yang Creation Strategy is quite satisfied.]
Though the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy served only as the "linking" technique, it seemed to find the work endlessly enjoyable.
Gu Chengming had tried using the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy as a primer to unfold Sword Domains cored on other techniques. Regrettably, so far only the Huiyuan Sword Formula had succeeded.
Little Huiyuan was thoroughly delighted about it, and naturally Gu Chengming caught the mood too.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance says pitifully: I want a combination technique with Heavenly Emperor Gu too.]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula sniffs: This is a bond special to Chengming and me! The rest of you will just have to practice, slowly!]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula does not push the claim too far, because it senses that other techniques will eventually get to "dance" with Heavenly Emperor Gu like this as well. Being the first is already more than enough for it!]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula thinks to itself that it had better enjoy this time with Chengming while it lasts. Heehee.]
Gu Chengming gave a helpless smile.
And over the next few days, some subtle changes quietly took place within the Daoning Gate.
First, that group of female disciples stopped discussing Su Qingmeng's daily trips to the Huiyuan Gate in public.
Not only did they not discuss it — if anyone said so much as a word in front of them about Gu Chengming bullying the Dao-Child, they would give that person a look that plainly said, "You don't understand."
After that, more and more Daoning Gate disciples began turning up, with increasing frequency, on the mountain path that led to the Huiyuan Gate's rear mountain.
Their excuses came in every flavor — "gathering spirit herbs," "taking a shortcut back to my quarters," "I got lost" — but without exception their routes passed by the slope near that little courtyard.
All of that, of course, is a story for later.
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