Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

The Master stood before him, placing both swollen hands onto the young man’s shoulders, his watery eyes brimming with deep quiet pride.

”Remember where your roots began, Wei Heng,” the Master said softly. ”The sword is meant to shield the weak and uphold the truth... Do not let the grand towers of the righteous path make you forget the earth beneath your boots.”

”I will never forget, Master!” Wei Heng declared loudly, dropping to both knees in the dirt and kowtowing three times with rigid tearful devotion.

When he stood up, he saw Rèn standing behind Qiu Ling’s skirts, her wooden sword held tightly against her leg with her dark crimson eyes overflowing with fat silent tears that ran through the dirt on her cheeks.

Wei Heng laughed softly, walking over and dropping onto one knee before her.

He reached out, his thumb gently wiping away a tear from her bruised chin, his eyes shining with boundless, ambitious affection.

”Don’t cry, little broom,” Wei Heng smiled, ruffling her untamed black hair until the braids loosened. ”The Heavenly Sword Court is only three hundred leagues to the east... Once I pass the inner-disciple trials and secure my own mountain cave, I will come back and visit you. I’ll bring you that wagon of glazed plums, just like I promised... Keep practicing that cut, hear me? When I come back, I expect to see you cleave a pine log in half!”

Rèn sniffled, rubbing her nose with her sleeve, and gave him a fierce solemn nod.

”I will,” she choked out. ”I’ll do two thousand cuts every day, Senior Brother!”

They watched his white robes fade down the winding mountain road until he vanished into the golden afternoon dust.

A year passed like running water.

Rèn turned nine.

Her limbs had stretched slightly, though she was still scrawny and small for her age with her skin browned by the high sun and her untamed black hair still cascading in wild stubborn waves down her back whenever Qiu Ling wasn’t there to braid it.

...It was the night of the annual Autumn Harvest Festival.

The Quiet Pine Sect was as poor as it had ever been, the garden harvest modest and the roof still leaking whenever a storm rolled through but the old Master had spent three weeks carefully saving copper coins from his medicinal herb gathering in the valley, scraping together just enough money to buy eleven small, round bean-paste mooncakes from the town baker.

The disciples sat around the communal table in the flickering light of tallow candles, chatting happily as they divided the sweet confections.

Rèn sat beside Qiu Ling, holding her small, paper-wrapped pastry in both hands, taking tiny microscopic nibbles to make the sweet red bean paste last as long as humanly possible.

A slender pale hand reached into her field of view.

Qiu Ling broke her own golden mooncake cleanly in two, placing the larger half directly into Rèn’s lap with a soft teasing smile.

”Eat, little one,” Qiu Ling murmured, her lotus-like face glowing softly in the candlelight. ”You swung that wooden branch for three hours this afternoon. You need the sugar more than I do...”

”Senior Sister, this is your share,” Rèn protested softly, trying to push it back. ”You only get one every autumn!”

”And I’m giving it to my favorite sister,” Qiu Ling whispered, leaning down to bump her forehead gently against Rèn’s bangs. ”Now chew, before the boys notice and demand a bite.”

Rèn looked down at the golden pastry, her heart swelling with an overwhelming sweetness that was a thousand times richer than the honey in the bean paste.

Later that evening, after the mooncakes had been finished and the dormitory lamps had been extinguished, the full autumn moon rose high and clear into the navy sky.

The three hundred and twelve granite steps gleamed like silver ribbons winding down through the quiet bamboo.

Rèn stood at the top step with the cool night breeze rustling the coarse hemp of her oversized tunic, gripping the worn sharkskin hilt of her mountain-ash wooden sword with both calloused hands.

”Haah... Haah...”

Her shoulders were drenched in sweat, her breath pluming in misty clouds in the crisp mountain air.

’Nine hundred and ninety-nine.’

Her muscles screamed, the blistered skin on her palms throbbed with hot pulses of pain that shot straight up into her wrists as she took a forward step, sliding her bare left foot across the polished stone.

’One more...’

She lifted the hilt, locking the guard horizontally before her sternum.

Rèn aligned her hips, dropped her center of gravity, and drove the blunt wooden blade downward in a clean perfectly balanced vertical arc that cleanly sheared through the empty night breeze.

SWOOSH!

The cut finished as the wooden tip stopped dead, perfectly parallel to the stone flags, three inches above the granite riser.

Her arms did not shake, her shoulders did not tremble and her breath settled in her lungs as her stance locked like an iron post driven into the bedrock of the mountain.

...For the very first time in a long grueling year of swinging a wooden branch against the dark, her hands held flawlessly steady at the thousandth strike.

From the shadows of the main courtyard gate, a soft cough broke the quiet night.

Rèn jumped slightly, lowering her sword, spinning around on her heels.

Standing beneath the wooden archway, wrapped in an old quilted hemp coat with his hands tucked into his wide sleeves, was the Master.

The old man had been standing there in the cold shadow for an hour, watching every single strike through his watery rheumy eyes.

He looked at the little nine-year-old girl standing alone on the silver steps, looked at the raw calloused blisters on her knuckles, and looked at the perfectly level angle of the blunt wooden blade resting by her knee.

A slow warm smile spread across his wrinkled, weathered face, crinkling his white beard.

The Master gave her a single deliberate nod.

”Good,” the Master said softly.

...Just that one word.

Rèn stood frozen on the granite riser, her dark crimson eyes going wide as the single syllable washed over her soul like warm summer rain.

A massive radiant grin broke across her sun-browned face, stretching from ear to ear, so bright and overwhelming that she felt like her little chest was going to burst wide open with joy.

It was the proudest and most triumphant moment of her entire nine years of life... She had done it... She had swept the steps clean, she had held her stance, and she had made the Master proud!

She opened her mouth, ready to shout back across the courtyard to tell him she would do another five hundred cuts before sunrise..

A dancing shimmer of pale yellow light caught the corner of her vision.

Rèn blinked, turning her head back toward the winding mountain path as down in the dark bamboo valley below, far at the bottom of the three hundred and twelve stone steps, a light was moving through the mist.

...Then another... Then three more...

Within seconds, dozens of glowing white-paper lanterns were bobbing along the dirt verge, rising out of the river fog in a silent coordinated sweeping procession that began to climb the granite staircase.

They were carried by men moving with silent synchronized martial discipline.

Every single one of them was draped in flowing, pristine robes of immaculate white silk that fluttered like death shrouds against the autumn wind, long iron scabbards clattering softly against their belts.

Rèn tilted her head with innocent, curious wonder, her wooden sword dangling loosely in her right hand.

”Master?” Rèn called out softly, pointing a finger down into the silver mist. ”Look... there are guests climbing the mountain so late at night... Are they from the village?”

Beside the wooden gate, the old Master did not answer.

The warm proud smile that had crinkled his weathered face drained away in a single freezing heartbeat.

His watery gray eyes widened until they were completely consumed by suffocating dread, his gnarled walking staff trembling violently against the granite as he watched the pristine white robes of the Heavenly Sword Court steadily ascend the steps his little disciple had swept clean that very morning.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

Twenty figures in immaculate white silk stepped through the splintered archway of the Quiet Pine Sect.

Their hems did not carry a single speck of mountain mud, floating three inches above the flagstones she had swept spotless that morning.

White-paper lanterns hung from their belts, casting stark bleaching rings of tallow light across the cracked granite courtyard, illuminating the embroidered clouds and soaring golden crane crests of the Heavenly Sword Court.

...Leading the formation was Patriarch Bai Wujian.

He was a legendary paragon of righteousness in the eastern provinces, a man celebrated across ten thousand leagues as the living pillar of orthodox justice.

His hair was long and snow-white, bound by a crown of polished white nephrite, his skin as smooth and unblemished as carved river jade.

He carried no naked blade in his hand with his long iron scabbard resting peacefully at his hip, his eyes calm, half-closed, and devoid of earthly passion like an ancient statue looking down from a high mountain temple.

Behind him, twenty sword cultivators fanned out in a silent flawless crescent, sealing the courtyard from edge to edge.

The old Master did not run to the weapon racks... He did not call for the alarm bell, and he did not summon a defensive formation either.

He dropped his gnarled pine walking staff onto the flagstones with a dull, hollow clatter.

The Master fell forward onto both knees as his swollen arthritic joints struck the granite with a sickening brittle crack.

He folded his trembling hands together, bowing his forehead all the way down to the cold stone before Bai Wujian’s immaculate white boots.

”Patriarch Bai...” the old man rasped, his voice thin, wheezing, and trembling with a father’s desperate, agonizing dread. ”Take the mountain... Take the spirit vein sleeping beneath our foundations. Take the ancestral records, the garden, the halls, take everything under this sky... I only beg your benevolence... Just let the children go... They know nothing of veins or ore. They are only poor orphans... Please... let them walk down the steps...”

Bai Wujian stopped three paces before him.

The righteous patriarch’s expression did not ripple with malice, anger, contempt, or greed.

He looked down at the weeping, bowed old man the exact same way a traveling scholar looks at a loose pebble lying in the dirt of a carriage road.

Bai Wujian’s right thumb flicked upward half an inch against the hilt of his sword.

SHING!

A razor-thin crescent of pure blinding white sword-qi detached from the scabbard, whistling through the night air with the soft, whisper-quiet hiss of parting silk.

...The Master’s head detached cleanly from his shoulders.

The torso remained upright on its knees for a fraction of a second before toppling sideways onto the blood-soaked granite.

The white beard stained crimson, his sightless watery gray eyes staring at the fallen pine staff however the world did not pause to mourn.

From behind the covered walkway, a slender hand darted out of the darkness, seizing nine-year-old Rèn by the collar of her hemp tunic with bruising, frantic strength.

”Run!” Qiu Ling choked out.

The fifteen-year-old girl hauled Rèn backward through the rear corridors, her boots skidding across the wooden floorboards.

They burst into the dark narrow kitchen.

The hearth fire had long since gone cold, smelling of stale ash, dried mountain tea, and the sweet lingering scent of the red bean mooncakes they had shared an hour before.

Qiu Ling did not stop... She dragged Rèn straight toward the deep water barrel resting in the corner beneath the heavy shelves.

With desperate tearing strength, Qiu Ling threw the round wooden lid aside.

The barrel was nearly empty, filled with only two inches of stagnant, muddy water at the curved bottom.

She hoisted Rèn by the waist, shoving the scrawny nine-year-old straight down into the cold damp dark of the barrel.

Rèn’s wooden sword was still clutched in her fist with the hemp-wrapped hilt pressed so hard against her chest that the cord bit into her skin.

”Senior Sister—” Rèn gasped, her small hands clawing frantically at the rim.

”Shh!” Qiu Ling hissed, her face pale as rice paper, her gentle lotus features twisted into a mask of pure terror.

She slammed the heavy pine lid down over the rim, leaving only a microscopic half-inch sliver of space near the warped back seam.

Through the crack, Qiu Ling’s dark tear-filled eyes locked directly onto Rèn’s face with her slender fingers trembling violently as she pressed down on the wood with all her strength.

Her familiar trembling voice dropped into an agonizingly soft whisper:

”Don’t make a sound... Not one... No matter what you hear...”

Outside in the main yard, the massacre began.

Rèn clamped both of her filthy, calloused hands hard over her mouth and nose.

Her fingernails dug so deeply into her sun-browned cheeks that the skin tore with her knuckles turning white as chalk in the pitch-black enclosure.

...She heard everything.