Chapter 8 · free to read
The scars had climbed past my elbow in nine days. Meilin stopped asking me to slow down and started looking for a smith.
Xiao Qing, seventeen, exiled from the Wan clan forges for making swords that held no qi at all.
Forty blades, perfectly made, worthless to every cultivator alive. A whole exile hung on a rack.
It was empty. Perfectly, silently empty — and the ash under my ribs did not stir for it at all.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.