Chapter 334: Establishing His Destiny!

As the saying went, the times created heroes—but heroes, in turn, also drove the times forward.

Taking an enemy general’s head amid tens of thousands of troops sounded like something out of a fantasy. Yet there was one great difference between reality and the stories told by teahouse storytellers.

A storyteller still had to obey logic.

Otherwise, the audience would have no objection to greeting him with teacups and fruit plates and cracking his skull open to show him exactly what happened to a man who made up nonsense to fool his listeners.

Reality, on the other hand, did not need logic.

As far as Gelimu was concerned, he had done nothing wrong.

Snow Sea Pass had fallen into Yan hands. While the army was busy constructing siege equipment, he had tried to meet the opposing commander and talk.

That was an entirely proactive move.

Snow Sea Pass was simply too important to the savages.

It was like two dorm rooms getting into a fight.

Gelimu brought along the son of the local police-station chief from his own room.

He thought the matter was practically guaranteed.

Only to discover that the other room had brought the police chief himself.

And somehow, this was the kind of ridiculous thing that had happened to him.

One could only say it was not a crime of incompetence.

His fate was simply miserable.

If he had the chance right now, Gelimu desperately wanted to turn around and have a proper conversation with the Sword Saint.

He wanted to tell Yu Huaping that he too was originally a man of Jin.

If the Sword Saint would sheathe his sword now, Gelimu was willing to defect and contribute to driving out the savages.

Under the shadow of life and death, he would make any oath.

Any promise.

He would swear upon Heaven itself or upon the ancestors of his own family.

Anything.

But right now, any pause, any hesitation, could be fatal.

Gelimu could not stop.

Nor did he dare.

If what he faced were tens of thousands of troops, truthfully, he would not have been this frightened.

Even if a massive army surrounded him, when the circle truly closed, the number of men he would have to directly face at once would still only be twenty or thirty.

With his cultivation as a high-grade Martial Artist, the odds might still be nine deaths in ten, but he would not be killed in a single instant.

The man behind him, however, possessed the ability to seal his throat with a single sword.

And no one in the world would doubt that ability.

The pursuit continued.

The chase.

The interception.

The rush of cavalry from every direction.

Yet at this moment, another scene rose inside the Sword Saint’s mind.

A year ago, inside the Situ Clan’s inner residence, Situ Lei had personally brought him into the heavily guarded compound.

The Sword Saint had drawn his blade, killed two Situ Clan retainers, then driven Longyuan into the chest of the old Situ Clan patriarch.

Half a year later, in the capital region of Jin, he had found his own younger brother and, as the elder brother, persuaded him to abandon the Emperor of Jin.

Afterward, Situ Lei’s personal campaign ended in defeat.

The savages entered the pass.

His younger brother died in battle.

The imperial clan of Jin was relocated to Yanjing.

And he himself was defeated by Yan’s Southern Marquis, fled in panic, and even lost his sword.

For a time, the Sword Saint had been deeply lost.

It seemed that no matter what he chose to do, the result was wrong.

He carried the title of Sword Saint, but perhaps the only thing he could truly rely upon in this life was still nothing more than a sword.

*I can only kill.*

*I am only fit to kill.*

*And the only thing I know how to do...*

*is kill with a sword.*

There were some things the Sword Saint had never said to Zheng Fan.

He had genuinely liked those months when he served as an ordinary city guard in Shengle City.

The Yu Clan had been in decline for several generations. Though he bore the surname Yu, he himself had come from an impoverished branch.

He had originally risen from among ordinary people.

Yet for a very long time, he had forgotten what it meant to return to the smoke and warmth of ordinary life.

Those months in Shengle made him feel as though he had returned.

The atmosphere of Shengle City had made him instinctively uncomfortable at first.

The General’s Residence controlled almost everything.

To a man of the jianghu, that kind of order naturally felt oppressive.

People of the jianghu hated restraint above all.

But when he looked at the city from the perspective of an ordinary person, the children there could at least attend private school.

The elderly could go to a clinic and receive medicine.

People did not freeze or starve to death.

Even a widow’s household could survive because she could work in a workshop and support her mother-in-law and child.

Truthfully, he did not particularly like that fellow surnamed Zheng.

The man always felt too hypocritical.

Across Shengle, soldiers and commoners alike—especially those grunts—worshiped General Zheng as though his image had been burned into their bones.

But the Sword Saint knew perfectly well that the Zheng Fan they worshiped and the Zheng Fan he knew were practically two different people.

And yet there was no denying that the man knew how to conduct himself.

He was meticulous.

He was fair in the ways that mattered.

For a Yan man who had risen through military merit to be capable of governing a region of common people without allowing them to freeze or starve that was genuinely not easy.

So, when Zheng Fan said,

*Kill Gelimu for me,*

the Sword Saint came to kill him.

Since... since... since every time he chose something for himself, the outcome seemed to turn terrible, then perhaps from now on, he would simply follow that man’s words.

At the very least, Zheng Fan had already proven that what he did usually turned out rather well.

The thunder of hooves around him grew denser.

More and more savage cavalrymen were surging toward the Sword Saint, attempting to use their own flesh, blood, and swinging weapons to block his path.

But these men what did they amount to?

Truthfully, not much.

The Sword Saint had always believed his sword was the finest in the world.

He had once said exactly that in front of his disciple.

His disciple had asked:

“Then who is the second-best sword beneath Heaven?”

The Sword Saint had answered:

“Yuan Zhenxing.”

The Little Sword Attendant had been delighted.

She thought her master had deliberately called her late master the second-best sword *in the world* rather than merely the second-best sword in Qian to make her happy.

But in truth, the Sword Saint had meant every word.

Li Liangshen had entered the army and given himself to the Marquis of Zhenbei’s Residence.

He obeyed the Marquis of Zhenbei.

Now he guarded Yanjing and obeyed the Emperor of Yan.

He was much like the heavy ancient sword in his hands covered in rules, carved full of order and restraint.

The Swordsmith of Chu had spent his entire life obsessed with forging swords.

Yet his sword furnace was inlaid with gold, silver, and jade.

He himself was a hereditary noble of Chu.

And now he was busy running errands for an imperial prince.

Rumor said that during Chu’s alliance with the savages, he too had appeared beside the Wang River.

He had risen from the sword furnace.

He was trapped by the sword furnace.

And he lived by the sword furnace.

A patch of Heaven and Earth closed around a man that was a prison.

The Hundred-Li Sword was the Crown Prince of Qian’s martial instructor.

Together with Yao Zizhan, he divided Qian’s glory between martial and literary fame.

Outside Yanjing, when protecting Master Zang as he severed Great Yan’s dragon vein, he never drew his sword.

Beneath Shangjing, when countless Qian commoners were driven forward by Li Fusheng to assault the walls, he never drew his sword.

He simply retreated.

No matter how fast his sword was, it was ultimately as fragile as jade, terrified that even the smallest blemish might appear upon it.

But that man named Yuan Zhenxing beside the Bian River, he had gone generously to his death.

He died miserably.

He died uselessly.

And yet he had embodied the true spirit of a man who carried a sword.

The sword was an ancient sacred weapon.

Supreme.

Noble.

Revered by both men and gods.

Stand upright in righteous spirit.

Do not fall into crooked paths.

Across the ages, the jianghu had nurtured Heaven alone knew how many famous swords.

Yet once those swords entered the jianghu, most eventually gathered dust and lost sight of their original hearts.

That brat surnamed Zheng had once said that after this war, he would help “package” the Sword Saint.

At Fengxin City one sword seized the gate.

Before Snow Sea Pass one sword slew the enemy chieftain.

For the next ten years and more, tavern drinkers and teahouse listeners would be able to use his stories as accompaniment to wine and tea.

But what that brat surnamed Zheng did not understand was that the Sword Saint no longer cared much about such fame.

More than a hundred sunrises and sunsets at Shengle City’s southern gate had given him a great deal of time to think.

And had changed him greatly.

Every time the widow returned from work and looked at him, her eyes were like fresh water just drawn from a well clear enough to see straight through a man.

Many things, once released, were simply released.

But one thing had never left his waist.

*Tian Wujing.*

*You once said the jianghu was too small.*

*So small that you found it laughable.*

*You were right.*

*The jianghu truly is small.*

*And I, a man trapped inside this little jianghu, can do little more than indulge the fury of one common man.*

*Men of the jianghu should do the things of the jianghu.*

*As for the endless flood of savages pouring across the lands of the Three Jin—*

*that will have to depend on you, Marquis of Jingnan, to clean up completely.*

In that instant the Sword Saint’s entire aura suddenly surged!

Today—

I, Yu Huaping, for every sword-bearer in this age establish my destiny, open my edge, and illuminate my path!

In the next instant, terrifying sword qi exploded outward.

Gelimu, still fleeing desperately, suddenly widened his eyes.

He had never felt an aura this powerful before.

Despair instantly filled his heart.

Behind them, Hasi—who was racing toward the scene—revealed an expression in which ecstasy and terror mixed together.

Because he had sensed it.

This was no longer the aura of a Third Grade swordsman.

The Sword Saint now carried sword intent that had surpassed Third Grade!

All the paths, arts, and methods beneath Heaven eventually converged upon the same end.

Third Grade stood at the summit visible to ordinary men.

Yet above it, Second and First Grade remained deliberately empty.

Second Grade and First Grade practitioners almost never appeared in the world.

Perhaps the historical records contained traces of them.

Perhaps legends claimed that some ancestor of some family had once reached such a height.

But no one in the public world had truly seen such beings display their power.

The paths of the West were the same.

They did not classify strength according to grades, but above their ordinary peak still existed the realms of “Transcendent” and “Saint,” roughly corresponding to the East’s Second and First Grades.

If those heights did not truly exist, why had two places been left empty above Third Grade?

And if they did exist why had no one seen them for a hundred years?

Hasi’s heart nearly stopped.

He had seen it.

He had actually seen it.

In the span of a breath the Sword Saint’s figure appeared directly behind Gelimu.

The savage cavalry had failed to block his path.

Truthfully, at this speed, it was no longer a question of whether they *wanted* to block him.

They simply could not.

The sword carried the man.

It was no longer the man controlling the sword.

Human strength had limits.

The sword had crossed some invisible shackle.

A terrifying pressure descended.

Gelimu turned his head in despair and looked at the Sword Saint beside him.

Blood was spilling from Yu Huaping’s eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.

Clearly, even for the Sword Saint, forcing himself beyond the limits of his normal realm and reaching this kind of speed and power required an atrocious price.

Yet he had still forced his cultivation upward for the sole purpose of killing Gelimu.

For one bizarre instant, Gelimu did not know whether he should continue feeling terror or feel strangely honored.

He was a Martial Artist.

A high-grade Martial Artist.

Naturally, he understood how terrifying and how extraordinary such a realm was.

To die beneath this sword for a warrior, perhaps that should have been considered an honor.

But almost immediately, he roared:

“I DON’T WANT TO DIE!”

His face a face no different from that of an ordinary man of Jin twisted beneath the force of his will to survive.

There were still too many things he had not done.

He did not want to die.

He did not want to die!

The Sword Saint, however, could not even be bothered wasting words on him.

His finger pointed downward.

Longyuan instantly pierced into Gelimu’s back.

The powerful physique in which Martial Artists took such pride was as fragile as thin paper before the blade.

The Sword Saint’s finger lifted.

Longyuan burst out through Gelimu’s skull.

In the next instant—

Gelimu’s body was split cleanly in two!

Then, the Sword Saint’s voice exploded like a great bronze bell:

“HE WHO BETRAYS HIS ANCESTRAL SHRINES—

SHALL BE EXECUTED!”

[End of Chapter 334]