298: So Cruel

So Cruel

She stumbled back, hitting the cave wall behind her with a thud. Her dagger and sword fell to the ground as her body slowly slid down against the wall, her eyes still fixed on me in disbelief.1

"… You summoned it with your mind …" she muttered. "… How were you able to do it? Who are you?"

She would know soon, I thought, and I wasted no time replying. Crouching down next to her, I placed my hand on the sword hilt, and I opened up my consciousness the same way Bai Ye showed me before.

The sound of swords swooshing behind me had returned, and I knew Bai Ye had gone back to his own battle after making sure I was safe. In relief, I blocked out those sounds from my mind. The sword spirit seemed to have said something, probably to curse me or maybe to ask me more questions. I blocked out those sounds as well. Then I closed my eyes, focusing solely on my consciousness and the resonation between our power.

It wasn't nearly as easy this time as what Bai Ye showed me earlier. Whereas his spiritual power had guided mine willingly and freely, the sword spirit's power was pushing against me with steadfast resistance, threatening to devour mine whenever I probed too far. But thanks to the pattern Bai Ye had shown me, I avoided clashing my presence with hers, carefully treading the narrow boundary between us and drawing only the free power draining from her body into Twin Stars. I left the guard up around my mind, giving her no space to intrude.

The first few tries were the hardest. As time went by, the resistance from her power grew weaker, and I knew it was a sign of her life draining away. I could feel through my grip on the sword hilt that her breathing was becoming slower and slower, her chest heaving in a broken rhythm. Part of me wondered if I should feel a little guilty—I had never killed a person before in my new life, not to mention that she was practically my family. But it surprised me that there was no guilt in me at all. Maybe it was because I knew she deserved this after what she had done to those cultivators at Misty Mountains. Or maybe it was because I knew from my own experience that this was an unavoidable ending for the spirit of a demonic sword.

An ending that would have been mine … If not for everything Bai Ye had done for me.

I brushed the irrelevant thought aside. Power kept flowing into me, pulsing so strong through my veins now that it felt as if my blood was starting to boil. I took a deep breath and chanted the spells to guide its course. Moving the new stream of power gradually within me, I let my own power seep into it little by little, slowly mingling and mixing the two while trying to keep the flow steady.

When the power coming from Twin Stars trickled to a stop, the two streams merged into one steady course, and suddenly, I felt my consciousness shift.

My eyes flew open. What was happening? I didn't let the sword spirit's consciousness reach too close to mine, and I could barely feel her presence anymore. What could have made my consciousness shift?

I squinted, only to find myself staring at a vast, empty space. The cave was no longer there. The sword spirit, the yazis, Bai Ye … Everyone and everything was gone, leaving only a stretch of darkness where I could see or hear nothing.

I probed my surroundings with my spiritual power. When I found nothing threatening, I took a deep breath and told myself to calm down. Bai Ye had mentioned that there were no written records of anyone trying this forbidden spell before, and we didn't know all the details of what might happen after I summoned it. My consciousness seemed to have just drifted somewhere else … But wherever this was, it felt safe, so I waited, alert and ready for anything that might be coming for me next.

No light or sound broke through the quiet void. The longer I waited, the quieter and darker everything seemed to become, as if the whole world had shrunk into this empty space around me, leaving nothing else. I forgot how much time had passed, but after what felt like an eternity, the initial uncertainty in me started to fade, gradually replaced by … something different.

I thought I felt a sense of loneliness. A sense of confusion and loss, as if I had been waiting in this darkness for hundreds of years, not knowing how to leave or what to do once I did get a chance to leave. The feeling was so real that I almost started to believe I had indeed spent hundreds of years here already … And then suddenly, I realized where I was.

I was inside Twin Stars. This was my memory when I was the sword spirit, before I left the walls of these blades and manifested myself in the physical world. Before I met Bai Ye.

Had the power resonation successfully reawakened the memories from my soul? Was that why I was able to feel this strange sensation of loneliness, so profoundly and familiarly as if I was truly experiencing it myself?

That thought cleared all the uncertainty out of my head. The spell had worked! Which meant all I needed to do now was to stay calm and clearheaded, ready for the clash of emotions when my memories in the physical world start rushing back.

Just as that realization settled in, I heard a voice sounding from a distance.

"Sister …" It was the sword spirit's voice, drifting faintly in the darkness. I stilled. Although my twin sister's voice was the same as mine from my past life, I could easily tell from the tone who was speaking right now.

"Sister …" she repeated. "How can you be so cruel? Are you not afraid of Heaven's punishment for doing this to me?"

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