Chương 20: The Past Glory of Heavenly Sword Sect

Ch 20: The Past Glory of Heavenly Sword Sect Three weeks of tea gone cold, cracked plaster patched and cracked again, and somewhere in the middle of it, without quite noticing when it happened, I'd stopped seeing the curling script on those vault pages as noise and started seeing it as language.

"Again," Master Dororo said, tapping one gnarled finger against the same line I'd already read four times.

"You're guessing the shape of the word from the sentence around it. That's not reading. That's gambling with better odds."

"It got the meaning right."

"It got the meaning right this time." He pulled the sunglasses down half an inch, which was, I had learned, the closest thing the man had to a genuine glare.

"A script this old doesn't forgive twice." Three weeks of that patient, needling, occasionally explosive when he forgot himself and reached for the book without thinking and today, for the first time, he hadn't taken it back from me at the end of the lesson.

"You're not ready," he'd said, sliding both volumes across the table toward me instead of away, "but you're closer to ready than I am to patient, and I have exactly one century of self-restraint left in me before I start reading it myself out of spite." He'd waved a hand at the door before I could thank him.

"Go. Break something quietly, for once." So I left the archive with three books under one arm the two from the vault, and a slim, unremarkable third volume I'd pulled off the sect-history shelf on the way out, on the theory that the ordinary version of my family's story might make a useful map before I went looking for the parts nobody had bothered to write down. I made it exactly as far as the courtyard before the day found a way to be complicated anyway.

Ellia was coming out of the training hall, silver hair still damp at the temples, sword slung loose over one shoulder in the unhurried way that meant she'd already finished whatever punishing routine she'd set herself for the morning. For one clean second our eyes met across the distance, and something in her whole posture short-circuited. She looked away first. Fast. Too fast the kind of fast that isn't actually about not caring.

"Ellia—" I started, closing half the distance before she'd finished turning. She was already walking the other way, spine a little too straight, pace a little too even, the kind of composure that takes real effort to fake. From here I could see the color climbing up the back of her neck, visible even through silver hair, and by the time she vanished around the corner of the dormitory wing it had gone all the way to her ears.

I stood there a moment, three books balanced against my hip, and let out a short laugh despite myself.

"It seems like she's having a hard time," I said, to absolutely no one.

"I guess." Whatever conversation her father had tried to start outside the Magic Tower a month ago clearly hadn't finished dying down in her head yet. I filed it under problems for a version of me with fewer open books, and kept walking. The dorm room was quiet by the time I dropped onto the floor cross-legged, spread all three volumes out in front of me, and reached for the one that didn't fight back.

History and Founding of the Heavenly Sword Sect, the cover read, in plain, unremarkable ink, written by some scholar who had clearly never imagined the family it described would ever have a reason to read it back. I opened it expecting a footnote. I did not get one. In the founding century, the Heavenly Sword Sect stood without rival not merely within Statera, but across the whole of the Chronos continent.

Cultivators from every kingdom sought entry to its halls, and it is recorded that seven Elders sat beneath its Patriarch: five of Divine Realm, and two who had reached the Supreme Realm entire. I read that sentence twice, and something cold settled at the base of my neck. Two Supreme Realm cultivators. In the entire continent, right now, there were exactly two the Vortexian family's reclusive ancestor, and a dead man drinking tea in a basement archive who'd nearly lost his own life to a book with no hands.

Two, spread across every kingdom, every sect, every mountain on Chronos. This sect alone had once held two Elders at that level. Beneath them.

"... How," I said out loud, to a room that didn't answer. I kept reading, because stopping wasn't going to make the number smaller. The Patriarch, Tean Len, founder of the sect and forger of its earliest sword arts, held the Supreme Realm's Sixth Leaf a height unmatched by any cultivator then living, and his Avatar, recorded by the scholars of that age as beyond classification, was said to stand among only five such Avatars ever witnessed on the continent. Three Supreme Realm cultivators under one roof.

A founder at the Sixth Leaf of a realm most kingdoms had never seen a single living example of. An Avatar so far past ordinary measurement that the scholars of the time hadn't had a category left to put it in. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. I lowered the book to my lap and stared at the wall for a long moment.

If we were ever this, I thought, then how in every heaven and hell did we end up here five thin volumes tucked into the back corner of a library, a dead courtyard, and a mother waiting behind a mountain gate for a son who'd promised to come back as someone unkillable? The book, unbothered by the question, kept going.

It was the Heavenly Sword Sect, together with five allied sects, who lent their strength to a minor prince during the continental wars of that era strength that carried him to the throne he would come to hold as the first Emperor of Statera Kingdom.

In gratitude, the new Emperor swore before witnesses of every allied sect that the Crown would never interfere in the internal matters of the Heavenly Sword Sect for the span of one century, and that the Sect's place among the kingdom's ten greatest houses would stand unchallenged for so long as the Sect itself still drew breath. I paused there and let that settle too. That's it, I thought.

That's the reason we're still counted among the top ten sects of this kingdom, even now, even hollowed out and half-buried a century-old promise nobody alive remembers making, still quietly holding the door open behind us. A debt older than the throne itself, still being paid out on a family that had no idea it was owed anything. Small comfort, set against what came next.

Some decades following the founding, the continent's strongest military power the Milos Kingdom, then and now unrivaled in raw martial strength moved against the newly risen Statera Kingdom. Milos fielded its own array of powerhouses in that campaign, led personally by the Emperor Stut Milos, himself a cultivator of the Supreme Realm's Sixth Leaf, matched only by our own Patriarch in the entire theater of that war.

The Emperor of Statera, newly crowned and untested, committed no expert of his own bloodline to that battlefield. It was the Heavenly Sword Sect's Patriarch and his Elders who held the line alone, for three months without relief, until the Patriarch himself fell in combat having, before the end, ended the life of one Supreme Realm general of Milos, and severed the arm of Emperor Stut Milos himself. His surviving Elders, by that final hour, stood entirely spent.

I set the book down flat on my knees and pressed both palms against my eyes for a moment, because I needed a second before I let myself keep reading, and because if I hadn't already sworn an oath to a Crown I couldn't renounce, I understood clearly, coldly, without a shred of doubt exactly what I would have done to that emperor with my own two hands. Not a single expert.

Three months of a man's family bleeding itself dry to hold a border, and the throne he'd bought with that blood hadn't spared him so much as one reinforcement. I forced myself to finish it. It is recorded that, in the final exchange, the Patriarch offered Emperor Stut Milos a single condition: that his wife and children be permitted to live untouched, in exchange for ending the war upon that field.

The Emperor Milos, recognizing in his opponent a warrior's honor equal to his own, accepted the terms without further bloodshed. The Patriarch died there with dignity, honored even by the enemy he had fought to a standstill, and Milos moved, the histories say, by the courage of that final stand withdrew from Statera's borders entirely, and made no further attempt upon the kingdom.

I closed the book slowly, and sat with it shut on my knees for a long time, watching the last of the afternoon light crawl across the floorboards. So that was the truth beneath the ruin. Not weakness. Not decline earned through some slow, deserved failure. A sect that had once stood three Supreme Realms deep, bled white to buy a throne its own founder never lived to see safe, by an emperor who hadn't spent a single soldier to help hold the line he was hiding behind.

"No wonder we faded," I said quietly.

"We were never allowed the chance to recover from the first debt before the world started collecting the next one." I understood, now, with a clarity that settled into my chest like a stone dropping into still water, exactly why the Nightsky Sect's attack had never made sense on its own. A sect this thin, this quietly propped up on a century-old promise nobody remembered it wasn't a threat worth the blood the Nightsky Sect had spent to erase it.

Unless someone had wanted something specific enough to make that math work anyway. I set the history aside and reached for the second book. The moment my fingers touched its cover, I understood why Master Dororo hadn't been able to hold it for more than a second before it threw him across the room. It didn't fight me the way it must have fought him no violent refusal, no mana tearing loose but something in it recognized my hand and simply... opened. Not physically. Not yet.

Just a sense, distant and certain, of a lock deciding it had finally found the correct key and was willing, at last, to be patient about the rest. Three weeks of lessons meant I could read perhaps one word in five without guessing. I opened to the first page anyway, because three weeks felt, suddenly, like far too long to have waited. The first line took me almost a full minute to work through, character by character, the way Dororo had drilled into me.

If you are reading this, then the blood finally found its way back to itself, and I owe you an apology I will not be alive to give in person. My pulse picked up. Whatever this was, it hadn't been written by a scholar cataloguing a dead sect's glory from a comfortable distance. It had been written by someone who expected, specifically, that I or someone like me would eventually be the one holding it. I kept going, slower now, sounding out symbols that hadn't fully settled into meaning yet.

I do not know what world you are reading this in, or what century, or whether the Sect still stands at all by the time this reaches you. I know only that the seal will hold until it doesn't need to anymore, and that whatever else you have been told about our family, none of it is the whole truth. The next line stopped me cold, because half of it wasn't written in the curling, ancient script at all.

It was written in characters I recognized instantly plain, blocky, achingly familiar describing things that had no earthly business appearing in a book buried behind a library shelf on a continent that didn't have highways or satellites or skyscrapers anywhere on it.... smartphone, one line read, in a hand that had clearly struggled with the word even as it wrote it, as though translating something the writer barely remembered how to spell.... television....

the internet had already— I sat back hard enough that the book nearly slid off my knees, staring down at ink that had no right to exist in this world at all.

"What," I said slowly, into a room that had gone very quiet around me, "the hell is this." I turned the page, half expecting the words to rearrange themselves into something that made sense, and found instead a dozen more lines in that same broken, half-forgotten script — words for things that belonged, unmistakably, unforgivably, to the world I'd already died in once. Whoever had written this book hadn't been born on Domantia. They'd come from somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere that sounded, line after impossible line, exactly like Earth.