The Wheel Of Samsara - 55 Sword Abyss III

It was a very dark night. The stars were dim and the moon was nowhere to be seen. Even so, a bit of the starlight managed to get past the leaves of the trees that covered the Broken Forest, tainting the earth in a pale white color. In such a night, the forest had an eerie atmosphere, and any kind of sound would make the pair traversing the forest shudder in fear and get tense.

The air was cold, and white mist shot out of Amon’s mouth while he took light breaths. He had a black cloak tightly wrapped around his body in a vain struggle against the biting chill of the night.

As he walked in silence, the trees slowly started turning sparse, and he had more space to walk the deeper he went into the forest. The ground under his feet was turning less and less green at each step, as the grass and fallen leaves disappeared and were replaced by muddy soil. At some point, the trees around him abruptly disappeared, and he saw himself facing barren land.

The cold at this point was almost unbearable, and Amon felt his skin prickling, as if countless needles were piercing every inch of his body. On the ground filled with cracks there was only a fine dust that blew at his faces, carried by a chilling wind. There was no other sound than the wind blowing through the air and rustling the leaves of the trees on his back.

No life could be seen in just a place. No plant could grow its roots here, for the cold slowly would wither them without a doubt. No spirit beast could live here, for the sharp energy that emanated from the chasm ahead would pierce through their skins and they would bleed to death. They had finally stepped into the domain of the Sword Abyss.

“You won’t be able to walk closer without getting injured, so I’ll give you a hand.” Lya said in her melodious voice.

Amon watched in surprise as a translucent sphere of light formed from thin air and covered him. Looking at his surrounding, he couldn’t help but shudder. More than once, weak disciples that had more bravery than intelligence ventured alone in such lands only to be found dead, their skins ruptured and their insides in pieces.

As he continued to walk, the cold wind grew stronger and stronger. It now carried an inherent sharpness, as if it hid blades that tried to slash the shield open. Each step he took was heavier than the last one, and exhaustion slowly started to creep through his face. Deep footprints were imprinted in the dust as he faced the opposing wind. Beads of sweat started rolling down Amon’s face. The effort was too much for him, he would soon reach his limit.

His pace was slowly turning to a halt. The wind was now like a barrier that grew tougher and tougher as he advanced. Cracks were slowly appearing in the shield, and it didn’t take long for it to start to creak.

“Lya…” Amon called, clearly worried as he saw the shield starting to distort.

“It will hold on, don’t worry.” Lya said in a serene voice, trying to calm Amon down.

The wind brought dust that violently clashed against the shield before being dispersed and blown away. From above one could only see a tiny commotion in the middle of a sandstorm that was slowly but resolutely moving forward.

Amon would barely be able to withstand the winds without the shield, but he had no desire to try. When he felt he couldn’t go further, he saw ahead of them a pair of gigantic wooden poles.

The poles were side by side, being at least thirty meters high and six meters wide. Attached to them were ropes as thick as a person that disappeared in the distance, above a terrifying darkness that devoured the ground.

A gigantic rift had split the ground apart. The ground simply ended out of nowhere, as if something had carved out a huge chunk of it. At one moment, there was solid land; in the next, there was only a fall to the nothingness. The Sword Abyss stretched as far as the eye could see, like a gaping mouth ready to devour anything and everything that fell into it.

As he slowly got closer to the Abyss and the poles that held the ropes of the bridge, the pressure disappeared. Amon sighed in relief and Lya dispersed the luminous shield around him, before he fell on the ground, panting heavily.

His clothes were drenched in sweat and his legs were trembling. Some parts of his tattered clothes couldn’t resist the pressure and were ripped, while his black cloak barely survived unscathed.

Nevertheless, he was happy. He had managed to get to the Bridge of Lamenting. While he recovered, he gazed in fear to the legendary Sword Abyss in front of him.

The Bridge of Lamenting had a formation inscribed in it, negating the effects of the Sword Qi from the Abyss and protecting it and everyone in the range of the formation. Even so, he could still feel a chill deep in his heart as he looked at that endless dark.

Amon took a long while catching his breath before he managed to sit with his legs crossed and closed his eyes in meditation to try to recover a bit. The air surrounding him seemed to blur a bit, and a faint halo emanated from him.

Slowly he stopped trembling from the cold and exhaustion, and his breathing became regular. He was in the boundary of the protective formation of the Bridge of Lamenting, so he could relax.

“You should pay attention to your surroundings.” Lya advised him from the interspatial ring. Amon gave her a slight nod as he focused.

Probing the surrounding with his divine sense, he felt the Qi that came from the Abyss. It felt unnatural. It was sharp, cold and unforgiving, like a sword dealing a killing blow. The misty Qi would gather into strands as thin as a hair, much like spider webs.

These strands would cut through the air, splitting apart everything in its way and speeding towards the bridge with a terrifying momentum that would make anyone shiver in fear.

When they got close enough to the bridge, however, they would suddenly disperse, as if they never existed. What caused it to disperse was naturally the protective formation on the bridge, but Amon had no idea of how it worked.

“This… is this Sword Qi?” He asked in awe. His golden eyes shone with expectation as he felt the blades of Qi shuttling around him.

“This is only remnant Qi.” Lya explained to him. “It is not even close to what you would have in the depths of the Abyss.”

“This is nothing more than a weak echo, a mere fraction of what that strike was.” She said in a serious voice, making Amon even more impressed. He was sure that if he was not being protected by the array formation in the bridge, just a single wisp of this Sword Qi would be able to split him in half.

He focused on recovering his energies and calming his mind. When he finished, he got up and walked towards the Bridge of Lamenting.

The Bridge of Lamenting could be called a simple rope bridge, however, its scale was massive. It crossed the whole width of the Sword Abyss, meaning it had about 2 kilometers. The boards used in it were 10 meters long and 3 meters wide.

It was hard to even imagine the size of the trees that originated them. They would have been at least as big as the trees used to make the poles that anchored the bridge.

The wooden poles that supported the ropes and the boards were covered with strange inscriptions made with elegant and intricate runes. Those inscriptions glowed in golden light, and moved freely in the poles and boards, twisting and turning like snakes.

The runes sometimes converged and dispersed, connected with each other and then broke apart. It was hard to discern what could have been words or sentences. The runes spiraled around each other, their glows varying according to their positions and to which runes they were connected.

“To do a formation on such a scale…” Amon couldn’t help but mutter to himself. The Bridge of Lamenting was huge. For every inch of it to be inscribed with formations like that was a feat in itself.

As he walked, the boards at his feet creaked a little and the bridge lightly swayed. He had no need to fear falling from the bridge or being cut into pieces, but he still felt uncomfortable as he sensed the Sword Qi smashing in his direction.

“This should be enough.” Lya said as Amon got halfway through the bridge.

The strands of Sword Qi in the middle of the bridge were many times bigger and more aggressive than on the extremities, making Amon pale as he carefully observed them. He felt he was seeing blades shooting at him rather than Qi.

He sat down on the bridge, closing his eyes as he focused. The moonlight fell over his lonely figure as the bridge slightly swayed with the wind.

“Now what you must do is focus on each strand of Sword Qi you see.” Lya guided him, her voice seemingly echoing from afar, like a fleeting dream. “Feel it closely. Don’t try to analyze the shape, try to see behind its behavior.”

“Try to see behind the will contained in it.”

The most important part behind of the concept of Sword Qi was not simply the sharpness. Behind Sword Qi, lied murderous intentions. A strong soul would have a strong will. Naturally, the strongest Soul Cultivator would have the strongest will. The strongest Sword Qi he ever produced would also contain the strongest murderous intention.

What Amon needed to do now was to dwell in it, learn from it. Amon Skoller needed to learn what trying to kill a person really felt like. This would be a part of his life that he wouldn’t be able to run from.

He was a Sword Cultivator, after all.