Chapter 1008 — The Sword Realm of Thirty-Three Heavens

The instant Shen Mu's pupils began to contract, the sword in his hand had already thrust forth—and with that thrust, the sword form transformed into the Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword!

It was a sword path born of beholding all the inequity under heaven, of watching gods and demons run riot and wreak ruin upon the mortal world, of grieving that countless beings languished in suffering, unable to lay hold of their own fates!

To pacify heaven—to pacify the injustices of the world, to pacify the inequities of the world, to hew down the evil and the treacherous, to butcher fiends and phantoms, and to set right what is wrong.

Kaihuang had never imagined that Shen Mu's opening move would turn out to be his very own first move upon the path of the sword.

When he had entered the Dao through the sword, the aftershocks of the Supreme Sovereign Calamity had not yet settled, and the Kaihuang Era had not yet come. He was still a young man then—a callow, impulsive lad, brimming with the gallantry of a wandering knight, roaming sword in hand through a world where demons and monsters ran amok.

He witnessed the Primal World warped and sealed by a power of overwhelming majesty; heaven after heaven vanished into silence, until nothing was left of the Primal World but a patch of land.

Though the Primal World of that age was many times vaster than the Jingping and Huangxu that came later, it was still far too small compared to the true Primal World.

To fold the Primal World, to seal the Primal World—what sort of majestic, torrential power was that?

He saw the legacy of the Supreme Sovereign—the towering, mountainous ruins of the Supreme Sovereign's heavenly court: collapsed halls, palace walls, the bones of gods and demons entombed beneath the foundations.

He would often sit amid those ruins, brooding over the history buried beneath them.

He also saw the people weeping and wailing amid war and suffering—husbands and wives, women and children, the aged and the infirm.

He saw gods and demons striding rampant and unbridled; he saw fiends and monsters exploiting the chaos to stir up evil; he saw the divine ones driving the surviving subjects of the Supreme Sovereign to raise grand altars, and herding those people up onto the altar blocks to be offered to the gods of the heavenly court. And he could still remember with perfect clarity the hideous, fawning, ingratiating smiles on the faces of those gods and demons as they sacrificed the people to the gods above.

The Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword was born from all this.

With chivalrous fire in his heart, he drew his sword to bring peace to the rivers and lakes.

It was his earliest technique; when he forged this sword path he had not yet met Shen Mu, had not yet crossed over to the early Longhan years.

The form was not as complete as his later sword-path techniques—one could even say it was somewhat crude—and yet, of the thirty-three heavens of his sword path, this was the move most replete with aspiration, the most heroic and sky-piercing of them all, without a single exception!

When the Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword blazed out from under Shen Mu's hand—the free-wheeling gallantry of a blade-wielding knight, the answer of violence to violence, the sword path of a boy hero bursting forth from one blade's edge—Kaihuang was in that single instant jolted back to the memories of those years, and unknowingly the Worry-Free Sword in his own hand seemed to carry him back to the past. What he now threw forth was the Taihuang Heaven-Pacifying Sword as well, the same sword art as Shen Mu's; and as he performed it, he felt the wind screaming again, felt his body pitching within that wind.

It was the feeling of his youth—a torrent of passion, the belief that a power to overturn heaven and earth was hidden within his small callow frame, and that no gale could dash him down, no wave could wear him away, no mountain of trials could crush him! Every hardship, every obstacle, every setback, every tribulation—all of it only drove him forward, tempered him stronger!

He would shield the people of this calamity-ridden land; he would make them fear no god, dread no demon; he would let them live with backs straight as pines, with no need ever to read the faces of gods and demons.

Beneath their two swords, the mountains and rivers of Taihuang Heaven crisscrossed in splendor; sword light became rivers, roiling and thundering. Inside Yujing City, in the heavenly court of Kaihuang, every god and demon, old and new alike, fixed unblinking eyes upon the scene.

Shen Mu wore the face of a youth, but Kaihuang had long since turned middle-aged, weighted with the majesty of an emperor—yet what all beheld now seemed to be two young swordsmen, dashing and high-spirited.

Sword like a rainbow, Dao like a painted scroll; a single sweeping slash, and a thousand li of mighty mountains and rivers came crashing into view.

Within those mountains and rivers, sword qi towered like peaks, sword light shimmered like ripples on a lake, sword qi rolled like clouds unfurling and gathering, and sword gleams split the sky like furious breakers!

Their sword lights overlapped, then exploded without warning—a great many of the younger generation of gods and demons fled the inner city of Yujing in panic.

For their sword light had shattered the Chengtian Gate, sweeping all the way from the Zhuque Gate to the Xuanwu Gate, from the Anfu Gate to the Yanxi Gate, from the Hanguang Gate to the Anli Gate, from the Shunyi Gate to the Jingfeng Gate, from the Zhide Gate to the Anshang Gate. The sword light gushed through those gateways and toppled the celestial gates one after another; palace after palace and building after building burst apart in the blaze, replaced by the magnificent, surging vistas of Taihuang Heaven!

The Taiji Palace, the Yeting Palace, the Eastern Palace—in a flash, they were replaced by mountain ridges leaping out of the earth; the Xiude Hall, the Fuxing Hall, the Changle Hall, the Daning Hall were replaced by a seamless sweep of lake and sky.

Then their sword lights suddenly gathered, swirling around the two of them into a stream of teleportation light.

It was a scene of blazing splendor.

Their bodies did not move, but their flying swords spun around them, and the dazzling blades reflected all manner of teleportation runes. The runes shone from the flying swords onto their bodies and activated the art of teleportation; sword light swallowed their frames as they shot through the air like twin bolts of rainbow lightning, clashing with ringing clangs over the city of Yujing.

At every collision, their sword light flared like the sun itself, and sword qi sprayed outward in all directions like perfectly straight rays of light. Down below, the outer city of Yujing took the brunt of it: the roofs of the Pingkang, Xuanyang, Xingdao, Kaihua, and Guanglu halls—all the divine halls—were riddled through and through as strands of sword qi stabbed into them.

To perform teleportation through swordsmanship left even a grand master of esoteric arts like Su Maiqing staring in a blur of wonder, clapping his hands and cheering aloud.

More of the young gods and demons fled the outer city, but before they could find their footing, the figures of Shen Mu and Kaihuang in the sky suddenly checked themselves.

Then there was a single thunderous boom—the second sword of the Thirty-Three Heavens Sword Path exploded forth!

The Taiming Heaven-Aligning Sword! This was the sword Kaihuang had forged along the road to suppressing the revolt of gods and demons, when the bold heroism in his breast swelled into towering ambition, and he swore to stand level with heaven itself and transform this unjust world!

The wrongness of this world had not been brought about by the revolt of gods and demons; the demonic upheaval in the latter phase of the Supreme Sovereign Calamity was only the outward show—the true injustice was heaven!