Chapter Eleven: The Cheater Sword
There is a thin line between genius and madness.
I have always believed that madness is simply a variety of genius that the mediocre haven't learned to recognize yet.
I have been sitting in this training courtyard for four hours.
The space is large and open — stone floors worn smooth by what must have been centuries of use, the walls of the castle rising on three sides, the strange permanent twilight of the Demon Prison overhead. I am cross-legged on the ground with an old sword across my knees, attempting to gather Qi around the blade until an aura manifests along its length.
Four hours.
Nothing.
Meditation is genuinely, profoundly difficult. I say this as someone who has done things that most people would consider impossible, and I mean it sincerely.
Something had been sitting at the back of my mind since the library. A question that surfaced when she revealed her aura during our first confrontation — that crushing, suffocating pressure that had silenced me before I could finish a thought.
I set the sword down.
"What color is your aura?"
She didn't answer with words.
She simply stood — and something shifted in the quality of her stillness, some internal gate opening — and the air around her moved. Not wind. Something denser than wind, something that hit the stone floor around her and radiated outward in a pressure wave that drove me clean off my position. The torches along the courtyard walls guttered simultaneously.
And around her — faint but unmistakable:
Blue.
Distinguished Realm, then, I thought. Blue Aura Manifestation.
I processed this carefully.
Level 60. Distinguished Realm.
My father is Level 40. He never mentioned his aura — and now I understood why. He doesn't have one. The first Aura Manifestation doesn't appear until somewhere above Level 50. Which means a cultivator remains in the Mortal Realm until at least that threshold.
Mortal Realm until Level 50. Distinguished from there. Master somewhere higher. Legendary above that.
And at Level 60, she sits at the lower bounds of Distinguished.
What does a Legendary black aura actually look like?
She was looking at me with an expression of considerable self-satisfaction. The kind of look that is technically not a smirk but is functionally identical to one. She said nothing — she had answered my question by demonstrating the answer, and clearly felt that was sufficient.
She's paying me back for what I did in the library.
I didn't particularly care. I had the information I needed. I stood, picked up the sword, and returned to my cultivation.
Which was still producing nothing.
Why won't the Qi gather around this sword?
I managed it with the dagger easily — and I was weaker then than I am now. The mechanics are identical. The intent is the same. The Qi responds when I call it, flows when I direct it, moves through my body the way it's supposed to move.
And then it reaches the sword.
And vanishes.
I could feel it draining — not gradually but constantly, a slow hemorrhage of internal energy that I hadn't noticed at first because my focus was on the blade. My Qi reserves were approaching empty. Only the Mana underneath was keeping me upright.
Something is wrong with this sword.
Her voice came — not spoken aloud, but in the particular way she communicated when she didn't want to be seen speaking:
(You still haven't managed to make the sword resonate with Qi. You're very weak.)
"It has nothing to do with weakness," I said, without turning. "Something is wrong with this sword. I cultivated Qi into a dagger when I was considerably less capable than I am now."
She looked at me with a face that had decided to communicate absolutely nothing and was executing that decision flawlessly.
Then:
(If you've figured that out — yes. Some people call that sword the Cheater Sword.)
"The Cheater Sword," I repeated. "What kind of name is that."
(That sword has been stealing Qi from Warriors for millions of years. It is a very wealthy cheater. So instead of giving to it — take from it first.)
I looked at the sword.
Then I started laughing.
Not because it was funny — though it was, in the way that things are funny when they're also deeply irritating — but because of the specific feeling of recognizing something I should have seen earlier.
"I understand. Hehehehe."
One hour remaining in the session. More than enough.
First: feel the Qi inside the sword.
I reached inward — past the surface of the blade, past the metal itself, into whatever the sword was holding — and found it immediately.
What in the name of—
The Qi stored inside this sword was not the modest reserve I expected from a weapon that had been draining me for a few hours. It was vast. Dense and compressed and ancient — layered deposits of stolen Qi accumulated over what the book had described as millions of years, packed into the blade like sediment at the bottom of something impossibly deep.
I pulled.
The world came apart.
Not literally — but the sensation was close enough that the distinction felt academic. The Qi flooded into me all at once, a torrent that my body was absolutely not designed to contain at that volume, and every nerve fired simultaneously. My vision went white. My hands locked around the hilt of their own accord. My entire frame began shaking with the particular violence of something structural failing under impossible load.
(Don't just take, you idiot — give as well. Control the Qi. Regulate it. Direct it both ways or it will tear your body apart.)
Her voice. Cutting through the white noise of overwhelming sensation like a blade through cloth.
Don't just take.
I pushed.
A thread of Qi back down into the blade — controlled, deliberate, a conscious release rather than a desperate attempt to stop the overflow. The torrent didn't stop but it changed. The directionality shifted. The energy began moving in both directions simultaneously — out of the sword and into me, out of me and back into the sword — a circuit instead of a flood, regulated by the narrow aperture of my control rather than the sword's bottomless appetite.
The shaking subsided.
The white behind my eyes faded.
Half an hour of continuous pain. Of holding that balance with every thread of concentration I possessed.
And then the Aura Manifestation appeared along the length of the blade — steady, clear, unmistakable.
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