A sword cut upwards, metal colliding with metal. A soft rupturing sound rose in the night and the once-clean bandages got another red stain. Two crimson wings cut through the night and met pale white strings, another rupturing sound signalling the arrival of another red stain. The sword swung and a red stain was born, the sword rose and a red stain was born, the sword descended and a red stain was born.
The sword swung and it birthed red, the sword blocked and it birthed red, the sword attacked and it birthed red. In that manner, while the colour of the blade was cyan, the colour of the sword, its essence, was the vibrant red of life.
Yin Long swung the weapon, the arc of the blade mimicking the arc of his own lips. But each swing spilt the colour of life, each arc drawn by his sword sapped a little bit of his own colour.
"Wrong. Again. Wrong. Once more. Tch, another failure."
He muttered to himself with each swing, with each attack and each block. The first attempt was a failure. The second attempt was a failure. The third to sixth attempts were all failures. The seventh showed promise and then failed, continuing on and on until his attempts entered the double digits and kept racking up. He failed and he bled, he failed and he lost his colour.
He wasn't sure if he should consider himself lucky or not for the fact that his left arm was currently covered in bandages. Like this, the bandages would at least suck up all the blood and hide just how damaged his arm was, but on the other side it also made it a bit hard to see the actual state of his limb, the pooling blood also wouldn't be too good if he let it coagulate. But those worries were mostly for the future him, right now his only worry was to figure out just how he should proceed with his body cultivation.
"So, would you mind telling me what you're mucking about with now? The first time I drop by you put on a comical show as you're getting tossed around and the second time you're running around cutting yourself up. I assume you have a good reason?"
Just as Yin Long was thinking up new ideas, a familiar voice reached him from the ornament tucked into his hair. His lips couldn't help but turn up somewhat wryly, of course Hongzai had to drop by the city and check on his state at this exact time. He couldn't be considered the best disciple, showing her such awkward things every time she saw him. But then again, that was how he had been from the start so it was just par for the course now, his lips turning up slightly.
"Well, you see it's like this..."
He gave her a quick explanation of what he was doing and what he had attempted so far, his sword never halting as he fought against the two elders. Hongzai had never encountered a physique like his, but she was a good bit older than him and had far more experience as a swordsman so her knowledge was invaluable.
"Yeah... I figured that it would be something... unorthodox. But I will give you extra points for your persistence, or perhaps stubbornness is a better term for this, not many can keep doing the same thing with just minor adjustments. But conversely, it is exactly this persistence that also prevents you from seeing other avenues at the appropriate time."
Hongzai sounded like she was sighing. She was well aware of Yin Long's persistence, it was what supported him when he drove himself to the brink of death in front of her cavern to ask for her guidance. What would have happened if it hadn't moved her heart? Would his persistence have pushed him all the way to death? She didn't have a guarantee, but she felt that it was likely, he was just that insane after all.
"Let's look at it from a somewhat logical standpoint, okay? Logical. All your attempts up until now have failed, you can't retain the energy because it's foreign so only the swords you created remain. So, how about you try to cut out the middle-man? Do you really need to store the energy into swords until it overflows? What if you just take the energy and directly turn it into a sword and then slowly stack them up? Or what if you ignore the act of taking in the energy at all and just use your soul to turn your own body into a sword? Or hell, why not slowly integrate your soul into your flesh like you've been trying with the energy, let flesh and soul become one so that cultivating one cultivates the other?"
Hongzai spoke slowly, seemingly chewing each word as she mulled them over. Yin Long was her first disciple, her only disciple, and he was someone who did not follow any sort of normal standard. As such, she was very careful about what advice she gave, taking great care that she didn't give any normal advice and only handed out what others would consider violently outrageous ideas. Yin Long went over the ideas in his own head, simulating them for a bit before he responded.
"Hmmm, those actually sound like pretty good ideas, not exactly something you'd find in books. You must have mulled over them for quite some time after I left, didn't you, Teacher?"
The wilder an idea, the harder it would be to come up with, especially in a world where some cultivation styles had such a long history. It definitely wasn't something Hongzai could have come up with here on the fly, that was Yin Long's honest thoughts.
"A disciple should know when to be quiet. But with that said, you should give your arm some rest before you try anything else. I know that you can't even die properly, but letting your arm get crippled will still be a huge blow."
Yin Long smirked quietly at Hongzai's humorous attempt at changing the topic. It was a bit hard to think that a woman like this was a Woehowl Swordsman, her blade a nail that scratched the world she hated oh-so-much. But oh well, sometimes he had to play the part of a good disciple so he would just have to let this slide.
"Understood, teacher. But don't leave just yet, I'd like you to see the results of what you told me back then."
He took a step back when he finished talking, his sword rising in an arc and colliding with the side of the incoming sword. He maintained the arc, pushing against the weakest side of the blade and steering it directly into the other incoming blade, the pale white lines tracing around the weapons jumbling together.
The two elders felt their breaths stagnate in their chests. Something was different, they could feel it. Yin Long took another step back, the cyan sword in his grasp vanishing as he pulled it back into his soulsea. The two elders locked eyes with him and saw it, the difference. Sincerity. He was no longer trying to pry into their techniques or test anything out, now he moved to end things.
"Thank you for your help, but overall, the technique you specialize in is quite... useless to me. Goodbye."
He had already gotten insights into their techniques after seeing it so often, and in the end, its base was something he himself had already utilized in the past. But as he said, it wasn't something he saw much use in. He would obviously remember it, but using it frequently was probably out of the question.
After he finished talking, he raised his right arm. His arm moved, and the world around him crumbled. His world broke, everything in his sight cracking and falling apart. His senses shrank into their pathetically small dome, his own little world filled with drops of liquid Qi. And reflected in them was a thousand him, a thousand lonely swords held high.
Slowly, or perhaps instantly, he couldn't quite tell, a black light surface in that shattered world of his. A pitch-black blade appeared in his raised hand, radiating a ravenous aura. This was devouring, this was a sword of eternal hunger that would do nothing but eat and eat until there was nothing left in the world.
The sword was held high, like a proud yet grieving parent placing their hand on their son's shoulder. It was perfectly straight, like a final show of strength, a final display of reliability as they passed on the torch. Yin Long held it high and remembered that day. His face was warm and his eyes stung, but the current him did not cry. No, the drops in the world that reflected him, and only him, were his tears right now. They were the tears he shed that day, the sorrow he suffered.
But was there only tears on that day? No, there was something else as well. He had already spent several days moving through the forest, surviving on whatever animals he could hunt and whatever streams he could find. He didn't starve, but he didn't eat his fill either. And then he had to run to his house when he got the news. And so he stood there, his stomach mostly empty as the sorrow sat in.
It sunk to the pit of his stomach like a stone, sucking in everything inside him like a sponge as it fell. He was empty, hollow. It hurt, the sorrow, the hollow sensation, it was like an awful hunger that gnawed at his very being. The hot tears down his face, the hand on his shoulder, the gnawing hunger, those were the emotions he could remember most clearly from that stormy day.
His shattered world reflected his tears, his raised arm reflected the hand on his shoulder, and the ever-hungry sword in his grasp reflected the gnawing hunger, the hollow pain. He kept the memories in his heart, held them in his soul, his sword. And then he swung it, like a nail trying to scratch the world, a nail trying to carve his name and pain into the world, a feeble attempt to crack it.
The sword fell like a powerless arm and he saw two beds appear around him, it slowly tilted to the side and he saw the large window in front of him. And then his sword swung to the side, like an arm powerlessly falling against the side of the bed, and he saw two weak rainbows pierce through the dark clouds in the distance.
Esi, the sword of starvation. It brought with it the pain of hunger, the hollow sensation of loss and desire. Yin Long had not forgotten what Hongzai told him in the past, a sword matching the pain he imbued it with would produce far greater effects than a normal sword. So now he dredged out the pain of starvation and handed it to a sword that was perpetually hungry, a law that embodied starvation.
And it cut through the world, his sorrow carved itself into existence and made itself known. The jumbled mess of pale white lines, the two blades that they were attached to, the two elders that held them, the wall that stood a bit behind them, the trees behind the wall, Yin Long's sorrow cut through them all. Wood withered from lack of nourishment, flesh faded as it ate itself in a desperate attempt to acquire nourishment. Yin Long had swung his word and displayed his sorrow, and the world had starved as a result.
