The revelation of the dragon scale was a crack in the world. For days after, Asuta moved through his routines—school, home, cultivation—like a ghost. The familiar streets felt like a painted backdrop over a bottomless chasm. Every shadow in an alley, every rumble from the subway, felt like a pre-echo of the sleeping world's awakening. His meticulously planned four-year countdown had been shattered. The enemy wasn't just coming. It was already here, buried and dreaming.
The crushing weight of it threatened to paralyze him. He found himself staring at Ruri as she did her homework, her brow furrowed in concentration over a math problem. In his mind's eye, he superimposed another image: Ruri, older, her face smudged with ash, gripping a makeshift spear in the ruins of their city, her eyes holding the same fierce determination. The memory was a shard of glass in his soul.
Flashback: The Fall of Neon-Spire City, Year 23 Post-Convergence.
The air tasted of ozone and blood. The defensive arrays around the last human enclave flickered like dying neon, hence the name. Ruri, no longer a girl but a hardened commander of the Scavenger Corps, stood beside him on the shattered wall. She wasn't a cultivator—her meridians had never awakened—but her will was tempered steel. "They're breaking through the eastern conduit," she said, her voice hoarse from shouting orders. "The Immortal's hounds. They're not beasts, brother. They're... intelligent. They're hunting for something." He gripped her shoulder, the Void-Severing Glaive heavy in his other hand. "Hold the line here. I'll cut the head off the pack." He leapt from the wall, the glaive's edge humming with the First Form: Sky-Cleaving Descent. He never saw her again. When he returned, hours later, the wall was a tomb of melted stone and silence.
The memory faded, leaving the taste of dust and failure. He clenched his fist on his desk, the wood groaning. Not again. I will forge a world so strong no wall will ever fall.
Despair was a luxury he couldn't afford. If the threats were both internal and external, his response had to be equally multifaceted. The Divine God Body Sutra was his foundation, his unbreakable vessel. But a vessel needed a weapon.
His past life's arsenal was a library of carnage. He had mastered a hundred sword arts, from the elegant, flowing Vermilion Phoenix Dance to the brutally direct Mountain-Sundering Chop. But they all required Qi to unleash their true, world-breaking potential. He needed something that could begin its life as a purely physical discipline, a mastery of form and intent so perfect it would become a channel for power later. A technique that was a seed, waiting for the rain of Qi to make it sprout into a forest of blades.
He remembered it, then. A fragment. A theory. A technique so demanding, so conceptually vast, it was considered apocryphal even among the immortal sects. He had discovered its first stance carved in a forgotten cave on a dead world, a monument to a swordsman who had tried to cut a concept and had been erased for his audacity.
The Unbroken Horizon Sword Art.
Its premise was insanity: to train not to cut things, but to cut the separations between things—space, fate, causality. Its final, theoretical forms had names that were myths: Severance of the Weeping Sky, Cutting the Threads of a Thousand Lives, Unmaking the Mirror of Existence. To fully master it was said to allow one to "split the heavens themselves," not as hyperbole, but as a technical description.
It began not with a sword, but with the body. The First Stance: Foundation of the Unseen Edge. It was not a fighting move. It was a perpetual, full-body alignment, a way of standing, moving, and breathing where every muscle, every tendon, was poised on the knife's edge between stillness and infinite motion. It taught the body to be the blade.
That night, in the cramped space of his room, he attempted the stance. He planted his feet, not wide, but precisely shoulder-width, toes gripping the floor as if holding the edge of a cliff. He adjusted his pelvis, his spine, the angle of his neck. He let his arms hang loose, but with a specific torsion in the shoulders, a micro-engagement of the latissimus muscles. He breathed into his lower dantian, but visualized the breath as a honing stone sliding along the length of his spine.
The strain was immediate and alien. It wasn't the deep burn of the Sutra, but a precise, wire-tight tension along lines of his body he never knew existed. It felt like his entire form was a single, drawn bowstring. He held it for ten seconds before trembling violently and collapsing.
Good, he thought, sweating on the floor. It exists. The path exists.
He would need a sword. Not a spiritual weapon, but a physical tool to train the forms, to teach his body the geometry of cutting. The next day, he used more of his gambling reserves to visit a traditional martial arts supplier. He bypassed the flashy, stainless steel katanas and chose a simple, unadorned iaito—an unsharpened practice blade used for drawing drills. It had the right weight, the right balance. It was a tool of discipline, not death. For now.
---
His cultivation, now focused on both Sutra and Sword Art, became a symphony of controlled agony. His days were a cycle:
Dawn: Sutra exercises, focusing on the Bone-Forge Respiration to deepen the cleansing of his newly purified blood, driving its vitality into the marrow. His sweat lost its toxic tinge, becoming clear.
After School: Foundational drills for the Unbroken Horizon. He started not with the sword, but with a wooden ruler. He practiced the First Motion: Drawing the Line. It was not a slash. It was a precise, perfect extension of his body's "edge" along a single, geometric line in space. He did it ten thousand times, until his shoulder burned and his vision narrowed to that one line. The goal was not speed or power, but absolute fidelity. The line must be true.
Night: Alchemy. With his blood cleansed, the next target was the nervous system—the Lightning-Quick Nerve Elixir. This required a catalyst of sudden, vibrant life. He settled on Bud of a Century-Old Bonsai. Life forced into intense, compacted slowness, holding explosive potential. Li Chen, for a significant sum, procured a single, gnarled bud from a white pine bonsai said to be over two hundred years old.
The process was delicate, requiring him to capture the "moment of unfurling" without letting the bud actually bloom. He used a vacuum-sealing technique with his new glassware, steeping the bud in alcohol at precisely 22°C while bombarding it with rhythmic pulses of low-frequency sound from a speaker—a crude mimicry of spring rain. Over three nights, the alcohol absorbed the bud's essence, turning a pale, vibrant green. He distilled it once, twice, three times, until he had a single eyedropper of liquid that smelled of lightning and pine.
He consumed it before his nervous system training: a series of brutal reaction drills where he dropped marbles from varying heights, trying to snatch them before they hit the floor. The elixir didn't make him faster; it made his perception denser. Time seemed to stretch. The marble hung in the air, and he could see the dust motes swirling around it. His hand, guided by the nascent Unbroken Horizon alignment, would flash out, and there—the marble was pinched between his fingers. His nerves hummed, synapses firing with terrifying efficiency.
Flashback: The Whispering Gorge, Year 312 of the Hunt.
He was surrounded. Three hunters from the Lei Clan, their bodies crackling with stolen lightning. They moved like striking serpents, their speed a blur to any normal eye. But Asuta's nerves were alight with the refined power of the Nine Revolutions Lightning-Wyrm Elixir, a precursor a thousand times more potent than his crude bonsai brew. Time was honey. He saw the flex of a thigh muscle before the leap, the gathering of charge in a palm before the bolt was thrown. He didn't dodge. He stepped through the intervals, his own blade—the Sky-Soaring Needle—a flicker of silver that found the gaps in their lightning. He moved not faster than lightning, but in the spaces it forgot to illuminate. That was the true secret of speed: not velocity, but prescience.
The memory fueled him. He wasn't that titan anymore. But the principle remained. Speed was a function of perception and decision. The elixir and the sword art were two halves of the same whole.
---
A week into this brutal new regimen, the Seekers made their second move. They had learned from the mountain. They didn't send one man.
Asuta was in a secluded corner of the city park at twilight, practicing the Second Motion: Dividing the Stream with his iaito—a precise, vertical cut meant to part currents, both of water and of energy. His senses, heightened by the nerve elixir, caught the anomaly first: not one, but three heartbeats, synchronized and held too still, from the treeline to the north. Then the soft click of a safety being disengaged, not on a tranq gun, but on something heavier.
Suppressors. They've escalated.
He didn't stop his motion. He completed the cut, the blade whistling faintly in the still air. In the aftermath of the movement, as his body was aligned in the perfect follow-through of the Unbroken Horizon stance, he had a crystalline moment of clarity. He knew their positions. One at two o'clock, thirty meters, rifle. Two at ten o'clock and eleven o'clock, twenty meters, moving to flank, sidearms.
They weren't here to pacify. They were here to terminate. The message on the mountain had been received, and their answer was annihilation.
Asuta moved, but not away. He moved into the geometry of the threat.
The rifleman fired first. The phut of the suppressed shot was lost in the rustle of leaves. But Asuta, his nerves singing, had already shifted six inches to the left. The round snapped past his ear. He didn't hear it; he felt the displacement of air.
He didn't run toward the shooters. He ran in a zig-zag that was also the footwork pattern for the Third Motion: Shattering the Cage, a maneuver for breaking encirclements. His body, tempered to Layer 4, unburdened by impurity, responded with explosive grace. He was a blur in the dim light.
The two flankers emerged from the trees, pistols rising. They were professionals, calm, tracking him. Asuta didn't slow. He gripped the iaito, not by the hilt, but by the blunt blade. In the heart of his sprint, he threw it.
It was not a throw meant to hit. It was a Foundation of the Unseen Edge made manifest. The practice sword tumbled, a spinning distraction, its polished steel catching the last bloody light of the sunset.
Both flankers' eyes tracked it for a split second. A fatal error.
Asuta closed the distance to the nearest one in that split second. He didn't punch or kick. He passed by him, his body a blade. His forearm, aligned with the ruthless precision of the Sword Art, smashed across the man's throat in a short, horizontal chop—a physical expression of Drawing the Line. The man gagged, collapsing.
The second flanker swung his pistol around. Asuta was already inside his reach. He grabbed the man's wrist, not to wrestle, but to guide. Using the man's own momentum and the flawless leverage of the Unbroken Horizon body structure, he spun him like a top and sent him crashing into a tree trunk. The pistol skittered away.
The rifleman fired again, twice. Dirt kicked up at Asuta's feet. He didn't look at the shooter. He looked at the space between himself, the fallen flanker, and a large oak tree.
He moved through that space.
A third shot. This one grazed his jacket sleeve, the fabric tearing. The heat of it seared his skin. He felt no pain, only a cold focus.
He reached the rifleman's position. The man, realizing his cover was blown, stood up to meet him, swinging the rifle like a club. Asuta didn't block. He stepped forward, his leading foot hooking behind the man's ankle. With a subtle shift of his hips—Dividing the Stream applied to balance—he uprooted the man and slammed him to the ground. He placed a foot on the rifle, pinning it, and looked down.
The man stared up, not in fear, but in shock. This wasn't combat. It was a dismantling. He hadn't been outfought; he'd been out-geometried.
"Tell your masters," Asuta said, his breath even, his voice colder than the coming night, "that I have drawn my line. The next time they cross it, I will not use the flat of the blade."
He retrieved his iaito from the grass, its surface unmarred. He left the three men in the gathering dark—one unconscious, one groaning, one in stunned silence.
He walked home, the adrenaline fading, replaced by a grim certainty. The Sword Art worked. Not as a magical technique, but as a supreme martial science. It had turned his tempered body into a weapon of terrifying efficiency.
But the cost of the demonstration was high. He was bleeding now, not just from a graze. He was bleeding into the awareness of powerful, ruthless enemies. The Seekers would not stop. The Foundation was watching. And beneath his feet, the ancient world was dreaming of fire and scale.
He looked at the unsharpened iaito in his hand. It was a promise.
He would need a real sword soon. And the heavens themselves would learn to fear its edge.