The Sundering Blade: A Thousand Li World Novel by Tao Wong

Author:Tao Wong [Wong, Tao]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: xianxia, wuxia, atl, a thousand li, tao wong, the sundering blade, cultivation, chinese fantasy, progression fantasy
ISBN: 9781778551239
Publisher: Starlit Publishing
Published: 2023-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Alone again. Or for the first time in a while, since the journey to the Forgotten Vale Sect had been replete with unwanted company. From the carriage master to the boatman to the random travelers on the road, Zhao Wan had been burdened with the presence of others for weeks now. Perhaps that explained the loss of control, his impatience when he’d struck out at the threads. His failure.

Discussing long-held motivations that he rarely spoke of and even more rarely deigned to acknowledge, to himself or others, smarted. What kind of cultivator grew their cultivation base not from some high-minded ideal or greedy desire for immortality but something as base as resentment?

Resentment of the very act of existence, of being tied to the dictates and debts of past lives that he neither remembered nor had chosen. A karmic wheel that ground him down, that took the lives of his family in a bout of illness and saw the love of his youth kill herself as her body rotted from within, an unspeakable, unhealable malady taking her voice, her looks, and her physical control, inch by inch?

What right did these impersonal, all-knowing wheels of karmic debt have to judge anyone? The beggar who stole for his family was as guilty as the merchant who stole for pleasure? Pains and indignities of the body and soul, decreed before birth, driving another to speak, to act in pain and shame. To curse another out, to strike at servants when the humiliation grew too great.

Was that right? Was that fair? How were you meant to resolve such failures, but with a saintly grace that even the Buddha might not achieve?

No. He would not dance to that tune. He would tear himself free. And if the very idea of such a dao, of unlimited freedom even from the heavens was borderline heretical, then so be it.

Though he would never have, should never have, spoken the words so clearly to another. Zhao Wan knew he had enemies, individuals who were jealous of his rise and his status. Elders in other sects who sought to pull down the Verdant Green Waters, to increase their own standing. As though dragging others lower made them taller, instead of dragging everyone else into the muck.

A foolish thing, one would think, when the entire point of cultivation was striding ever higher until one reached the peak and became an immortal. Yet though many spoke of reaching such an end, Zhao Wan no longer believed that most cultivators held such ambitions.

Of course, the majority of Body Cleansing cultivators—the mortals that made up the masses—were lacking in desire. They sought to feed their family, work their farms, and love their partners. Such grinding lives of mediocrity were theirs to choose, but those who joined the sects should have been cut from a different cloth.

Most weren’t.

Most only sought to rise to a position of power, to use cultivation as a tool to grow their strength or their family’s strength. There was no deeper goal, no search for a dao that would carry them forth.

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