First Immortal of the Sword

A sandstorm blew throughout the eleventh floor of the Sword-Testing Tower. Everything was overcast.

Three figures appeared in the air, two men and one woman. All of them rippled with shocking sword intent.

Boom!

As soon as Su Yi appeared, a streak of blue sword qi descended from the heavens, unfurling like a scroll painting of the annals of history. Years passed within the image. The seasons alternated, and worldly affairs shifted... All manner of grand visions played out within the surging sword intent.

There was no need to even question it. This was the work of Heavenly Monarch Qing Qiu, the founder of the Primordial Era’s Floating World Sword Mountain. He’d invented a sword sutra that could lead cultivators through all five realms of Eternity, and he was both valiant and skilled in strategy. His talent was extraordinary.

His legacy of the Dao of the Sword—Spring and Autumn in This Floating World—had inspired and enlightened Jiang Wuchen. It was a legacy of the Dao of the Sword connected to the passage of time, imbued with the mysteries of the shifting of time and space!

Su Yi didn’t retreat. On the contrary, he waved his sleeve through the air.

Boom!

He blocked that blue sword qi, then stretched out his hand and grabbed it.

It was as if he’d grabbed the shifting of the ages itself. Even with Jiang Wuchen’s memories, the mysteries of time and space within the sword qi were shocking.

Suddenly, the woman bellowed. “Cut!”

A streak of glinting sword light appeared, shaped almost like a hay cutter. It was only three feet long, but it cleaved through space and hurtled straight toward Su Yi’s head with unbelievable speed.

Su Yi just stood there, making no attempt to dodge. When the sword qi cleaved into him, it vanished inexplicably.

A moment later, a terrifying impact assailed the landscape of his heart. That glinting sword light was flying right towards it!

But when Su Yi’s Heart Soul stretched out his hand and flicked his finger, the sword light shattered into pieces.

“Back then, the Formless Spirit Sword gave me a lot of trouble,” sighed Su Yi.

The Formless Spirit Sword was a unique legacy of the Dao of the Sword that drew on the secret power of the heart. It was the work of Sword Monarch Ling Zhuo of the Primordial Era, a swordswoman who’d once astonished the entire Eternal Heavens Domain.

Her Formless Spirit Court had been among the ten greatest Heavenly Monarch factions of the Primordial Era!

Alas, the Primordial Era had ended a long time ago. By the time the Devastation came to a close, there was practically no one left who’d even heard of the Formless Spirit Court. Not even rumors remained.

Naturally, Sword Monarch Ling Zhuo’s accomplishments had been buried in the dust of history.

When Jiang Wuchen first challenged the eleventh floor of the Sword-Testing Tower, Sword Monarch Ling Zhuo’s Formless Spirit Sword cleaved into his heart, giving him a lot of trouble, but this legacy was no longer enough to shake Su Yi's heart.

“Take this!” A heaven-shaking bellow went off like a thunderclap, and countless streaks of sword qi rose around Su Yi. They were so dense that there seemed no end to them. There were thousands upon thousands, and they blanketed both heaven and earth.

The countless streaks of sword qi interwove into a perfectly round sword formation reminiscent of a Yin-Yang diagram. It contained yin, yang, the five elements, and nine transformations of wind and thunder shifting in accordance with a Nine Palaces Formation.

The sword qi was endless and endlessly shifting, as innumerable as the grains of sand in a riverbed. Those trapped inside it were effectively imprisoned in a sword domain, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

This sword formation was called the Great Manifestation! It was created entirely out of sword intent. If used in a large-scale battle, it could massacre tens of thousands of opponents at once.

This legacy was called the Great Manifestation of Lifelessness. It belonged to Sword Monarch Chi Heng of the Primordial Era, the founder of the Great Manifestation Sword Sect. During the Primordial Era, he was a famed master of sword formations.

Countless droplets of misty, ethereal sword rain sprang up beneath Su Yi’s feet. He then charged straight into the fray, sword first.

Boom!

The entire Great Manifestation Sword Formation trembled as Su Yi tore open a path to life, cleaving right through it.

Qing Qiu and Ling Zhuo attacked practically simultaneously, charging into the formation before Su Yi could escape. Chi Heng, meanwhile, poured his strength into the formation, relentlessly suppressing Su Yi’s offensive.

Just like that, a grand battle broke out.

Each of these three experts of the Primordial Era had founded their own orthodoxy. These were just the imprints they’d left in the Sword-Testing Tower, but even so, they were every bit as strong as they’d been in life!

Fighting the three of them wasn’t any less dangerous than fighting twenty-nine Heavenly Monarchs of the Heart-Tempering Sword House three days prior.

Jiang Wuchen had challenged the tower many times over the course of his life, but every time he attempted this floor, he left injured.

It was thus obvious how terrifying these Heavenly Monarchs of the Primordial Era were.

Su Yi fought with all his might, drawing on the full extent of his attainments in the Dao of the Sword, but he still couldn’t suppress them quickly.

But that only made this battle all the more delightful. Su Yi was a sword cultivator. He’d never feared his enemies’ strength. On the contrary, he feared that his enemies wouldn’t be strong enough to put up a fight!

The battle raged for almost an hour.

In the end, Su Yi made a bold play, risking heavy injuries to take them down one by one!

By the time he claimed victory, Su Yi was badly wounded, but he didn’t mind. On the contrary, he rested only briefly before decisively advancing to the twelfth floor.

His haste seemed most unwise. After all, his wounds were severe. If he pushed himself to keep climbing, he’d only bring suffering upon himself.

But Su Yi planned to try it anyway.

Meanwhile, outside the tower, Sect Leader Lu Ye and the others were in uproar. All of them sensed that Su Yi had successfully overcome the eleventh floor!

“Why do I get the sense that our founder’s strength is a bit... overly ridiculous?” someone murmured.

“There are two types of heaven-defying figures in this world: the kind we’ve heard of before, and people like our founder,” someone sighed. “The first group is at least comprehensible. The second group makes no sense at all!”

Su Yi was only in the Silent Realm, yet he’d overcome the first eleven floors of the tower. That was an unprecedented feat!

More importantly, no one in the current Heart-Tempering Sword House was capable of overcoming the eleventh floor.

High Elder Shen Xing could overcome the first ten floors in the time it took to burn a stick of incense, but he could advance no further than that. He’d challenged the eleventh floor countless times over the years, but every attempt ended in failure, no exceptions.

Throughout the Heart-Tempering Sword House’s history, only the founder and his heart devil had ever made it past the eleventh floor!

Thus, when they saw Su Yi succeed, their hearts shook. A long time passed, but they struggled to calm down.

The members of the Heart-Tempering Sword House had often said that they were the greatest Heavenly Monarch faction in the Eternal Heavens Domain entirely thanks to their founder.

Anyone who overcame the eleventh floor of the Sword-Testing Tower could one day support the sect, just as their founder had.

No one had succeeded in the past, but now, Su Yi had done it! And he’d done it while still in the Silent Realm!

“Our ancestral grounds have been destroyed, but our founder has returned. The Heart-Tempering Sword House no longer needs to fear a slow but inevitable decline.” Sect Leader Lu Ye sighed.

This was the significance of the second test. Seeing the results made everything clear. There was no need for any further explanations.

...

The twelfth floor of the Sword-Testing Tower was a world covered in blood-red lotuses.

When Su Yi appeared, he saw a thin, gaunt man with blood-red hair and black robes. He was sitting atop a roughly quarter-acre blood-red lotus, resting his head in his hands. His eyes were shut, and it looked as if he were napping.

This was the man who called himself the Primordial Sword Devil.

Unlike the other imprints in the tower, the Primordial Sword Devil was intelligent and aware. He, too, was just an imprint of the original’s Dao of the Sword, but he retained much of the personality and memories of his true self.

That was proof in and of itself of how terrifying an existence he was.

It was admittedly possible that the Heavenly Monarch imprint on the thirteenth floor was aware too, but Su Yi had no way of knowing. Every time Jiang Wuchen had attempted the thirteenth floor, he’d been crushed before he could even try to talk, let alone investigate.

“Mm?” The Primordial Sword Devil opened his eyes, revealing bright red irises.

He stared at Su Yi in a bit of a daze, then exclaimed, “Hey, little baby. Are you Jiang Wuchen’s disciple? Grand-disciple? Or perhaps great-grand-disciple? You aren’t simple, huh? You actually made it all the way to this lofty one’s Blood Lotus Hidden Realm!”

His voice was soft and feminine, with a distinctive, magnetic quality.

Su Yi laughed. “Defeat me, and I’ll tell you.”

“Oh?” said the Primordial Sword Devil. He tapped himself on the forehead and sighed. “You’re so badly injured already. If I attack you, I’d only bring shame upon myself.”

Su Yi raised his right hand, and sword intent gathered into a sword in his grip. “No, you’ll bring shame upon yourself if you refuse my challenge.”

With that, he approached his opponent. With each step he took, the entire Blood Lotus Hidden Realm shook. Waves of blood-red flowers surged forth.

Yet unstoppable sword intent rose around Su Yi’s badly battered figure, rising higher and higher.

The Primordial Sword Devil’s eyes widened. He shot to his feet.

The entire hidden realm was breaking and collapsing. Countless blood-red lotuses withered and fell apart.

Endlessly terrifying sword intent swept across the entire hidden realm, like an apocalyptic storm from beyond the clouds.

Su Yi, the instigator of all this, suddenly seemed like a totally different person. His sharp edge was now on full display, and his radiance illuminated everything within one hundred thousand feet.

With every step he took, heaven and earth caved in!

The enormous blood-red lotus suddenly exploded beneath the Primordial Sword Devil’s feet, sliced to ribbons by that apocalyptic storm of sword intent.

The Primordial Sword Devil looked stricken, but just as he was about to attack, he discovered that he too had been sliced into countless pieces.

“What the—” He opened his mouth to curse, only to explode and dissipate.

But within moments, his figure recondensed.

This wasn’t initially enough to surprise him. When destroyed, the imprints in the tower didn’t vanish. Instead, they reformed to fight the next challenger, making them effectively unkillable.

But this time, the Primordial Sword Devil recondensed, only to gape in astonishment. Something wasn’t right here.

Heaven and earth hadn’t caved in. The countless blood-red lotuses hadn’t withered, and that seemingly apocalyptic sword storm had vanished without a trace.

Even Su Yi stood in place. He clearly hadn’t moved a muscle.

All was just as it had been when Su Yi first arrived, but the Primordial Sword Devil looked stricken.

Because even if all of that had been an illusion, his defeat hadn’t been!

“Impressive, kid! Don’t tell me you’ve condensed a Heart Soul and fused it into your Dao of the Sword already?” exclaimed the Primordial Sword Demon.

Su Yi smiled and nodded. “Guilty as charged!”

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