The rain tasted like copper. Like betrayal.
Kai knelt in the mud of the execution yard, wrists locked in spirit-binding chains that burned colder than winter steel. Around him lay twenty-three bodies, arranged in a broken circle—small, thin, familiar. The youngest had been eight. The oldest, fifteen. All wore the same gray rags he did. All had once shared the same moldy blankets on orphanage nights. Now they shared the same death.
The Black Fang Guild's torches hissed in the downpour, throwing red light across the scene like fresh blood. Above the walls, the sky bled too. The Crimson Eclipse had begun an hour ago, turning the sun into a swollen wound that refused to set. The air itself felt heavy, as if the world was holding its breath… before screaming.
Guildmaster Gorran waddled forward, belly swaying beneath silk robes too fine for a man who made his coin selling children. His saber dripped. He wiped it carelessly on the hair of a dead girl Kai had once carried on his back when she broke her ankle.
"Any last words, little ghost?" Gorran grinned, yellow teeth flashing.
Kai lifted his head. Rain slid down the scar splitting his left cheek—a gift from his first contract kill at age nine. His voice was hoarse from disuse.
"Yeah," he said. "Tell the buyer the merchandise is defective."
Gorran barked a laugh. "Defective goods still bleed the same."
He raised the saber.
The eclipse reached its apex.
Time fractured.
The dying sun screamed—a sound no human throat could make—shattering clouds, bone, soul alike. The spirit-binding chains flared white-hot, then shattered like frozen glass. Every torch snuffed out simultaneously.
[SFX: "CRACK—FLASH—SILENCE"]
Darkness swallowed the yard.
Gorran's saber froze a finger's width from Kai's neck.
Something vast and ancient uncoiled from the abyss beneath the execution ground. It had no shape. Only hunger. It poured into the half-second wound the blade would have made, flooding Kai's veins with liquid night.
When the torches relit a heartbeat later, Gorran was still screaming—but his right arm ended in a cauterized stump. The severed limb lay twitching in the mud, still clutching the saber.
Kai rose slowly. In his right hand was a sword that had never existed a moment ago.
It was not metal.
It was not shadow.
It was the place where light went to die.
The blade drank the red eclipse glow, drank the torchlight, drank the rain. Along its edge crawled letters in a language that hurt to perceive. They spelled a name Kai had never been told he owned.
The sword spoke—with his own voice, older. Hungrier.
Hello, vessel. I've waited a thousand years for someone angry enough to wield me.
Kai looked at the twenty-three small bodies. Then at the guild compound beyond the wall, where the men who sold them slept behind wards and guards. He tightened his grip. The shadow blade bled darkness between his fingers like ink.
"Waiting, huh?" he whispered.
The eclipse sun pulsed once, as if in agreement.
"Then let's not keep death waiting any longer."
He stepped over Gorran's whimpering body without looking down.
The first guard on the wall never raised the alarm. The blade passed through his neck like a sigh through curtains. His head toppled backward, expression still bored, and rolled into the mud.
The second guard managed half a scream before the shadow drank it.
By the time Kai reached the inner courtyard, the rain had stopped falling upward.
Fifty-three cultivators lived inside the Black Fang branch. Most had trained him. Some had beaten him. All had laughed when the orphanage master handed over the children for "special disposal." None of them laughed tonight.
He moved like something that had forgotten how to be human. Every cut was perfect. Every kill fed the blade a name, a face, a final expression of disbelief. The shadow grew heavier with each death, yet the sword remained feather-light.
On the third-floor balcony, Vice-Guildmaster Huo tried to form a fire serpent talisman. Kai walked straight through the flames. They parted around him as if ashamed to touch his skin.
Huo's eyes widened. "You… you're just a dog we—"
Kai's left hand closed around the man's throat. The shadow blade rested gently against Huo's core.
"I was never your dog," Kai said quietly. "I was the leash you forgot you were holding."
He pushed. The blade slid in without resistance. Huo's core shattered like spun sugar. A lifetime of cultivation, cruelty, and hubris poured into the sword in a single heartbeat.
The shadow blade purred.
When Kai pulled it free, Huo was already ash on the wind.
He found the ledger in Gorran's study. Neat rows of names, ages, prices. At the bottom, fresh ink:
Lot 24 – Male, approx 19, mute, excellent blade affinity – 300 mid-grade spirit stones (discounted for attitude).
Kai stared at the line until the letters blurred. He did not remember crying. He did remember setting the entire compound on fire with his own hands.
By the time the eclipse began to fade, nothing remained of the Black Fang Guild except smoke and silence.
Kai stood on the highest roof, soaked in blood that wasn't his. The shadow blade rested across his shoulders like a sleeping predator. His hair—once pure black—now bore a streak of bone-white where the eclipse light had touched it.
Far below, something small moved among the ruins. A child. A girl. Barefoot, covered in soot, clutching a broken wooden sword.
She looked up at him with huge, unafraid eyes.
"Big brother?" she called, voice cracking. "Is it over?"
Kai opened his mouth. No sound came out.
The blade whispered against his mind, gentle and poisonous.
One more to kill. Empires to unmake. Suns to extinguish. Forget her. Forget all of them. Be free.
He looked at the girl—Rin, her name was Rin—and felt something crack inside his chest like thin ice.
"Not yet," he told the sword.
Then, louder, to the child: "Run east until you reach the river. Don't look back."
Rin hesitated, then bowed the way the orphanage master had taught them when a buyer came. She turned and ran.
Kai watched until she vanished into the dying red light.
When she was gone, he finally spoke the name the blade had learned from the crawling letters.
"Calamity," he said, tasting the word. "That's what you are."
The sword hummed, pleased.
Above them, the eclipse sun gave one final, wet heartbeat, then began to sink.
Seven days, Kai thought. Seven days until the sun rises white again and the world pretends none of this ever happened.
He leapt from the roof, landing cat-quiet among the embers.
Seven days to make them remember forever.
The Shadow Blade had found its wielder. And the world had no idea what it had just unleashed.
[SFX: "WHOOM—CRACKLE—FIZZLE"]