The world of cultivation is simple.
Talent is everything.
Without it, you are nothing. Without it, you do not cultivate fast enough, do not break through in time, do not earn the respect of your seniors or the fear of your enemies.
Without talent, the sect that took you in will eventually look at you the way a farmer looks at a crop that refuses to grow.
They will uproot you.
Dao Ling understood this early.
Not as a child who cried about it. Not as a teenager who raged against it. But as a person who simply looked at the world, saw the truth of it, and accepted what was in front of him.
He had no talent.
He had always known.
---
"You lowly cockroach!"
The voice swept across the ruined land with its rage.
The sect was destroyed.
Debris and rubble lay everywhere. The sky was dark as the sun sank behind the mountains, and the rain fell cold against broken stone and splintered wood. What had once been a place of cultivation and order was now nothing but wreckage.
"How did you survive like a cockroach?"
Another voice. Filled with sarcasm.
In front of them stood a single figure.
He looked lonely.
He looked exhausted.
His black and white robe swayed in the wind, damaged beyond repair and completely soaked through. His deep, abyss-like black hair clung to his face and neck. His blue eyes — tired, carrying the faint weight of something that wasn't quite sadness but lived close to it — looked at every face surrounding him without flinching.
His gaze was expressionless.
Not the expressionless of someone who felt nothing.
The expressionless of someone who had already calculated everything, already accepted everything, and was simply waiting for what came next.
He was surrounded by enemies. Death wasn't calling anymore — it had already knocked on the door and was now standing inside the hall.
And yet Dao Ling remained calm.
And he smiled.
Not the type of smile that comforts you.
The type that chills you. The type that makes you grip your sword tighter without knowing why. Like the calm of a blade pressed against your skin before you've even felt the cut.
Then he raised his sword and pointed it at the sect leader.
"Dao Ling."
The sect leader's tone was powerful and commanding. The voice of a man who had given orders his entire life and had never once been refused.
"Did you really think you were something special? Like you were talented? Better than the rest of us?"
His eyes were cold.
"No. You were never anything. You were just talentless trash. Now hand over the Timeless Crystal."
Dao Ling looked at them all.
His expressionless gaze moved from face to face — disciples he had trained beside, elders who had ignored him, enemies who had underestimated him. Something in him shifted.
Not breaking. Not cracking.
Just a brief flicker. Like a candle in the wind that bends but does not go out.
His hands began to shake.
Not from fear. Dao Ling had lived too long with fear to still be frightened by it. His hands shook because his body was already dying, already running on something that wasn't strength anymore but sheer, stubborn refusal.
And even then — even with his hands trembling — the blade stayed pointed at the sect leader.
The world wants you to kneel, Dao Ling thought. It has always wanted that.
I never learned how.
---
One hour passed.
No one moved.
Everyone was on guard, watching for any shift, any sudden action, because they all knew — even if none of them said it — that this talentless man had already done what no one thought was possible.
He had destroyed a sect.
He had earned the right to be taken seriously, even now, even bleeding, even dying.
That was the irony of it all.
They only respected him now that he had nothing left.
Then Dao Ling lowered his blade.
And he chuckled.
It started small, quiet. Then it grew into something that didn't sound entirely sane — a wild grin spreading across his blood-stained lips as his blue eyes slowly turned bloodshot.
Everyone backed away.
The rain roared with thunder, and a flash of lightning split the sky, illuminating everything — the ruins, the disciples, the sect leader, and the lone figure standing in the middle of it all, laughing.
Then Dao Ling stopped.
He looked at everyone. And then his mouth began to move.
"The wind stirred across the vibrant landscapes," he said, his voice loud and clear despite the rain. "The days resembling tomorrows that would never arrive. The lush green mountains teemed with vitality, yet held a hidden chill within."
No one spoke.
"Even though I failed," he continued. "Even though I will die. Even though this might be the end — I still destroyed a sect."
"Is your ego acting up now?" The sect leader's voice was cold.
Dao Ling looked at him.
Really looked at him.
Not with hatred. Not with rage. But with the steady gaze of someone who had finally stopped pretending the world was something other than what it was.
Then he smiled.
A cursed smile.
"This so-called talentless person destroyed a sect."
His blue eyes gleamed with dark amusement.
"Don't you feel embarrassed? Pathetic? You had talent. You had disciples. You had resources and power and decades of cultivation. And you still failed to stop one talentless man."
He let that sit in the air between them.
"All of your pride is worthless. How did you even fail?"
The killing intent erupted from every direction.
Blades came out, all pointed at him. Every disciple gritted their teeth, consumed by hatred, by humiliation, by the unbearable shame of what he had just said.
Because it was true.
They all knew it was true.
And that made it worse.
CLANG!!!
The sect leader lunged. Fast. Precise. A blade aimed to end things quickly.
Dao Ling saw it. He blocked. He redirected.
In the exchange — brief and violent and over in a single breath — the sect leader's cheek was cut open, blood dripping onto the wet stone floor.
But Dao Ling paid a price too.
The redirect wasn't clean. A slash mark now crossed his chest, adding to a body that was already a map of wounds.
"Not bad for a talentless person." The sect leader's voice was cold as iron.
Dao Ling coughed blood.
His exhausted eyes could barely stay focused. He backed away — not fleeing, just creating distance, buying a few more seconds of standing upright. Then he laughed again, his voice trembling not from emotion but from the sheer physical effort of staying alive.
"Impressed?" he said. "Even your talented disciples couldn't manage what I just did."
The words were logical. Stated like facts.
But underneath them was something real — not gloating, not bitterness. Just the honest observation of a man who had spent his entire life being told he was nothing, and had quietly, patiently, stubbornly proven otherwise.
"Now hand over the Timeless Crystal." The sect leader's hand reached out. "And I will give you a quick death."
The two figures stood opposite each other across the ruined ground.
Different ideals. Different lives.
One man who had been given everything by the world. And one man the world had given nothing to.
Dao Ling's left hand entered his robe.
He pulled out the Timeless Crystal.
It was small. White. And inside it, clouds seemed to move — slow and endless, like something dreaming.
"You mean this?"
He looked at it for a moment.
Just a moment.
"You know, I was stupid back then," he said quietly. "I believed if I worked hard enough, if I was honest enough, if I never cheated and never lied and just kept swinging the sword — the world would eventually be fair."
He spat blood onto the stone floor.
"It wasn't."
"It never was."
"But now I'm not stupid." He looked up. "I'm mad. Not angry. Mad with madness. The kind that comes from understanding exactly how the world works and deciding you don't care."
His complexion was turning pale now.
Corpse-like.
The color of someone who had already crossed the threshold and was simply too stubborn to fall.
"This is the last time I will struggle in the face of deat—"
STAB!!!
He stopped mid-sentence.
Looked down.
A blade had pierced through his chest from behind. Clean and quiet, the way betrayal always is — you never hear it coming because you weren't listening in that direction.
He looked back.
A girl stood behind him, her blade still buried in his body.
"...Senior Xia Meng."
He said her name without accusation. Without hatred.
Just recognition.
He looked at her face and understood — she had made her calculation, the same way the world always made its calculations, and he had been found lacking.
That was fine.
He understood.
Dao Ling turned back and threw the Timeless Crystal onto the cold stone floor. The sect leader panicked and lunged forward. Dao Ling raised his blade to destroy it.
STAB!!!
The sect leader was fast enough to stab him through the front first.
Now Dao Ling had steel through both his front and his back.
Life was no longer slipping away.
It was running.
And yet he turned. And with what remained of him, slashed the sect leader's right arm clean off at the shoulder.
SLASH!!!
"Aaaargh!!! You bastard!"
The sect leader staggered back, missing his arm, his face twisted in pain and disbelief. Xia Meng retreated. The disciples retreated.
And Dao Ling was still standing.
He could feel the pain. He could feel everything fading — his vision, his warmth, his weight in the world. But he looked at all of them with something in his eyes that wasn't quite madness and wasn't quite peace.
Something in between.
The expression of a man who had finally stopped fighting the world and started fighting on his own terms.
Then he assumed a stance.
On the surface it looked ordinary — the basic stance for practicing slashes, the kind taught to children on their first day of sword training.
But something about it was wrong.
Wrong in a way that made every experienced cultivator in that courtyard instinctively step back. It had the same bones as a normal stance. The same foundation. But what Dao Ling had built on that foundation over years of solitary, thankless practice was something else entirely.
His body trembled.
He didn't falter.
"This so-called talentless person," he said quietly, "will cut everything."
It was his technique. His alone.
Born not from talent or insight or divine inheritance. But from repetition — ten thousand swings becoming a hundred thousand becoming a million, each one slightly better than the last, each one carved out of nothing but time and the refusal to stop.
His last slash.
Lightning struck from behind him.
For a moment his determined blue eyes seemed to glow — lit from within by something that had no name in the world of cultivation, because the world of cultivation had never thought to name it.
The disciples scattered.
The sect leader stood alone in the center. Pale. Bleeding. One-armed. Finally understanding what he was looking at.
"Untalented Slash."
Everything went quiet.
The rain stopped. The wind stopped.
For one impossible moment the world held its breath.
Dao Ling was the only thing moving.
And the sword swung down.
SLASH!!!
The rain returned.
The sect leader was cut in half. The mountain behind him cracked down the center. The shockwave threw every living person off their feet, scattered the falling rain sideways, and cracked the stone ground in a line that ran fifty meters in every direction.
The earth shook.
Debris rained down.
The mountain began to collapse onto the ruins below.
And Dao Ling was gone.
No body. No blood. No trace.
As if the world, having finally acknowledged him, had quietly erased the evidence.
The Timeless Crystal faded into nothing.
Xia Meng pulled herself upright and looked at her juniors, then at the mountain coming down above them.
"Evacuate. Now."
They ran.
As she left she looked back once — at the empty space where he had stood, at the split mountain, at the ruined sect that a talentless man had destroyed with nothing but a sword and thirty years of quiet, stubborn work.
"He was truly the Mad Demon Blade."
---
That was a hundred years ago.
History remembered it as a conflict between a demonic cultivator and a righteous sect. The righteous won, of course.
They always wrote the ending.
But even they could not bring themselves to erase what he had done, because some truths are too heavy to bury completely.
Thunder rolled across the land.
Rain fell gently over a lone, obscure village where wooden houses stood quietly in the dark. A boy woke up, gasping, sweat soaking through his gray robe.
He looked in the mirror.
Young. Unfamiliar. Different.
He touched his own face with hands that didn't feel like his yet. And behind his eyes — behind the confusion and the disorientation of a soul that had just traveled further than any soul should — was the memory of a million sword swings.
Then a shout erupted from outside the door.
"Dao Ling! You bastard, where's my money!"
The boy closed his eyes.
Then opened them again.
*Again*, he thought. *From the beginning.*
He almost smiled.
---
**End of Chapter 1.**