The Seven Gods Sword Sovereign wandered through the battlefield, saw the dead and the dying, and despaired.

  All was still. All was deathly quiet, like a vast open-air tomb.

  The Heavenly Demon was still alive, he knew. At immense cost they had forced him into retreat. It had taken the sacrifice of some of the greatest martial artists the jianghu had ever known, and yet it simply hadn't been enough to do more than drive the Demon off.

  He himself - well. This life of his wouldn't last more than an hour now, he thought, and he had some experience in knowing when his wounds would prove fatal. He'd been consigned to inevitable death the instant that man's palm technique had sundered his Dantian with more demonic qi than the previous Heavenly Demon had ever been able to muster.

  That was a troubling thought all on its own.

  The Sword Sovereign, with the experience of long years and hundreds of lives, ignored his own wounds and instead surveyed the desolate landscape. The battle had begun at noon, lasted past sunset, and now the sunrise was coming once more.

  Shattered weapons dotted the landscape, having fallen with their owners. Gore-decked corpses lay where they had perished, sometimes together with their friends and sometimes with their enemies.

  Some of them he could identify by their signs - dozens of men bearing the Taiji emblem of the Wudang Sect lay dying near the hill where they had made their final stand, holding off the Scarlet Demon until the Whistling Wisdom Sword could arrive to take him on. For all of an hour they had held out, and in return for entire generations of disciples and elders having died, they had achieved their aim.

  But even after the Whistling Wisdom Sword had arrived, he had only been able to take the Scarlet Demon with him in death. He lay there, a boy of merely twenty years. The Sword Sovereign had been told his name, at some point, but couldn't recall it now. The enormous hole that had been carved into the boy's midsection in the imprint of a massive fist was at odds with the peaceful smile he wore.

  His opponent, on the other hand, lay scattered in pieces. A blossoming flower in red had been painted on the already blood-soaked mountain ground, stretching almost from his neck to where his head lay. His headless body still clenched its massive fists in death.

  The Sword Sovereign shook his head and hoped that it'd been worth it, and that the boy had indeed been content to sacrifice himself like this.

  One of the Seven Dragons & Phoenixes, seven once-in-a-generation talents, gone, his flame extinguished. Two others had died like the Whistling Wisdom Sword, two more had been kept away from the battle, and the final two had defected to the Demon Cult's side.

  He sighed and moved on. As he walked, the blood soaked into his white shoes and painted them red. He could prevent it with the barest application of qi, but he didn't. There was no point.

  A hundred years ago, he had defeated the Second Heavenly Demon. That had been an ordeal that had left him with wounds he still carried. Families had been ripped apart, sects torn from their roots never to return, both minor and major. The sheer amount of knowledge that had been lost, the beauty that the world might never know.

  And for what? So that the world could face the same trial a century later?

  The Sword Sovereign felt every second of his hundred-and-twenty years. Qi kept him hale and healthy, but there was only so much a man could do against the ravages of time, and qi did nothing against the mental strain that he bore.

  Besides, though he had lived this time to a hundred and twenty, he had lived so many more lives that it was impossible to figure out his true age. He had lost count of how many times he had faced the Heavenly Demon the century before. Hundreds? It didn't matter, and he didn't care much.

  When he had finally defeated the Heavenly Demon, he had settled down to enjoy a life less challenging, a life where he wouldn't have to calculate all the time he spent against the appearance of the next Heavenly Demon. When next he died, he would have to prepare for this, as well -

  But... would he? Could he?

  The Sword Sovereign was tired. So, so tired.

  It had taken every single bit of his ability to kill the previous Heavenly Demon, and the one that had appeared now was even stronger. The Heavenly Demon Cult had learned from their failure, while he and the other sects had not learned anything from their victory.

  When he'd begun, he wouldn't have been able to imagine even this. Victory had seemed impossible then, trying to force himself to become strong enough to defeat the Heavenly Demon. He'd made the most out of every single of those years and made the most out of his deaths, as well. He'd found so many different paths, though they all seemed to lead only to the same cliff face.

  Now he had found a path that, despite its momentary victory and respite, led inevitably back to defeat anyway.

  He sighed. His mistake, for thinking that paths ever ended. But if so, was there even a path that did not require sacrifice of ten thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or more, for a long moment of happiness, just to end in a place like this? Enjoy the day though they might, night always came in the end.

  Movement caught his attention.

  The other masters had all retreated - the Volcanic Sage had left to lick his wounds, the Divine Fist Emperor had gone to be with what was left of his family, and his granddaughter the Lady Sun Sword was somewhere searching for medicine that might restore the Sword Sovereign to his full condition. A desperate search that would lead to no results, the Sword Sovereign knew, but he had allowed her the small bit of hope. Looking at the poor girl had nearly broken him.

  The others, he didn't even know. Some were off to die in peace. He knew the look on their faces, because that was the look he himself had worn, coming back here.

  The dying belonged among the dying, after all.

  So who else was left, then? Though - or because - he was dying himself, he would allow no graverobbers. Never, but doubly not so in a place such as this. The martial artists here had given their lives and died with great honor and purpose on his command, and the least he could do in return was ensure them a peaceful repose until burial arrangements were made.

  But it wasn't the hill that the best of the Mount Hua Sect had died on, nor the stretch of ground that the Wudang Sect had defended with their lives, nor the ruined acres that were filled with thousands of dead that the Zhuge and the Tang had been responsible for. It wasn't any of the minor sects, either.

  One of the corpses in the pile of bodies that belonged to the conscripted militias had moved. Minutely, but he had moved. One with senses less keen than the Sword Sovereign might not have noticed.

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  The Sword Sovereign stepped forward with one foot, the single step taking him the distance an ordinary man might need a hundred for, down the hill he stood on and past a patch of blasted earth.

  There, he thought. With a wave of his hand, he mobilized his qi and pulled the moving corpse free. With the other he summoned his sword. If this was to be some horrible plague that the Heavenly Demon wished to unleash upon them even now...

  But it wasn't. What he saw was a novice martial artist - a boy maybe sixteen, at the very most. Baby fat still lingered on his cheeks, and even without it he might have looked young. The Sword Sovereign focused for a moment and saw only dregs of life remaining in the boy, which were already dispersing. He didn't seem to have much qi whatsoever, and with a glance the Sword Sovereign knew that he'd never been properly trained to use what he did have.

  The boy was dying, if not already mostly dead. His left arm had been brutally cut off, his right arm had been mangled, and he had lost so much blood that there was nothing even the Sword Sovereign could do for him. A wound to his head exposed things to the air that were not meant to see the sun. One of his eyes had been pulped. He struggled for breath and struggled to pull himself out of the pile of corpses he’d been buried under, but he had no more strength to give.

  He wore no symbols, but the Sword Sovereign easily read his qi and frowned. The signs of a cultivation technique that burned lifeforce in return for a quick boost in power, the little loop of qi wrapped around the heart to require regular qi infusions to keep them dependent, the paleness of the skin that indicated a drug dependency...

  "Deathsworn," he said, and sighed. "I forbid those seventy-five years ago, and yet here I find them again."

  Nonetheless, the boy's chest moved. Only a little, but still.

  The Sword Sovereign kneeled, brushed the blood out of the boy's eyes, and closed them carefully.

  "You did well," he murmured. "Rest."

  He doubted the boy heard him. Frankly, there was probably nothing left of him to understand the words, at this point.

  And yet something in the boy kept struggling for something. It wasn't a conscious decision, or not at least a completely conscious one. But it wasn't the final movements before rigor set in, either. The Sword Sovereign had seen all of those before, and all of those had something that this lacked.

  "I cannot help you," the Sword Sovereign said, unsure why he was talking to the boy at all. But the truth of what he'd said struck him immediately: he couldn't help the young man now. He was dead; he just hadn't realized it yet.

  Then the untruth of it all struck him, too.

  No, he could help the young man, couldn't he?

  And before he could regret it, he found himself burrowing deep into his dantian for the seas of qi locked away there. They were locked into a battle of their own with the demonic qi ravaging his veins, but he forced his will onto them and pried them away from the battle for self-preservation. If what he did worked, it wouldn't matter, and if it didn't it wouldn't matter, either.

  The Sword Sovereign took a deep breath. So be it. He had made his decision. Feeling the demonic qi begin its resurgence through his veins like lava, he began.

  "Our death is not the true death," he murmured, forcing trembling fingers to trace symbols he still only half understood in the air. All he knew was that they felt right, and that he couldn't make a mistake now. He turned his attention inward, bringing his attention to the lazy circle they spun around his own heart, and drew them one by one in no particular order.

  He worked for some time, arm burning with strain for the first time in a hundred and five years. Each character lit up as he drew it and vanished from the same circle that had always glowed around his own heart, joining the others in the air.

  When the air was full of glowing lines of qi, all characters from different languages, some he knew of and many he didn't, the Sword Sovereign coughed up blood. He had shortened his time left until he had mere minutes left.

  He hoped it was worth it.

  "Death is not the end, but a beginning to live anew," he murmured, the words spilling from his lips.

  "A life is the most precious thing we own, and can never be bought with all the money in the world. A life is worth nothing, except in its spending..."

  One character with thick, looping lines that flowed like water spun forward as if carried on an invisible breeze, whirling until it began to run a tight circle around the boy's heart. It was joined by the others, first trickling into position and then faster and faster until an entire book's worth of characters was swirling deeper and deeper into a spiral that punched straight into the last bit of life the boy had.

  "Living a thousand lives may mean less than living one well. What is given, must be returned; what is taken can never be given back..."

  The poem that the Sword Sovereign had recited came to an end, and he contemplated the final words he was to speak before death took him.

  He looked at the boy, who was certainly unconscious from the transferral, if he hadn't been before, and thought for a moment.

  "Forgive us," he finally said, and tapped the boy on the chest. "We all try the best we can."

  Caught on the edge of life himself, the Sword Sovereign watched the boy's chest fall still. A final breath escaped his lips, and then he died. He would wind up, the Sword Sovereign hoped, back to a better time, able to prepare himself for what was coming. He had no idea if it would work the same for the boy as it had for him, and regretted not even knowing the name of this successor of his.

  He regretted a lot of things, but as the sunrise peaked and light shone blood-red through the gathered clouds, the Sword Sovereign felt his heart stop. He could restart it with a thought, if he had the intention, but he didn't. Only a few breaths remained, now. If nothing else, it did answer a question he had - what of the lives that he'd died in?

  It seemed they just continued without him.

  How horrible, he thought, and smiled. How delightful.

  As bright sunlight spilled across the bloodied battlefield like a silk curtain falling across a window, in the sun the Sword Sovereign saw the reward of a long, long life lived in the pursuit of others being able to find happiness. He saw brothers, sisters, parents, wives, children, friends.

  Ah, he thought, eyes trembling. I've finally arrived.

  And, with that final thought, the Seven Gods Sword Sovereign Du Jincang died. A moment later, his body crumbled into ashes, the weight of a hundred lives finally catching him up with him.

  Twenty-four hours earlier, a boy woke up.