"That's perfectly normal. Butcher's sword control is terrible, so he can't teach you."
Apothecary smiled and said, "There’s someone in our village who knows advanced sword control, but unfortunately, he doesn’t want to teach you."
The Village Chief's face darkened slightly, and he said stiffly, "Apothecary, there’s too much water here. Take me back to my room!"
Apothecary laughed, "Then the Village Chief will have to wait a moment. I’m still bandaging Quinn’s wounds."
Once the wound was bandaged, Quinn saw the Mute Smith picking up swords scattered on the ground. He picked up one, gave it a gentle shake, and thousands of flying swords automatically soared over, clinking as they collided with the sword in Mute Smith’s hand. All the swords vanished, merging into a single blade, leaving Quinn marveling.
He stepped forward, picked up a sword, and gave it a gentle shake, but nothing happened.
Mute Smith grinned, his mouth tongueless, letting out two ah-ah sounds. Then he rubbed the sword between his palms; the blade shrank smaller and smaller, and in the blink of an eye, it became a tiny silver pellet, only the size of a fingertip.
Quinn looked at the sword in his own hand, wanting to rub it too to see if he could turn it into a little silver pellet. Apothecary quickly said, "Don’t rub it, I just finished bandaging your wound! Mute Smith, stop teasing him, or I’ll poison you!"
Mute Smith couldn't stop laughing. He snatched the flying sword from Quinn’s hand and stuffed the silver pellet into Quinn’s palm.
Crack.
Quinn heard a faint sound from his shoulder, then was pressed flat to the ground by the weight of the silver pellet in his hand. Mute Smith was startled, patting his own forehead—he’d forgotten that this was a sword pellet forged from thousands of swords merged together. The weight of thousands of swords was beyond imagination.
Caught off guard, Quinn was naturally crushed, his arm dislocated, his whole body sprawled on the ground.
Mute Smith was about to fix Quinn’s arm when Granny Sue walked over and kicked him out of the village with a single blow. No one knew where he landed, but the ah-ah sounds echoed farther and farther away outside the village.
Granny Sue, face grim, set Quinn’s arm back and scolded, "Those who can’t talk are always trouble, full of bad ideas! Quinn, these swords are mother-child swords. Out of thousands, one is the mother sword, the rest are child swords. Find the mother sword, and you can recall all the child swords. But River Lee Sect’s sword pellets are heavy—you can’t lift them yet."
She picked up a sword, gave it a gentle shake like Mute Smith, and thousands of treasure swords flew over, merging into the mother sword.
Granny Sue smiled, "To turn the mother sword back into a sword pellet, you don’t need to rub it—Mute Smith was just messing with you. You only need to merge your yuanqi with the mother sword, and it will shrink back into a pellet. The same method lets you release the child swords from the mother sword."
Quinn eyed the sword pellet in her palm, blinking in confusion. "Granny, it seems like you have a lot of these silver pellets in your room!"
"Do I?" Granny Sue blinked her cloudy old eyes, looking puzzled.
"You do!"
Quinn remembered seeing these silver pellets in Granny Sue’s room—quite a few, some tossed under the bed, some in shoes she didn’t wear, and plenty in the corners.
When he was little, he even played marbles with these silver pellets, flicking them around.
He even saw Granny Sue’s old hen swallow one of these silver pellets, mistaking it for grit!
Thinking back now, it’s terrifying—if one of those pellets suddenly turned into a sword inside the hen’s stomach, the scene would be gruesome.
Luckily, that never happened.
Granny Sue’s eyes darted. "The ones you could pick up as a child were just ordinary silver pellets, not sword pellets."
Quinn didn’t quite believe her. "I saw a big chest full of silver pellets in Mute Smith’s forge."
Granny Sue blinked her cloudy old eyes, even slicker than Quinn, and smiled, "Do you really think Mute Smith is that rich?"
Quinn grew a bit confused—Mute Smith didn’t look like someone wealthy, just a hard-working, penniless blacksmith.
Granny Sue laughed, "Don’t overthink it. Our village is full of ordinary folks, all dirt poor and crippled. We’re just a regular village—everything is perfectly normal. If you suspect that chest is full of sword pellets, you might as well suspect the water tank in the corner is some kind of treasure!"
Quinn looked at the water tank she mentioned, sitting under the eaves of the forge. It was used to collect rainwater, but strangely, Quinn had never seen it full—no matter how hard it rained, it was always half full!
Not only that, the water level never dropped, nor did he ever see the bottom. Mute Smith used lots of water for forging, scooping bucket after bucket, but the tank always stayed the same!
Granny Sue saw his suspicious look and realized that example wasn’t working, so she quickly said, "You don’t think Apothecary’s pile of broken earthen jars is treasure too, do you?"
Quinn glanced at the broken jars outside Apothecary’s door. Inside were strange herbs and little bugs—spiders, silkworms, centipedes, and the like.
Earlier, when the flood hit, water got into the jars and a few bugs crawled out, fighting on the rims. Suddenly a black spider flared up, its whole body ablaze. The spider swelled to the size of a table and spewed fire at the other bugs. In the flames, several golden silkworms sprouted wings, grew over a foot long, flew out of the fire, and bit the spider with a shrill hiss.
Apothecary poked his head out and barked a command; the bugs instantly shrank and retreated back into the jars, behaving themselves.
Quinn grew even more suspicious. Granny Sue forced a dry laugh and stammered, "These are all normal—just ordinary things..."
Quinn probed, "Granny, are people outside the Great Ruins like Grandpa Blind—can they all fly?"
Granny Sue nodded, "Everyone outside can fly."
Quinn asked, "Are they all spirit bodies like our villagers?"
"All spirit bodies!"
"Are people outside as powerful as our villagers?"
"Much more powerful! Otherwise Granny and Grandpa Blind wouldn’t have been forced to hide in the Great Ruins! Don’t keep thinking about running outside—you’ll get yourself killed. People out there are fiercer than Grandpa Blind!"
...
Quinn was half-convinced. Were people outside the Great Ruins really as powerful as Granny Sue said, able to soar through the sky and burrow through the earth?
By the river, Crippled Joe finished packing the corpses into coffins. Grandpa Mark hammered each lid shut with wooden wedges, then pushed the coffins into the river, letting them drift downstream.
The current was swift, with many hidden rocks downstream. The coffins would likely be smashed before reaching the sea, the bodies sinking and becoming food for the giant river fish.
"River Lee Sect might be wiped from the Southern Frontier."
Crippled Joe watched the coffins drift away and said quietly, "The sect master is dead, and all their experts are gone. The sect won’t survive."
"That’s not what I’m thinking about right now."
Grandpa Mark shook his head, gazing into the distance. "What I’m thinking about is that man called ‘first beneath the gods.’ Elias Mornwind was the Governor of the Five Miao Prefectures, personally recruited by the Imperial Preceptor and granted a second-rank title. Now he’s dead, and so are the Five Elders. Will this alarm the man called ‘first beneath the gods’?"
Crippled Joe shook his head. "It’ll alarm him, but he’d never dare enter the Great Ruins!"
Grandpa Mark glanced at him. "Don’t forget, one Imperial Preceptor alone might not be able to handle the Great Ruins, but behind him stands the Everpeace Empire—a colossal ‘sect’ flying the banner of a nation! How could such a giant not covet the Great Ruins? There are countless treasures here!"