The Blade-and-Sword Soul Barrow.
A space set between the unreal and the real.
Apart from a background like a sea of stars filling the universe, everywhere he looked there were sword barrows, some large and some small, unchanged since time began, with all manner of blades and swords driven into them.
Of these, two barrows stood nearer to Ke Jie than the rest and gave him a powerful sense of kinship.
One lay ahead and to his left, and thrust into it point-down was a ring-pommel saber wreathed in vermilion blood-vapour, stained with old blood and looking faintly unreal.
The other lay ahead and to his right, holding two double-edged longswords of markedly different styles and distinct character, one clad in a gentle holy light and the other in a deep shadow.
Plainly, he had been chosen at the same time by a Blade Spirit, which stood for the yang force and for Blade Wielders, and by a Sword Soul, which stood for the yin force and for Sword Maidens.
Blade Spirit and Sword Soul, which ought to have run parallel and never crossed, could actually be held and joined by one person.
In the whole history of the Sword God Dynasty and the Blade King Empire this was a miracle without precedent.
Realising it, Ke Jie hesitated only a second before he went forward without wavering.
"So long as I have power enough for revenge, I don't care what I turn into."
Holding to that thought, he stopped one single step short of the two barrows.
Abruptly.
The ring-pommel saber and the double-edged longswords in the barrows thinned and vanished at the same instant.
They became a flash of blood-coloured light and a ball of light shot through with black and white, and struck his left palm and his right palm respectively.
Two miniature designs surfaced in his palms: a great saber burning with blood-flame, and a white cross inside a ring of black thorns.
Some basic inherited knowledge and combat instinct poured into his mind along with the two of them taking up residence.
"I see. So one is my father's broken Blade Spirit after his death, 'Wrathblood Frenzy Blade,' and the other is the previous Sword God of Time's Twin Sword Souls, 'Dawn' and 'Darknight'......"
Ke Jie murmured it under his breath.
From this moment on he would be a special existence holding both identities at once, Blade Wielder and Sword Maiden.
However.
Because the Blade Spirit was damaged, and because the Blade Demon he faced was of the Quasi-Demon Tier.
The fight ahead, his debut, would have to lean on the Sword Soul for its main output.
After all, the Blade Demon's corresponding tier was the Sheath Tier, and that was nothing a newborn Blade Wielder handicapped from the start could handle.
Only a newborn Sword Maiden like this, with the doubled sword-force reserves of Twin Sword Souls at the same tier and two forms to draw on, could make an attempt.
That brief consideration over.
The world in front of him blurred by degrees. Ke Jie, his awakening complete, was leaving the Blade-and-Sword Soul Barrow fast.
***
Right now.
The real world.
A fine, unbroken rain was coming down out of the night sky.
"Mm?"
The Blade Demon, about to reattach its severed limb, went rigid.
For reasons it could not fathom, Ke Jie, who by rights should have been thoroughly dead, was standing back up like a walking corpse.
The huge wound in the belly it had run through healed as good as new in the space of a few breaths.
Countless shadow-thorns, so thick they seemed able to swallow every ray of light, rose out of his shadow, and against the clear moonlight they coiled and tangled and knotted themselves into a cocoon.
With the cocoon at its centre, a fog of the deepest black burst out of nothing and rolled and spread outward.
In an instant it had shrouded the Blade Demon and was creeping toward the end of the street.
"This fog carries a Sword Maiden's presence......"
The Blade Demon finished setting its limb and kept a wary watch on all sides, its face grave, trying to find the vanished Ke Jie.
Five metres out, pitch black. Everywhere its limbs reached, cold and numb. Apart from the sound of rain, quiet and undisturbed.
"BAM!"
Following the memory of where he had been before its sight went, it slammed a claw down on the spot where Ke Jie had cocooned himself, and struck nothing at all.
Even Bai Wuxie, lying unconscious on the ground, had disappeared without a trace.
"Who is playing at ghosts and gods?!!"
Condensing grey-white Blade Qi afresh, the Blade Demon swung its talons wildly about it, nearly mad.
"Hoo! Hoo-hoo!"
Wind scattered from the claws, and together with the cutting of the grey-white Blade Qi lattice it drove off the black fog around it to a degree.
"Zzz, zzz."
With a sound like charcoal roasting on a fire.
Blade Qi and the sword-force of the black fog reacted against each other and burned each other away, forcing a small vacuum clear in the fog-shrouded street.
Within a circle ten metres in radius from that centre, brightness the naked eye could work by came back.
Only then did the Blade Demon make out, at the spot where Ke Jie had vanished, the shadow cocoon, broken open at some unknown moment and now fading pale.
So where, then, was the one who had broken out of it?
Before it could think.
At once.
"RIP."
A splitting pain from its belly told it the answer was its own shadow.
The wound ran it through from tail to head, and the instant it was made the one who had made it slowed, turned, and stopped at the boundary line of the black fog, facing the Blade Demon head-on.
The figure reflected in the Blade Demon's crimson single eye was Ke Jie, broken from the cocoon and reborn, his transformation realised.
No, to put it precisely, it was the newborn Sword Maiden code-named "Darknight" — Li Yue.
Long silver hair threw up a pale white sheen under the moonlight, setting off a half-transparent black blindfold of gauzy texture threaded with gold, and delicate, fair features.
Gold ornaments in the shapes of stars and moons dotted the black-and-gold star-gauze gown she wore, answering the phantom of a starry universe that surfaced faintly across the dress's surface.
The Steel-Cleaving Sword in her hand was like the blackest stroke of night itself, echoing the black thigh-band at her leg, adding a touch more mystery and allure.
By appearance alone, no one would ever have guessed that this cool, elegant and unspoiled little white puffball was Ke Jie, son of the Blade King.
"How is this possible? Why can you transform into a Sword Maiden?" The Blade Demon's eye went wide with shock.
Changed as her appearance was, the shape of Ke Jie was still faintly visible in her bearing.
This violated one great piece of common knowledge that everyone had agreed on for a thousand years — that a Sword Maiden could only be female.
"......"
Li Yue said nothing.
She was still getting used to the changes the new body brought.
The forward shift of her centre of gravity. The coolness below her belly. The helplessness of being shorter. The blindness of having both eyes covered. Senses keener than an ordinary person's.
All of that should have taken time to accept and settle into, but with the battle pressing she had been forced to hide Bai Wuxie away in the Shadow World and go straight out to fight.
"It doesn't matter. So long as I'm certain you're Ke Jie and I can have my revenge, that's enough."
The Blade Demon thought a moment and worked its way through it.
Immediately.
It swung a talon at the Li Yue standing before it.
"SHNG!"
Fast enough that only a thread of cold light could be caught.
"Too slow."
Li Yue slipped aside and said it flatly.
The bitter wind off the blade only lifted the hem of her skirt.
"Mm?!!"
Refusing to believe it, the Blade Demon pressed the attack.
Straight thrusts, horizontal sweeps, leaping chops, savage pounces......
Alternating fast and slow, mixing true strikes and feints......
Very nearly emptying itself, putting all its experience into every blow.
However.
Whatever changes of technique it brought out.
Every one was always dodged, at the very last step, at the very limit, by the blindfolded Li Yue.
She had shut off the sense a person relies on most, and was more in her element for it.
Set against Li Yue, whose movements were supple and graceful as a dance in the dark, the Blade Demon was like a caged animal in a circus waiting to be broken: savage, coarse, violent, and being taught its manners, little by little, by its trainer.
"Heh."
Playing with the Blade Demon, Li Yue could not help a small scoffing laugh.
Beneath the gold-threaded black mask her closed eyelids trembled faintly, as though they might open at any moment.
If they opened, this farce would end too.
But before she had paid the pain back a hundredfold, she was not going to spoil her own fun by finishing the Blade Demon early.
Gradually.
As the Blade Demon's stamina wore down and away, its offence weakened and slowed.
Li Yue turned from defence and went on the attack of her own accord, springing lightly up onto the Blade Demon's back.
And on that back, gripping the Steel-Cleaving Sword in her hand, she performed a travelling operation from head to tail.
Along the way she stirred up the Blade Demon's blood, spilling out everywhere — dark red Blade Qi.
"Rrrgh......"
The Blade Demon roared weakly and threw its body about, trying to shake the Li Yue on its back away.
"Mm-hmm~"
Li Yue hummed a small, contented note.
Balanced and steady, she used the sword as a brush and drew one cute little animal after another on the Blade Demon's back.
The strokes were crude, the beasts only barely beasts.
But if they hurt the Blade Demon enough to make it howl, doesn't that count as drawing them well?
Of course, it had to be the new body's doing. She herself, under normal circumstances, would absolutely never carry out a piece of revenge this cute and this girlish.
"There."
Having ravaged the Blade Demon's back to her heart's content, Li Yue sprang down and returned to her original position.
The Blade Demon, in agony past bearing, straightened its body in relief, its glare fit to eat her whole.
"Time to be on your way, animal."
Without expression, Li Yue let ice-cold words of death fall from a soft pink mouth at thirty-seven degrees.
Her right hand tightened on the grip and set the flat of the blade crosswise before her, and her left hand started at the hilt and stroked slowly toward the point.
With every inch of blade her hand passed over, the darkness thick enough to drink all light receded by a measure.
Revealing the blade's true face, sealed away so long — a phantom of the universe, a cerulean sea of stars in motion.
The deepest stroke of night dispersed, and what it left was a sword blessed by the stars that shone through the night sky.
At once.
"Night, see me off."
Li Yue opened her eyes.
Through the half-transparent gauze of the mask, those dreamlike violet-and-star-blue eyes, holding brilliant constellations within them, gave off a light that dazzled and bewildered.
With her eyes open, the world she saw broke wide, showing her an utterly different scene.
The rain falling from the sky crawled as slowly as caterpillars.
The Blade Demon lunging at her had slowed a hundredfold too.
As though at one blink the whole world had been pressed into slow motion, and only she went on at her normal pace.
Look closely and one could see that everything around had taken on a layer of hazy blue-violet fluorescence.
Everywhere her sight reached, it was so.
This was not relative stillness, nor accelerated thought.
It was that the flow of time in this stretch of space had genuinely been slowed.
Li Yue put up the sword and stepped forward, one step and another, unhurried, turning her body aside from the Blade Demon's claw strike, then quickening her pace by degrees.
Finally.
Close to the Blade Demon's neck she accelerated in one sudden burst.
Ducked low, sprinted, and cut once, clean and decisive.
"CRACK!"
Splitting the fist-sized blood-red core precisely open.
And with the same stroke tearing the blue-violet curtain of light apart.
A dazzling sword-glare shot straight for the heavens, drawing a dreamlike cerulean mark across the night sky.
And where she had passed a moment ago, several disconnected afterimages surfaced all at once.
The afterimages joined into one and laid out the whole course of her walk, from beginning to end, straight into the Blade Demon's core.
Immediately.
The flow of time returned to normal.
"Drip. Drip."
The rain fell as it always had.
To an ordinary eye, in less time than a few breaths, the track of Li Yue's movement joined into a single line, cut open the blue-violet curtain of light that covered this place, and with one stroke cut open the night sky as well.
This was the Sword Art belonging to her alone as the Sword Maiden "Darknight" — "Meteor Night-Cleaving".
Unlike the extreme mechanism of Bai Wuxie's "Seven-Star Dragon Slaying", this was an art that chased extreme numbers.
"NO!!!"
The Blade Demon let out a howl of refusal.
It tried to lash out one last time in death, only to find its body had no feeling at all. Its crimson single eye was melting and losing colour, mixing into a trunk that had turned to jelly in an instant.
A few seconds later.
The rain stopped falling.
The black fog that shrouded the street thinned and dispersed, declaring Li Yue's first battle over.
Left on the ground was a large slick of sticky black jelly and fluid, and one blood-red rhomboid crystal the size of a fingernail — the demon crystal condensed from the Blade Spirit left behind after a Blade Demon's death, hard currency among Blade Wielders.
From now on, no one would care that this wretchedly dead Blade Demon had once been one of the Blade Wielders guarding human civilisation.
"Rest well, Blade Wielder that was."
Li Yue closed her eyes, her expression complicated, and bent to pick the demon crystal up off the ground.
Then, at the fierce pain running through her whole body, she pressed her lips lightly together.
"Nngh."
As she had thought.
A Sword Art that strong really was too much to bring out in a newborn Sword Maiden's body......
She could feel it. Her body had been briefly strengthened over a hundredfold by sword-force, and after killing the Blade Demon while holding the slowdown of time in place, it had reached its limit.
Dense porcelain-white cracks had already crawled across the skin of this body, which sword-force had remade and condensed.
"I'm sorry to have put you through that. Darknight."
Li Yue's voice was sorrowful, and it shook as she said it softly.
She waved her right hand, and the sword in it scattered into a spray of light points.
Out of the shadow at her feet the black thorns of congealed shade rose again, coiling and winding into a shadow cocoon.
The shadow cocoon split, and the transformed state released of itself.
Apart from the tear in the clothing at his belly, there was not a trace left of the fight to be seen.
"......"
In silence Ke Jie glanced at his right palm.
The black-thorn design on it had blurred a good deal.
To an extent it reflected the state of the Sword Soul "Darknight", which was still at the Embryo Tier.
With no outside sword-force to draw on, healing on its own would likely take months.
Having read the Sword Soul's condition, Ke Jie willed the design on his right palm to fade and hide itself.
The design of the Blade Spirit "Wrathblood Frenzy Blade" on his left palm lit with a warm crimson glow instead.
The crimson dimmed, and the clothes on him turned into a swordsman-styled robe in old cut, black with a red lapel. His left hand gripped the haft of the ring-pommel saber, and a scarlet colour stained his black eyes.
He had chosen to transform into his Blade Wielder form.
Only by making it look as though he had awakened as a Blade Wielder and killed the Blade Demon in turn could he keep his two identities, Blade Wielder and Sword Maiden, apart.
That way he could take credit in the open for his Blade Wielder identity, which made revenge through official channels easier.
And it also kept the Sword Maiden identity hidden in the dark and out of the light, for revenge by way of private investigation.
For the revenge plan he was about to carry out, this was a necessary long-term measure.
"Well then. Time to go and collect Xiao Bai."
Imagining the reaction Bai Wuxie might have when she woke and saw what he looked like.
Ke Jie could not help letting a thoroughly mischievous, flippant little smile show.
After walking a few paces.
Following his memory of the transformed Sword Maiden "Darknight", he came to the shadow of a piece of broken wall.
The first thing he saw was Bai Wuxie, out of her transformed state, standing there stock-still with her cerulean eyes wide open.
"Xiao Bai, this is......"
"Thank you, Mr. Ke Jie."
"Er, hear me out......"
"But please forgive me, I can't......"
For a moment.
The two of them, rather in step, spoke at the same time and fell silent at the same time.
Each could see the other had something to say, and each wanted to be the one to say it first. So both were at a loss for what to do, and they stood there staring at each other.
The stand-off held for a solid minute.
Just then.
An ill-timed, faintly amused woman's voice, mature, sounded abruptly beside them:
"Excuse me, Blade Wielder, and Sword Maiden Longquan, could one of you explain the situation here to me?"
Delayed by the public's late report and by that unidentified black fog, the reinforcements from the Dongdu Judgment Hall had finally reached the scene.