I Only Swept the Floor, So How Did I Become a Sword Saint?
I was born into a great clan that put the sword above everything else.
At three I could read a sword manual. By seven I had all thirty-six forms of the Shen family Sword Art by heart. At twelve, even a few of the family drillmasters were saying that if I ever grew a sword bone, I would be the sort of sword talent that comes along once in a hundred years.
I thought so too.
In my last life I had been nothing much — an ordinary man who liked reading wuxia novels.
Being born into a world of sword cultivators this time, not training with the sword would have felt like wasting the chance the heavens handed me.
Until the year I turned sixteen.
At the Trial Sword Stele I put my hand on the stone.
The patterns on it stayed dead.
The elder studied it for a long while. At the last he said four words.
“No bone. No meridian.”
No sword bone. No sword meridian to carry sword qi either.
Never mind sword flight into the sky. I couldn’t produce even the plainest thread of sword qi.
All the while my elder brother Shen Lingxiao, who had never liked a sword manual in his life and only cared about horses and cockfights, had no sooner touched the stele than sword ring filled the whole training ground.
Innate Sword Physique.
The white-browed elder of the Taiyi Sword Sect decided on the spot: he wanted the boy as a personal disciple.
Overnight.
I went from the “little sword seed” everyone in the Shen family praised to the biggest joke in the city.
Later, I left the Shen family.
To keep myself fed, I took a sweeping job at an old Sword Tomb at the foot of Luoxia Mountain.
I swept. Sixty years went by.
Sixty years later, at the Sword Debate of the realm, the Sword Ancestor asked me:
“Fellow Daoist, where is your sword?”
I glanced down at the bamboo broom in my hands, worn bald down one side.
It was a bit awkward.
“I don’t know the sword.”
“I’m only a sweeper.”
That day.
Every famous sword on the mountain lowered its head, on its own.
…
• • •
“Shen Yan, can you truly not feel the slightest bit of sword qi?”
In front of the Trial Sword Stele, the white-browed elder asked again.
I shut my eyes.
I tried hard to feel it.
Wind.
Birds.
And beside me, Shen Lingxiao’s laughter, which he could not quite hold back.
Of the sword qi they all spoke of, there was nothing.
I opened my eyes. Shook my head.
The hope in the white-browed elder’s face drained away.
“A pity.”
He said.
“Temperament, comprehension — both top grade. And yet born without the bone.”
“The Dao of the sword comes down to one thing: having something to hold it. Without a sword bone, even the finest comprehension is only a pavilion built on air.”
That said, he turned to look at Shen Lingxiao.
The smile came back onto his face at once.
Shen Lingxiao stood in a field of sword ring.
A boy in his pride, eyes and brows flying.
He glanced at me, then asked suddenly:
“Elder, my second brother memorized so many sword arts as a child. Are they truly worth nothing at all?”
The elder stroked his beard.
“Remembering a sword art and walking the sword path are two different things.”
“Every other craft under heaven can be made up for with work. Bone structure alone cannot be forced, not by half a measure.”
Low laughter went around the yard.
I didn’t feel particularly humiliated.
Just a little sorry.
Back in my last life, when I sat the college exam, I at least knew that working harder would get me a few more points.
This life was more straightforward.
They tell you they’re not even going to hand you an answer sheet.
Shen Lingxiao walked over to me.
He drew the spirit sword he had just been given.
The blade was like autumn water, bright enough to hurt the eyes.
“Second brother.”
“When we were small you always copied out the sword manuals for me. You said you would teach me the sword someday.”
He smiled.
“Looks like that isn’t going to happen.”
I studied the sword.
It was beautiful.
So I answered him honestly:
“That’s good. You can practice on your own from now on.”
The smile on his face stiffened.
He probably hadn’t expected me to skip even the angry part.
That night the Shen family threw a feast.
To celebrate the eldest son joining the sect — the Taiyi Sword Sect, no less.
I didn’t go.
Not out of spite.
Nobody called me.
The next day, the east compound changed owners.
The steward moved my books and clothes to the west service court, and left me one line:
“The eldest young master is entering an immortal sect. Since you cannot cultivate the sword, there are things you’ll have no use for.”
I watched them carry away the thirty-six volumes of sword manuals. I didn’t argue.
That night my father, Shen Yue, came once.
He stood outside the door.
He never stepped in.
“Yan’er.”
“Your brother entering the Taiyi Sword Sect is the chance of a century for the Shen family.”
“From now on the family’s resources will go to him, as they should.”
I nodded.
“They should.”
That seemed to make it worse for him.
He was quiet a long time before he said:
“If you’re willing, I can send you to study in the provincial capital.”
“You’re clever enough. A civil post someday, and the family name loses nothing.”
I asked:
“Father, if I can’t train with the sword, do I have to take some other road that other people find respectable?”
He froze.
Didn’t answer.
I didn’t ask again.
Before dawn the next day.
I shouldered a small bundle and walked out of the Shen family.
On my way out I took one thing.
A wooden sword.
My father had carved it for me himself when I was seven.
The blade had split long ago.
I took it not because I still wanted to train.
Only because it seemed to me
Sixteen years of living, and I couldn’t leave with nothing.
• • •
After leaving the Shen family I walked south for three months.
The day my travel money ran out, I reached Luoxia Mountain.
A small Sect stood on the mountain.
Called the Qingya Sword Sect.
Sounds grand.
It was poor enough to hurt.
The mountain gate leaned over to one side, and one corner of the characters “Qingya” on the welcoming stone had broken off.
I had meant to ask for a bowl of rice.
The old gatekeeper looked me up and down for a while, then asked:
“What can you do?”
I turned it over.
“Read.”
“Cook?”
“A little.”
“Split firewood?”
“That too.”
“Sweep?”
“That I can do.”
He nodded.
“Then stay.”
And so I became a menial of the Qingya Sword Sect.
Up at the mao hour every day, before dawn.
Sweep the mountain gate, sweep the stone steps, sweep the training ground.
Last of all, the Sword Tomb behind the mountain.
What lies buried in the Sword Tomb is the broken swords of generations of Qingya disciples.
Some rusted down to iron bars.
Some are only half a blade.
The old gatekeeper told me:
“Don’t go touching things in here.”
“Those swords especially.”
I nodded.
I had no interest in what was inside anyway.
On my first day sweeping the Sword Tomb, I found a problem.
Too many fallen leaves.
Autumn wind would blow, and the stone path I had just cleaned would be covered with another layer.
I got annoyed, and pushed the broom sideways.
Trying to move more leaves in one go.
There was a rush of sound, and the leaves three zhang away all parted to either side at once.
A strip of clean blue stone showed through the middle.
I stared. My eyes dropped to the broom.
Bamboo twigs, still bamboo twigs. No glow. No system prompt either.
I puzzled over it a long while and could only put it down to a strong wind that day.
From then on I found that sweeping was actually interesting.
Leaves are light or heavy. Dust is wet or dry.
Cobwebs in a corner need a trick of the wrist, or the bamboo snaps.
Slowly I learned to let the broom follow the wind.
Wind goes east, I go east.
Wind curls back, my wrist turns with it.
Sometimes a leaf wedges into a crack between stones.
I sweep three times and it won’t come out.
So I crouch there and work it over.
Which angle the force should come from.
Once I worked at it for a full half shichen.
One light flick at the last, and the leaf flew out.
At that same moment, in the deepest part of the Sword Tomb.
A broken sword buried for two hundred years hummed.
The sound was very faint.
I looked up and muttered:
“Wind again?”
• • •
I swept at the Qingya Sword Sect for five years.
From a boy to a young man.
The disciples in the Sect turned over, crop after crop.
They all knew my face.
Very few of them knew my name.
They only ever called me the sweeper.
I thought that was fine.
A name is for other people to call, after all.
That day a chubby boy was punished on the training ground.
His name was Zhou Xiaoman.
An Outer Sect disciple.
Three years at the sword, and he still couldn’t get the most basic thing right — the Green Peak Thirteen Forms.
The drillmaster lost his temper and sent him to sweep the mountain steps with me for seven days.
First day: two strokes of the broom, three sighs.
Second day: two strokes, three curses.
Third day, he simply sat down on the steps.
“Senior Brother Shen.”
He had asked my name at last.
“You sweep every day. Doesn’t it bore you?”
I told him:
“It does.”
“Then why keep sweeping?”
“Because not sweeping is dirtier.”
He thought it over.
Decided it made a lot of sense.
A while later he asked again:
“I train the sword every day. That bores me too.”
“Then stop training.”
His face went white.
“No! My parents sold two mu of land to send me up this mountain. If I don’t make something of myself, how do I ever go home?”
I watched him a while.
“Then what are you bored about?”
Zhou Xiaoman drew his sword and went through a couple of moves.
“The Thirteen Forms!”
“The drillmaster says my sword comes out slow, my turns are clumsy, my wrist is stiff, and my footwork is a mess.”
“I remember every single move.”
I said, offhand:
“Remembering isn’t knowing.”
He said:
“So what do I do?”
I held out the broom.
“Sweep this stretch clean first.”
Zhou Xiaoman looked at me as if I had grown a second head.
“I asked about the sword!”
“I don’t know the sword.”
“Then why are you making me sweep?”
“You can’t even stand steady. What’s the difference between a sword in your hand and a broom?”
He didn’t like it.
He took the broom anyway.
I had him sweep a thin line of dust along the edge of the steps.
Without touching the moss beside it.
First try.
The broom took off half a patch of moss.
Second try.
The dust didn’t move.
Third try.
He used too much force and snapped three bamboo twigs.
Zhou Xiaoman’s face went green.
I crouched to one side cracking melon seeds.
“Slower.”
“You’re not trying to beat the stone to death.”
After seven days.
He swept that line of dust off in one clean stroke, at last.
He stood there for a long time, stunned.
Then he drew his sword.
Green Peak Thirteen Forms, first form.
Thrust.
The point ran straight out.
Not a tremor in it.
Zhou Xiaoman couldn’t believe it himself.
“I… I can do it?”
I slapped off my seat and stood up.
“Looks like sweeping is good for something.”
That night.
Over a hundred broken swords in the Sword Tomb rang softly, all at once.
The next day the whole Sect was talking about it.
Saying the founding master had shown his power.
When I heard, I went and burned two extra sticks of incense.
I do live next to the Sword Tomb, after all.
Staying on good terms with the old ancestors can’t hurt.
• • •
After that business with Zhou Xiaoman.
More and more people came to find me about sweeping.
Outer Sect disciples at first.
Later, even an Inner Disciple came.
They said they were helping the Sect with the work.
In truth they would sweep twice and then ask me quietly:
“Senior Brother Shen, what’s wrong with my sword?”
I said:
“I don’t know.”
They didn’t believe me.
I really didn’t know.
I can’t produce sword qi.
I never learned the Qingya sword methods either.
All I could see was a few very simple things.
Someone’s shoulder too tight when the sword comes out.
Like a broom jammed in a corner: the harder you push, the less it moves.
Someone’s forms too showy.
I would ask him:
“Are you trying to sweep the leaves, or scare them to death?”
Someone chasing nothing but speed.
I told him:
“Dust in a stone crack. Go fast and you sweep it clean of nothing.”
As time went on.
The Sect picked up a strange saying.
“Can’t get the sword right? Go sweep behind the mountain for three months.”
And I picked up a nickname.
Brother Dust-Sweeper.
I was twenty-seven that year.
A guest came to the Sect.
Liu Chengfeng, true disciple of the Jinhong Sword Sect.
They said he had already reached the peak stage of the Sword Qi Realm, young as he was.
His Thirty-Six Layered Wave Sword had made his name in three provinces.
He came to the Qingya Sword Sect to compare swords.
From the mountain gate he fought his way to the Inner Sect.
Of seven core disciples, not one lasted ten moves in his hands.
When it was over he stood in the middle of the training ground.
Sword point resting on the ground.
And said with a smile:
“The Qingya Sword Sect. So this is all it amounts to.”
The Sect Lord’s face went dark.
But we had lost, and that was that.
Nobody could find anything to say.
On that day I was sweeping paulownia leaves outside the training ground.
Liu Chengfeng saw me.
A menial sweeping at a time like that must have looked offensive.
He frowned.
“Beat it.”
I stepped aside.
Kept sweeping.
A leaf was blown by the wind to his feet.
I swept it away without thinking.
His long sword suddenly went clang.
It flew out of his hand, three zhang.
And buried itself in the stone wall.
The whole field went quiet.
I went quiet too.
Liu Chengfeng looked at his empty hand.
Then at me.
“What did you do?”
I examined the leaf.
“Swept.”
His face darkened.
He pulled the sword out of the wall.
“Again!”
I thought he had probably misunderstood.
I was about to explain.
The wind sent another drift of leaves across the ground.
So I had to get on with the job first.
One sweep.
Liu Chengfeng’s sword went wide.
Two sweeps.
He gave two steps back.
Three sweeps.
The Thirty-Six Layered Wave Sword had not stacked to its sixth layer before he was out of the training ground entirely.
I stopped.
Not because I wanted to win.
He happened to be standing where I hadn’t finished sweeping.
Liu Chengfeng’s face went green, then white, then green again.
A long time later he sheathed the sword and gave me a fist salute.
“Your Excellency, what sword art was that?”
I glanced down at it.
“It really isn’t a sword art.”
“Then what is it called?”
I had to think about that.
“Sweeping, I suppose.”
The next day.
Liu Chengfeng hadn’t left.
He turned up behind the mountain with a new broom.
From then on, the jianghu had one more legend.
That a master was hidden somewhere on Qingya Mountain.
Who taught no sword.
Only sweeping.
• • •
I turned thirty-five.
Zhou Xiaoman went down the mountain.
He sought me out at the Sword Tomb before he left.
Over the years he had grown from that round little chubby boy into the steadiest of the Qingya Sword Sect’s younger generation.
The Sect Lord wanted to keep him as an Elder.
He refused.
“The demon raids in the Northern Frontier are getting worse.”
“I want to go hold the pass.”
Under an old pine I was sweeping needles.
I asked him:
“Thought it through?”
“Thought it through.”
“You could die.”
He laughed.
“Didn’t you used to say, Senior Brother, that when the ground is dirty somebody has to sweep it?”
My hand stopped.
I had nearly forgotten saying that.
He had carried it for more than ten years.
I went inside and brought out the wooden sword my father had carved for me when I was seven.
I had kept it with me all these years.
“For you.”
Zhou Xiaoman took it and touched the split in the blade carefully.
“Wood?”
“Give it back if you don’t want it.”
He hugged it at once.
“I want it!”
As he left, he grinned at me.
“Senior Brother, when I come back, let’s sweep the one thousand eight hundred stone steps from the gate to the Sword Tomb in one go.”
I answered:
“All right.”
He never came back.
Two years later.
Heishui Pass in the Northern Frontier fell.
The demon tide rolled three hundred li south.
The Imperial Court’s battle report gave it a few lines.
Qingya disciple Zhou Xiaoman, commanding three hundred soldiers in the rear guard, died at Heishui Bridge.
When the news reached me.
I was sweeping step nine hundred and forty-seven that day.
The broom stopped for a long time.
After that day.
I didn’t sweep for three days.
Dead leaves piled up on every step of Qingya Mountain.
On the morning of the fourth day.
A soldier with his left arm gone climbed up the mountain.
He brought Zhou Xiaoman’s last things.
That wooden sword.
Broken in two.
The soldier knelt in front of me.
“General Zhou held for three days.”
“On the third day, three sword cultivators of the Taiyi Sword Sect passed right over Heishui Pass.”
“We begged them to intervene.”
“They said… mortal warfare has nothing to do with cultivation.”
“Then the demon king came onto the bridge, and General Zhou blocked the bridgehead alone.”
“Before he died he told me to give this sword back to you.”
I took the wooden sword.
Said nothing.
The soldier handed over a letter, stained with blood.
One line on it.
“Senior Brother, Heishui Bridge is too dirty. I’ll get a step ahead on the sweeping.”
I sat with it a long while.
Then I folded it away.
Stood up.
That day, for the first time, I left Qingya Mountain to go looking for someone.
• • •
The Taiyi Sword Sect sits in Yun Province.
Its mountain gate stands three thousand zhang high.
Twelve floating sword platforms hang in the air.
More than ten thousand disciples beneath its banner.
It is the first of the five great sword sects under heaven.
When I arrived, a disciple-taking ceremony was underway before the mountain gate.
Several thousand boys knelt at the foot of the stone steps.
Heads tilted back, watching the immortals come and go by sword flight.
Broom in hand, I climbed the mountain one step at a time.
A disciple at the gate stopped me.
“Who are you?”
“Shen Yan, of the Qingya Sword Sect.”
“What do you want?”
I weighed it.
“To ask one question.”
He frowned.
“Ask whom?”
“The three who passed Heishui Pass that day.”
The gatekeeping disciple’s face changed.
He plainly knew about it.
Soon a green-robed elder descended in front of the mountain gate.
He gave the broom in my hand a single look.
“Heishui Pass is a mortal battlefield.”
“The disciples of my Taiyi Sword Sect bear the duty to slay demons and guard the Dao. We cannot entangle ourselves in cause and effect over one city.”
I asked:
“There were three thousand people on that bridge.”
“So what?”
“Are they not people?”
The green-robed elder’s brows drew down.
“Your Excellency, watch your words.”
“A cultivator seeks the Great Dao. Mortals live a hundred years to a generation, and life and death follow their own span.”
I nodded.
I understood.
And turned to walk down the mountain.
Everyone froze.
The elder had not expected me to be so easily sent away.
He gave a thin, cold laugh.
“Since you know the gap between us, do not court your own humiliation.”
I had gone two steps
when I saw a layer of dust settled on the stone steps.
The ceremony had kept everyone too busy. No one had swept.
I could not stop myself.
I gave in and swept once.
Boom.
Before the mountain gate of the Taiyi Sword Sect, the Foremost Sword Under Heaven stele, which had stood there eight hundred years, split down the middle.
Every sword on the mountain rang.
His face changed utterly.
“You!”
I was startled too.
Was the stone in this place really so poor?
He thrust a sword at me.
The sword qi cut across a full hundred zhang.
Without thinking, I swept the dust aside.
The sword qi went with the dust, off to one side.
And shaved half the cliff face flat.
Before the gate, silence like death.
The green-robed elder stood frozen where he was.
I eyed my broom.
Then at him.
And suddenly remembered the question Liu Chengfeng had asked me, years ago.
Perhaps… I really did know something.
But I had not come here for a Sword Debate.
I raised my head and looked to the highest point of the Taiyi Sword Sect.
“Those three.”
“Come out.”
My voice was not loud.
But it ran up along the twelve floating sword platforms, right to the summit.
A short while later.
Three figures came by sword flight.
One of them, impatient:
“A trifle like Heishui Pass, and you force your way into our Sect over it?”
I put it to him:
“One sword from any of you, and Zhou Xiaoman need not have died. Yes?”
He frowned.
“A mortal soldier. Dead is dead.”
I nodded.
“Fine.”
Then I swept, three times.
The first.
All three of their swords broke at once.
The second.
On all three, the sword qi scattered.
The third.
The twelve floating sword platforms sank slowly out of the sky and back to the ground.
They did not crash.
As if someone had set them down gently.
Over ten thousand sword cultivators in the Taiyi Sword Sect, and not one dared move.
I took in the three of them.
“I will not kill you.”
“Zhou Xiaoman held that bridge so people would live.”
“If I killed men because he died, he would say I had swept all those years for nothing.”
“But from this day on, the three of you go down the mountain.”
“Go to Heishui Pass.”
“Rebuild that bridge.”
“When the people of that place are willing to cross the bridge again, you may come back.”
The three of them went deathly pale.
No one spoke against it.
As I turned to go,
I saw the cracked Foremost Sword Under Heaven stele.
I mulled it over.
And used the broom handle to write a line in the dust beside it.
If a sword only contends for high and low,
what use is drawing it out?
I finished, and I left.
I heard something later.
That the Taiyi Sword Sect carved that line into the first of its Sect Precepts.
True or not, I could not say.
I only know that when I got back to Qingya Mountain,
the pile of leaves on the nine hundred and forty-seventh step was still there.
I swept for a long time
before it was clean.
• • •
I was forty-two when
someone came from the Shen family.
The one who came was not my father.
It was the old housekeeper.
Ten years and more since I had seen him, and his back was bent.
He stared at my face for a long while.
The first thing he said was:
“Second Young Master, how have you not aged at all?”
I touched my face.
“Maybe the mountain has good feng shui.”
Truth be told, I found it strange too.
All these years, not only had I not aged,
not one hair had gone white.
Stranger still.
When I swept, I would sometimes hear sword ring from very far away.
Sometimes from beyond the mountain.
Sometimes as if from beneath the earth.
I never did work it out.
The old housekeeper had come to ask me back to the Shen family.
He said my father was ill.
The Shen family had not had an easy time of it either.
After Shen Lingxiao entered the Taiyi Sword Sect, he still came home the first few years.
Later his realm climbed higher, his mortal ties grew thinner.
In ten years he might not return once.
None of the other sons could hold the house up.
The family had long lost its old splendor.
He said:
“The master kept speaking of you before he fell ill.”
I was quiet for a while.
I went back all the same.
The city was still that city.
But the Shen house was much smaller.
The two eastern compounds had been sold.
One of the stone lions at the gate was gone.
When I went into my father’s room,
he was asleep.
Far older than in my memory.
His temples entirely white, the backs of his hands worn to skin over bone.
Beside the bed lay those thirty-six old sword manuals.
The very ones the steward had carried out of my room years ago.
Not one missing.
When my father woke, he looked at me for a long time.
But the first thing he said was:
“Your brother has entered the Sword King Realm.”
I smiled.
“That’s good.”
His lips moved.
As if he had a great deal to say.
There was only one thing he asked:
“All these years, did you ever hate me?”
I gave it proper thought.
“A little, when I was young.”
“And after that?”
“After that I swept every day. Too busy to remember.”
My father was stunned.
Then he laughed.
And laughed until he was coughing again.
We spoke of no great truths that day.
Only of very old things.
How at seven I first took up a wooden sword and hacked every lily in the courtyard tub to pieces.
How Shen Lingxiao was afraid of thunder as a boy and would run to my room to sleep.
How our mother, while she was still with us, loved making osmanthus cake.
The next morning,
my father did not wake.
Gathering his things, I found an unfinished letter under his pillow.
Half a sentence, no more.
“Yan’er, your father never thought you unfit for the sword. He only feared others would laugh at a son of the Shen family…”
And nothing after that.
The letter stayed in my hands a long while.
Then I folded the letter away.
On the day of the burial, Shen Lingxiao did not come back.
Word came from the Taiyi Sword Sect that he was in Death Seclusion, striking at the Sword Emperor realm.
I never blamed him.
Every man has his own road.
After the funeral scattered,
I stayed alone by the grave.
I took out my broom
and swept the earth from the headstone, a little at a time.
At the end of it,
I understood something all at once.
Some dust settles on a person.
Sweep it off, and that’s that.
Some dust settles in the heart.
Sweep a lifetime, and it may still not come clean.
Just then,
the Ancestral Sword enshrined three hundred years in the Shen family ancestral hall drew three inches from its scabbard, untouched by any hand.
And slid gently back.
I did not see it.
• • •
After I turned fifty,
I left Qingya Mountain.
It wasn’t that I wanted to stop sweeping.
But because one thing troubled me more and more.
Why did I not age?
Why could I knock sword qi aside with a broom?
And why, at every sword-forging place I came to, did the swords always start humming?
I decided to go out and find the answer.
Before I left, the Sect Lord would not let go of me.
The Sect Lord was past ninety.
His beard white as snow.
“Junior Brother.”
“Once you are gone, who will sweep the back mountain?”
I told him:
“There are so many disciples.”
He was stricken to the heart.
“None of them sweep as clean as you!”
I took that as the highest praise my sixty-year career had ever earned.
I went down the mountain well satisfied.
I walked across snow plains and sea islands, past forge fires and old battlefields.
I met men who spent a lifetime on a single sword. Others I met killed their own fellows for the four words Foremost Under Heaven.
The longer I went, the more I felt that a sword, like a broom, is only a tool.
High or low lies not in the thing, but in the hand that holds it.
I was sixty, and
in Huang Province I met a mute boy.
They called the boy Chen Mo.
It had not always been his name.
The town took him for a boy who could not speak, and so they called him that.
He was a blacksmith’s son.
After his father died, he worked as a drudge in a sword shop.
The day I passed the shop,
I happened to see the shopkeeper beating him with a rattan cane.
Because he had ground the edge off a fine blacksteel sword.
The shopkeeper swore:
“A sword that isn’t sharp. Is that a sword at all!”
Chen Mo could not speak.
He only held that sword tight against his chest.
I took a look.
The sword truly had no edge.
But it sat in the hand very steady.
The balance, the length, the curve, all of it good.
I asked:
“On purpose?”
He nodded.
I asked again:
“Why?”
He crouched down and wrote in the dirt with his finger.
“My father said the best sword in the world is not the one best at killing.”
That amused me.
“So what kind of sword do you want to make?”
He kept writing.
“One that doesn’t kill.”
The shopkeeper doubled over laughing.
“A sword that doesn’t kill? Isn’t that just a poker for the fire?”
I laughed too.
Though not at Chen Mo.
I asked:
“Want to learn to sweep?”
Chen Mo looked up, blank.
I answered:
“I can’t forge swords.”
“But I have swept for a great many years.”
“Perhaps there is a thing or two I can teach you.”
He watched me for a long while.
Then he nodded.
Chen Mo followed me for twelve years.
Together we crossed deserts, snow mountains, old battlefields.
Others practiced the sword. He watched swords.
I swept. He listened to the sound.
Twelve years later he had not become a swordsman.
He had become one of the most famous swordsmiths under heaven.
Every sword he made had one thing in common.
He never chased the thinnest edge or the keenest point.
Many of them looked clumsy at first glance.
But held in the hand, they were steady as a mountain.
The day he left me, he wrote a line on the ground.
“Master, I want to forge for the world a sword that never has to be drawn.”
I couldn’t make sense of it.
But it sounded impressive.
So I gave him a thumbs up.
• • •
At seventy-six,
sword cultivators all over the world were hurrying to one place.
Tianmen Peak.
Because the Sword Ancestor Pei Wentian, two hundred years in closed-door cultivation, was about to leave seclusion.
They say that in his youth Pei Wentian, one man and one sword, pressed the sword cultivators of the Five Continents until they could not lift their heads.
Then in his later years he suddenly sealed his sword away.
Before entering seclusion he left behind four words.
“The sword path has dust.”
No one knew what they meant.
Two hundred years later, he sent word out.
He would hold a last Sword Debate at Tianmen Peak.
And choose one among the younger generation under heaven to inherit his Supreme Sword Seal.
I had not meant to join the crowd.
Until Chen Mo sent a man to me with a letter.
The letter said:
“Master, you have always wanted to know why you do not age. The Sword Ancestor may know.”
I went along too.
Below Tianmen Peak, a sea of people.
Sword cultivators packed in like a market day.
With my broom on my back, I was stopped three times going in.
“Menials use the back gate.”
I explained:
“I’m not a menial here.”
The man grew more impatient.
“Then why bring a broom?”
“Habit.”
I squeezed my way up to the middle of the mountain with some difficulty.
And there I saw someone I knew.
Shen Lingxiao.
Sixty years since I had last seen him.
He still looked young.
Handsomer, even, than he had been then.
All in white, the famous sword Jinghong on his back.
Standing at the very front of the crowd.
Ringed by elders from countless great sects.
Someone said, low:
“Is that Shen, the Sword Emperor of the Taiyi Sword Sect?”
“They say he entered the Sword King Realm at forty-nine and broke through to Sword Emperor at sixty. Of the younger generation under heaven, none can stand against him.”
“Younger generation? The man has cultivated for nearly eighty years.”
“A sword cultivator’s lifespan is three hundred. What is eighty?”
“This inheritance from the Sword Ancestor will most likely be his.”
I was rather pleased to hear it.
He was my brother, after all.
Better he do well than badly.
Just then Shen Lingxiao saw me too.
He froze.
Then his brows slowly drew together.
Sixty years gone,
and both our faces were still much as they had been at sixteen.
He came over.
Stared at me for a long while.
“Shen Yan?”
I nodded.
“Brother.”
The moment that word was out,
the whole place went considerably quieter.
Shen Lingxiao’s eyes were complicated.
“You’re still alive?”
I said:
“For now.”
His gaze dropped to the broom on my back.
“All these years, this is what you relied on?”
“More or less.”
He was silent.
After a long while, he said quietly:
“The year our father was buried, I knew.”
“Mm.”
“I was one step from breaking through.”
“Mm.”
“Do you blame me?”
I shook my head.
“No.”
He seemed to let out a breath.
And seemed the more pained for it.
A disciple of the Taiyi Sword Sect came over.
And said respectfully:
“Honored Master, the sword gate is about to open.”
Shen Lingxiao nodded.
Before he left, he said to me:
“When the Sword Debate is done, I’ll take you back to the Taiyi Sword Sect.”
“You cannot cultivate the sword, but with my standing, keeping you in comfort all your life is no hard thing.”
I wanted to say there was no need.
He had already turned away.
I watched his back.
And thought, suddenly:
Sixty years gone,
and he seemed still the Shen Lingxiao he had always been.
Only his sword was faster.
• • •
The wu hour.
Tianmen Peak opened.
Not the mountain gate opening.
The whole mountain split down the middle, opening a straight flight of stone steps.
The steps ran straight up into a sea of cloud.
Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of them.
At the top, a black sword platform.
An aged voice came out of the cloud.
“Come up.”
Every sword cultivator moved at once.
Sword light lit half the sky in an instant.
The first ones onto the steps changed color at once.
Their swords would not come out of the scabbards.
Some forced their sword qi.
And were driven straight down to their knees.
Soon an older sword cultivator saw what this was.
“This is the Sword Ancestor’s Heart-Questioning Stair!”
“The higher you go, the heavier the sword pressure.”
“With too many stray thoughts in your heart, never mind the summit, a hundred steps will break you!”
For a time,
everyone began to climb on foot.
Some turned back at ten steps.
Some spat blood at a hundred.
Very few got past a thousand.
Fastest of them was Shen Lingxiao.
A figure in white, he reached three thousand steps in no time.
Four thousand.
Five thousand.
Cries of wonder rose from the foot of the mountain.
“Worthy of Sword Emperor Shen!”
“The Sword Ancestor’s heir today can only be him!”
I stood at the very bottom.
And did not move.
Not from fear.
I had seen that the steps were covered in muddy footprints.
Tens of thousands of people had trodden over them.
Filthy past bearing.
I held out a long time.
At last I took down my broom.
And began sweeping from the first step.
The people beside me stared.
“What are you doing?”
“Sweeping.”
“This is the Sword Ancestor’s Heart-Questioning Stair!”
“I know.”
“You’re not climbing?”
“I’ll sweep as I climb.”
I said it, and I swept one step.
The mud on the step scattered.
And a terrible weight of sword pressure scattered with it.
I swept another step.
It scattered again.
The sword cultivator who had been pressed to his knees nearby found, suddenly, that he could stand.
He looked at me, dazed.
I ignored him.
And went on up.
One step.
Ten steps.
A hundred.
Where the broom had passed, everything was clean.
The sword intent that had bowed the heads of countless sword cultivators was swept aside like dust, a little at a time.
Along the whole Heart-Questioning Stair, the ringing of swords began.
At first one ring, then two.
Then a hundred.
A thousand.
By then the whole of Tianmen Peak was ringing.
The swords on the backs of countless sword cultivators slid an inch from their scabbards of their own accord.
Not to strike an enemy.
More like a bow.
Someone below said, voice trembling:
“Ten thousand swords… bowing their heads?”
It never reached me.
I had reached the three thousandth step.
There stood Shen Lingxiao.
His face was somewhat pale.
Sweat at his temples.
He saw me sweeping up from below.
And for the first time his eyes truly changed.
“How did you get up here?”
I held up the broom.
“Swept my way up.”
His eyes went to the clean stair behind me.
Then at the swords along that road, each with its head bowed.
His lips moved.
“Impossible.”
I kept walking.
I passed by him.
“Brother, move aside a moment.”
“There’s mud where you’re standing.”
Shen Lingxiao stepped aside without thinking.
I swept the mud away.
And went on up.
Four thousand steps.
Five thousand.
Six thousand.
Past seven thousand there was no one else.
Only me.
The wind was strong.
The steps were older too.
In many places the dust had piled up thick.
I swept all the more carefully for it.
At eight thousand,
the cloud split open.
A sword shadow too huge to see the end of hung down out of the sky.
Its point level with the space between my brows.
The aged voice came again.
“Brat.”
“There is no sword in your heart. Why climb my stair?”
I looked up.
“Someone said you might know why I do not age.”
Silence in the cloud.
“That is all?”
“There is something else.”
I pointed at my feet.
“No one has swept your steps for far too long.”
Above and below,
everyone heard it.
Silence like death.
And then.
From deep in the sea of cloud came a great laugh.
The laugh shook ten thousand swords into ringing together.
“No one has swept it for far too long! Good!”
“Then sweep it to the top for this old man!”
The huge sword shadow above pressed down all at once.
Every face went white.
Shen Lingxiao cried out:
“The might of the Ancestral Sword!”
But all I felt was:
the wind grew stronger,
and the dust thicker.
I gripped my broom.
From left to right,
one light sweep.
The sword shadow scattered.
Like a layer of mist parted by a morning breeze.
Across the Nine Provinces,
every sword resting on a sword rack trembled once, all together.
A swordsmith dropped his hammer.
An old sword immortal in closed-door cultivation opened his eyes abruptly.
The wooden sword in a child’s hand rang with no wind at all.
And I simply went on sweeping.
Nine thousand.
Nine thousand five hundred.
Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine.
The last stroke.
The broom passed over the black sword platform.
And the thick dust fell away down the cliff.
An old man in a grey robe was sitting there.
His hair a tangle like a hen’s nest.
Across his knees lay a rusted iron sword.
He looked down at the sword platform, clean at last.
And let out a long breath.
“Two hundred years.”
“Someone has swept this place clean at last.”
I asked:
“You are Pei Wentian?”
The old man nodded.
“The world calls me Sword Ancestor.”
“Then do you know why I do not age?”
He did not answer.
He asked me instead:
“Do you truly not know what you have been doing?”
My answer:
“Sweeping.”
He simply looked at me for a long while.
Then he raised a hand
and drew the rusted sword across his knees.
Only an inch of it.
Heaven and earth changed color in an instant.
The cloud sea of the nine heavens was cut in two.
Below, tens of thousands of sword cultivators grunted as one.
Only in front of me,
a single leaf fell.
I swung the broom without thinking.
The leaf flew off.
And the old man’s inch of sword would come no further out.
He gazed at his own sword.
Then at my broom.
A long while passed.
He let go.
The rusted sword clanged onto the ground.
And then.
This man, who had weighed down the sword path under heaven for two hundred years, stood up
and bowed to me, properly and in earnest.
The mountain below erupted.
“Who is the Sword Ancestor bowing to?”
“Who is that sweeper, anyway!”
“He doesn’t even have a sword!”
He heard them.
He turned to face the whole of Tianmen Peak.
His voice carried across the sea of cloud.
“Who says a man with no sword is no sword?”
“This old man learned the sword as a boy, and learned first to be sharp. In middle age he sought to be unbeatable. In his later years he sealed the sword away for two hundred years, because there was one thing he could never work out.”
“And when the sword path comes to its end, what is left?”
He looked back at me.
“Today this old man understands.”
“The sword path is not addition.”
“It is subtraction.”
“Subtract the forms. Subtract winning and losing. Subtract fame and profit. Subtract the ten thousand stray thoughts in the heart.”
“Until at last only one thing is left, the thing most worth doing.”
I listened, somewhat stunned.
But the old man laughed.
“You have swept for sixty years.”
“Fallen leaves are dust. Broken swords are dust. Fame and profit are dust. Life and death are dust as well.”
“When others practice the sword, they add things to themselves.”
“You, day after day, have swept out everything that should not be there.”
“You have no sword bone.”
“Because your whole self has no need left to carry a sword.”
“Where you stand is a Sword Domain.”
“Where your thought reaches, all things can be a sword.”
My eyes fell to the broom in my hands.
And asked at last:
“So all these years… I have been practicing the sword?”
Pei Wentian laughed until his beard shook.
“If you say you have not,”
“then all these sword-bearing folk under heaven have even less right to say they have.”
When his voice fell,
below Tianmen Peak,
tens of thousands of swords left their scabbards at once.
Not shooting into the sky.
But point down.
Driven into the earth together.
Like ten thousand men bowing their heads.
Above the sea of cloud, an ancient sword stele no one had ever seen slowly took shape.
On the stele there had been only three names.
Pei Wentian.
Gongsun Zhishui.
Lu Wuya.
All of them acknowledged sword saints of the last thousand years.
The next moment,
a fourth name appeared, stroke by stroke.
Shen Yan.
Someone below knelt.
Someone shouted like a madman:
“A name on the Sword Stele!”
“The fourth Sword Saint!”
“The Sword Saint of this age!”
I was standing at the summit of the peak.
My scalp tingled to hear it.
I waved my hands at once.
“Stop.”
“Really, stop.”
“I only swept the floor.”
Pei Wentian nearly fell off the sword platform, laughing.
• • •
Halfway up the mountain.
At the three thousandth step, Shen Lingxiao still stood.
Head tilted back, looking at the name in the sea of cloud.
Not moving at all.
Not one of the Taiyi Sword Sect disciples around him dared speak.
Plenty of them did not know who Shen Yan was.
But all of them had heard Sword Emperor Shen call that man Second Brother.
Shen Lingxiao did not explain.
He had simply thought, suddenly, of many years ago.
Before the Shen family’s Trial Sword Stele.
The white-browed one had said:
“No sword bone, and the keenest comprehension is still only a pavilion built on air.”
That day,
he had stood amid the ringing of swords, with every eye upon him.
And Shen Yan had stood in a dead silence.
Sixty years on,
he had a sword bone.
He had a sword meridian.
He had the realms of Sword King and Sword Emperor.
And at three thousand steps he could not climb one further.
Shen Yan had nothing at all.
Only a broom in his hands.
And with it he had swept the Sword Ancestor’s Heart-Questioning Stair to the top, one step at a time.
Shen Lingxiao laughed, suddenly, once.
Not madness.
Not unwillingness either.
More like seeing clearly at last a thing that had trapped him his whole life.
His eyes dropped to Jinghong in his hands.
The seventh-ranked famous sword under heaven.
He had loved it for sixty years.
And now, for the first time, it felt heavy.
So he laid the sword on the stone steps
and sat down.
Then reached out to wipe the small patch of mud in front of him.
The disciple beside him was horrified.
“Honored Master, what are you…”
Shen Lingxiao said:
“Sweeping.”
The disciple froze.
Shen Lingxiao raised his head
and looked at the clean stone steps running right up to the summit.
He smiled, very faintly.
“My brother swept for sixty years.”
“Today is my first day learning.”
…
After the Sword Debate at Tianmen Peak,
the world suddenly filled with people carrying brooms.
Sword sects had disciples sweep the mountain gate.
Sword schools had apprentices sweep the courtyard.
Even the Taiyi Sword Sect abolished the rule that menials alone swept the training ground.
Every disciple swept their own ground.
Hearing it, I could only sigh.
They had misunderstood, again.
There is nothing miraculous about sweeping.
At least, I have never thought so.
Pei Wentian asked me where I would go next.
I considered.
“Back to Qingya Mountain.”
“To do what?”
“The back mountain hasn’t been properly swept in sixty-odd years.”
He was silent for a while.
“May I come and see?”
“As you like.”
And so, three months later,
the old disciple who kept the gate at the Qingya Sword Sect saw with his own eyes the legendary Sword Ancestor, a rusted sword on his back, following me up the mountain.
Our Sect Lord fainted on the spot.
What he said first, on waking, was:
“Is the back mountain swept clean?”
Nobody dared answer.
I went to look for myself.
As I thought.
Leaves carpeting the ground.
I sighed,
picked up my broom.
I had swept twice
when Pei Wentian took one up too.
His movements were clumsy.
His first stroke tore away a patch of moss.
I frowned.
“Gently.”
The man who was Sword Ancestor of the world nodded at once.
“Yes.”
A group of elders nearby nearly lost their eyes watching.
I paid them no mind.
That evening,
two people swept from the sect gate to the Sword Tomb.
One was the Sword Ancestor.
One was the Sword Saint.
Neither used a sword.
• • •
Many more years passed.
I learned later that a Sword Saint does not truly have longevity. He only lives longer.
That put my mind at rest.
Later Pei Wentian went first.
Before he went, he left me that rusted sword.
I refused it.
He said:
“The foremost sword under heaven.”
I told him:
“It takes up space.”
So we buried it in the Sword Tomb,
alongside the broken swords of Qingya.
Later still.
Chen Mo grew old too.
In his life he forged three hundred and seventy-two swords.
The last one had no edge.
He named it Zhige.
A general of the frontier hung that sword on the city tower.
It was not drawn for decades.
An envoy of the enemy state saw the name on it and withdrew his army thirty li.
Some say it was the sharpest sword under heaven.
I laughed for a long time when I heard that.
Zhou Xiaoman’s Heishui Bridge was rebuilt as well.
A stele stands at the head of the bridge.
It does not record how many demons he killed.
It says only:
“Beyond this bridge, three thousand people lived.”
I went there once.
Sat by the bridge until dark.
Leaving, I swept the fallen leaves in front of the stele.
As for Shen Lingxiao,
he never went back to the Taiyi Sword Sect as Sect Lord.
He gave up the name of Sword Emperor and wandered instead.
One year he came to Qingya Mountain to find me.
Jinghong still on his back.
But a broom in his hands.
He swept with me for an afternoon.
As he was leaving, he asked:
“Second Brother.”
“When you left the Shen family all those years ago, did you hate me?”
I answered:
“A little.”
“And now?”
I eyed the patch he had just swept.
Every bit of the dust pushed into the corner.
I frowned at once.
“More now.”
“You call that sweeping?”
For two seconds Shen Lingxiao was blank.
Then laughed until he crouched on the ground and could not get up.
I laughed too.
And as we laughed,
I suddenly felt that the afternoon before the Trial Sword Stele, sixty years ago, was as distant as another life.
If I had had a sword bone back then, I might have entered the Taiyi Sword Sect, closed-door cultivation, contending for victory, climbing higher and higher.
There would have been nothing wrong with that.
Only I would probably never have met Zhou Xiaoman or Chen Mo.
Nor learned that some roads in this world need not be walked over other people.
Sweep the small patch beneath your feet clean, and the road appears on its own.
Side Story
Many years later,
the Qingya Sword Sect became the foremost sword sect under heaven.
Strangely,
the Sect had no strongest Sword Art.
Nor was it known for the number of famous swords it held.
It had only one very odd entry in its Sect Rules.
In their first year joining the sect, new disciples were not allowed to learn the sword.
They swept first.
Three hundred steps at the mountain gate.
Twelve mu of training ground.
The long road to the Sword Tomb on the back mountain.
Only after sweeping all of it did they earn the right to their first wooden sword.
Many geniuses resented this.
They thought it a waste of time.
One day a boy from a great clan of the sword path threw his broom to the ground.
“I have an innate sword bone!”
“My father spent thirty thousand spirit stones to send me here, not to work as a menial!”
The old steward in charge of the newcomers was not angry.
He only asked:
“Do you know what our founding ancestor used to do?”
All pride, that boy.
“Of course I know.”
“The fourth Sword Saint of this age, Ancestor Shen. One thought and ten thousand swords bowed. A broom broke the Ancestral Sword!”
The old steward nodded.
“And before he became a saint?”
The boy got stuck.
The old steward pointed at the broom at his feet.
“He swept.”
Laughter all around.
The boy’s face went red.
He bent down and picked the broom up after all.
Afternoon.
The Sword Tomb on the back mountain was quiet.
A young man in green was asleep against an old pine.
Beside him lay a bamboo broom worn by many years of use.
The boy swept his way there and muttered:
“If you ask me, how could sweeping make a Sword Saint?”
“Later generations must have made it up.”
The man under the tree opened his eyes.
And asked, smiling:
“You think so too?”
The boy jumped.
“Who are you?”
The man in green thought about it.
He lifted the broom.
“Me?”
“A sweeper.”
Wind blew across the Sword Tomb.
Broken swords all over the mountain.
The swords rang once, softly.
(The End)