As Lyra listened, flames of fury ignited behind her usually cool eyes. A chill surged from her body that made even the air recoil.
“Parasites!” she hissed, sweeping a lethal glare across the cowed crowd. “You poison the very air of this sect. You will not walk away today!”
Her sword rang free, silver light streaking like a meteor across midnight. She moved, one moment beside Jared, the next a phantom weaving through the guilty. Steel flashed, each strike deliberate, merciless, final.
Clive, Trevor, and the others found themselves pinned by an invisible pressure, limbs refusing to obey even the instinct to flee.
Heartbeats later, they lay sprawled and broken, blood blooming across the courtyard stones like dark flowers after rain.
Watching disciples stood frozen, too afraid even to breathe loud enough to be noticed.
Effortless and absolute, Jared thought, quietly impressed as Lyra sheathed her blade without a speck of red marring its edge.
He stepped forward when silence fell. “Lyra, how did the Sword Sect decay into this? When I left, we were battered but united.”
Shame washed over her features. She exhaled softly. “Jared, since Master entered closed-door cultivation, every burden has fallen on me alone.”
“At the beginning…” Lyra said, her voice low yet steady, “I could still hold the Sword Sect together. But as the months dragged on, duties multiplied like weeds. My strength—once enough, could no longer keep pace…”
“Those with darker ambitions crept in through every unattended gate. They formed cliques, traded favors, and stuffed our halls with smoke and noise until the very air tasted foul. I tried, again and again, to purge the sect, yet every time I raised the blade of discipline, a different faction seized my wrist. That is how things rotted into what you see today.”
“Lyra, blame yourself no more,” Jared replied, giving one decisive nod. “I’m back now. I swear I’ll lend you every ounce of my strength to set the Sword Sect upright.”
Relief and gratitude flickered in Lyra’s eyes like dawn breaking through storm clouds. “With you beside me,” she said, “I can steer our sect back onto its rightful course.”
The days that followed felt like tempered steel, unyielding, precise, and hot with purpose. Jared and Lyra governed the Sword Sect with iron-clad resolve.
They rewrote the rules from the ground up, nailing punishments and rewards into place so clearly that even the youngest recruit could recite them by heart. No rank, no pedigree, no buried favor could shield a lawbreaker now.
They tore apart the old entrance trials and built new ones in their place, fair, open, merciless, so that only true talent and grit could step beyond the gate.
Bullying, once a sick tradition, met a fresh watchdog. Jared and Lyra created a supervisory bureau and urged disciples to watch one another.
Report an abuser, and the hammer fell instantly. Veterans who tormented newcomers paid in celestial gems and days of isolation, or, when cruelty ran deep, expulsion without appeal.
Under that relentless pressure, foul airs thinned. Fresh disciples tasted fairness for the first time and trained like wildfire. Senior members, their swagger clipped, bent over their own cultivation in sober silence.
Yet Jared knew a hard truth, in a realm where the weak feed the soil of the strong, order alone was a paper shield. Power, personal, unshakable power, remained the only true law.
“After our night together,” Jared whispered to Lyra once their duties paused, “My real purpose in returning is to cultivate in silence. When my strength rises a little more, I’m aiming for level nine.”
Hearing this, Lyra’s breath caught.
“Level nine?” she echoed, stunned.
To any cultivator still trapped on level five, level nine was a summit of myth—so distant it might as well have lived beyond the stars.
“Your ambition never knew walls,” Lyra said at last. “Here on level five, our Sword Sect already stands unrivaled. Stay, train, and let nothing distract you.”
“Go to the back valley behind Swordmaster City,” she added. “I’ll assign guardians to keep watch while you meditate.”
Lyra understood too well, Jared belonged neither to level five nor to her. His path reached farther than her longing could follow.
