The Saint of Blade's Edge

Since I can't post any additional chapters, there are going to be two patron exclusive short stories posted today, set during the time of the tournament.

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Ming strode into the Keeper’s Hall, the soft sound of her shoes causing a clicking on the smooth marble tiles lined with jade, and then felt a prickle in her mana senses. She turned to see the keeper of the headstones watching her from within the recesses of shadow cast by the headstones all around her. He slid out of the darkness like a ghost, his power as a false Occultist whispering through the hall. Knowledge and Abnegation mana spun out from him as he smiled, tapping her on the head.

There were very few people Ming allowed to get this close to her. She had once allowed her parents to do as much, but they were dead. Now she allowed Morgan and Dario, and had put up with the odd embrace from Emi or the beaded girl that Dario was friends with. This keeper was not on the short list of people, but he was a false Occultist, and there was nothing she could do. 

Then there was a swirling as knowledge began to expand within her mind. Dozens of herediment headstones. No, more than dozens. One hundred and thirty-seven headstones, collected in many different ways. While most had come from Occultists of Greater Daocheng, not all of them were. Some had been the results of trade, while others had been taken from now-destroyed kingdoms conquered by the Storm King, and others still had been looted from the remnants of fallen kingdoms so old she did not recognize the names given. All of the information was all indexed in a neat, orderly fashion, allowing for easy perusal. There were plenty of ways that she could search – mana type, magical styles, personality traits, and more. She could gain a dossier of information on any of them in less than a second. 

She flipped to the section on swords. 

Of course she did. Ming wasn’t one for self delusion. She might have both desolation and life mana, but her life mana was nothing more than a supporting type. Her plan would ensure she possessed incredible speed, staggering regenerative ability, and remarkable bodily resilience. But those were merely support for her true masterwork, the Silvery Blades spell. 

If she was honest with herself, she still didn’t know how she had managed to craft the spell form. She’d built it using principles that she didn’t understand, based on the half-burnt scraps from a burning branch of the library sect, covered in blood and mud, following intuition more than anything. But however she had done it, it was the basis for her entire desolation gate. 

Absorbing the power of a herediment headstone could give someone years of growth and training. It was a potent ability, certainly, but one that most of the people in the tournament would get limited benefits from. They’d be splitting it across their entire garden, or at least across dozens of spells. A few of them would have the foresight to concentrate all of the growth on a small number of spells, making those spells land with the force of someone several years their senior. She thought Morgan might call them superspells, or something of that sort.

But Ming had built her entire desolation garden around a single spell. Every other spell in her desolation garden was nothing more than a meta spell for Silvery Blades. She would focus all of the headstone’s power in the Silvery Blades. It would, in essence, make every single spell she cast with her desolation mana into a superspell. All of them relied on this one spell, after all. She’d done well to get this far, but if she found the right headstone, she could propel herself from a middle of the pack competitor to someone with a real chance at winning the entire thing. 

She just had to find the right headstone. 

She flipped through the sword artists whose headstones hadn't been claimed by the Arcanist division. The Blade caught her eye briefly, he had been a powerful sword mage that had wielded power to rival two Occultists in his last moments. In the end, his swords of light and heat weren’t compatible enough with her path, so she put him aside and kept flipping through people. 

Then she saw it: The Saint of Blade’s Edge. A spirit of physical and desolation mana who had forged themselves into the perfect user of the sword, giving up their name, identity, and if rumor was to be believed, even their original form in pursuit of perfection. They had used their physical mana in half the same way she used her life mana, enhancing and empowering themselves, while using the other half to form their force blades. Their desolation garden had been devoted to improving the edge of those blades. When they had formed their dominion, they had merged together force and destruction to create a cutting dominion, with which they could empower their swords to cut through far more than it ought to be able to. Their authority had let them manifest cutting edges through the sheer force of their spirit. And their Title had been the Saint of Blade’s Edge.

As soon as she committed, the tendrils of knowledge that had given her impressions of all of the other headstones vanished. Even some details of the Saint of Blade’s Edge grew fuzzy, as the knowledge had never really been hers to begin with. It didn’t matter. 

The keeper of the headstones walked her through the halls, until she stood before a shimmering black obelisk. Its edges were sharp enough to cause even the breeze of their arrival to whistle against them, and within, Ming could feel the dormant well of power. 

“Simply place your hand upon the flat of the stone and draw in the power. Their mana, the trueness of their mind, and their latent power will all flow into you. Make ready, as the merging can be… difficult.”

Ming didn’t need to be told twice. She placed her hand on the stone, and immediately felt her power flow out of her. Then the tide reversed, and magic exploded through her spirit. The world around her vanished as she was pulled into her mana-garden. Above her, the sky seemed to split open as an overwhelming deluge of mana in a pure, true, strong form flowed into her. It wanted to spread to every inch of her garden, to enhance everything, to give her improvement in ten thousand ways.

Ming firmed her will and took hold of the magic. She would not let it wastefully go to growing the walls, to burning the mists of her garden, to spells that would already be improved by improving Silvery Blades. She wanted, no, needed the power directed to a single source. This was her shot. Everything in her life depended on this one second. If she failed, she’d lose the tournament. She’d go back to Elohi, and fail to have gained the power and resources for advancement. She’d never kill the Windrider for his failures and incompetence. Her parents and village would all be dead, and she would have done nothing.

It was like trying to wrangle a bull with both hands tied behind her back, while blindfolded, deafened, and dipped in oil. But if that was the situation she found herself in, then she would wrestle it with her teeth!

The power thundered through her first gate, where a single spell, a silver blade, sat. With every second, it shot higher and higher into the sky of her garden, drinking greedily of the power on offer. A month of growth. A year. Two. Four. Eight. 

The blade had gained as much growth as it had in all the years of her practice and then some. Then the power in the sky began to die. 

She reached out, took hold of it, ripped more strength out. Then she began to scream. Dragging more power from the headstone was painful, as if sharp blades were cutting into every inch of her skin and spirit alike. But what did she care about pain?

Ten years. Eleven. Twelve. 

Then it gave out all at once. There was simply nothing left for the headstone to give, and no amount of raw force of will and personality could pull forth something from nothing at all. 

She was tempted to sag in relief, but before she could, the next phase began. She slid through dirt, then through stone, and found herself in caverns. There, the form of someone else appeared. The other form held a blade made of glowing purple nothing, and Ming did too. 

And so they met one another in the only way two swordmasters knew how: combat. 

There was a clashing of steel as purple smoke boiled out of the ground around them. A sword ripped through Ming’s neck, and she began again. Strike after strike, blow after blow, she lost ten times, a hundred, two hundred. And then, she won. The figure began to fade, but Ming reached out to the obelisk and demanded it stay. She’d learned some from the figure, the Saint of Blade’s Edge, but not everything. 

Again, pain. Pain beyond anything she’d felt before, a sword sliding into her heart and deep into her spirit. 

But it didn’t matter. She had so much more to learn from the Saint of Bladed Edge. This wasn’t the full copy of skills that they’d possessed in life, merely the impressions that their intent had carried, but that intent dwarfed Ming’s own – though not as much as it had two hundred matches ago. That wasn’t enough. She wanted all of it. She took it, and forgot the pain, every match striking against one another. She lost nine out of every ten matches, and each one she won, the pain intensified as the headstone tried to force her on, but that only strengthened her desire to keep the Saint. 

Then she was losing eight of ten, and then seven, and then six. Eventually, she began to win more than she lost, and it was then that the headstone ran dry. There was nothing left to give, she had taken all of it. 

And she moved on. This last task was the hardest, but also the simplest. It was a merging, a mingling of might she didn’t understand and that she, in part, was unable to use. Only a sliver, perhaps an eighth or less, of the power here melded smoothly into her. As soon as it had, the headstone tried to cut the process, and for a third time, Ming refused. She screamed as the worst pain thus far bombarded her, but she reached for the mass of power that refused to merge. It spun and shook, and she snapped at it, trying to pull it into her anyway. It was wrong, so wrong, and painful, so painful. She did not care. She was going to take every bit of this power, and she would use it to kill the man who had destroyed the only peace she had ever known. 

It fought like a viscous magi dragon, while she was a magicless mortal. She was doomed to fail, to hurt, to break. She knew that. But she pushed on anyways. She would slay the dragon, she would take its hoard, and she would get what she needed. 

A tiny speck of the power she had yet to claim flew across the chasm and melded with her. It was so small. For all her pain and suffering, she’d only claimed a single drop of water in an entire bucket. She was tempted, so tempted, to give up. She refused. So what if she could only take it one drop at a time? The rain was only one drop at a time, and it still wore down mountains. 

She grabbed the power and screamed, forcing one spark of power, then another, and another. She became so invested in the mere act of holding on and taking the power that it became the only thing she knew. And so it almost surprised her when there was nothing left. She had taken everything from the herediment headstone. And now she would… she would…

Darkness washed over Ming as she passed out. 

In the Keeper’s Hall, the keeper stared in horror as the mere girl before him took everything from the headstone. The obelisk shape went from the color of obsidian to a dull gray, then to white. Cracks began to run along its surface, and then it exploded. Sharp shards of stone cut into the girl’s sword hand, but rather than blood, liquid black spooled out of her. He raised his hand, prepared to strike her down, but the wind shifted, and his wrist shattered under the pressure as the Storm King expressed his displeasure. An instant later, blood erupted from his hands as a dominion, the power of spirits, rippled out from the girl’s inky scars. 

And the dominion felt like the edge of a knife.