Nine Lives of the Sword Saint

Chapter 2: Ninety Years Too Early

The crying stopped before he wanted it to. That was the strangest part — some deep animal function of this new body decided he was finished grieving before the mind riding inside it agreed, and Li Wuchen found himself staring up at a smoke-stained ceiling, silent, while the rest of him screamed on the inside.

Think. It was the first coherent order he gave himself, and it steadied him the way orders always had, back when he'd had three hundred disciples waiting on his word. You are not dead. You are also not sixty-one. Work from there.

The midwife — a broad, tired woman with flour-dusted forearms — wrapped him in a cloth that smelled of woodsmoke and lye soap, and passed him to another woman lying exhausted in the bed. His mother, he understood, in this life. A stranger's face, kind and worn, looking down at him like he was the only good thing that had happened to her in a long while.

He had no memory of this woman. No memory of this village. Which meant, if his instincts about the pull backward through time were right, this was not merely his past — it was a past before any of the events he could remember, in a place his sixty-one years of life had never touched.

Ninety years, he thought, testing the number the way he'd test the edge of a blade. If Zhaoxin poisoned me in my sixty-first year, and the world I remember from childhood was ninety years before that death... this should be close to the years I actually grew up in. Should be. But this room. This dialect. I don't know either of them.

That single realization was more frightening than dying had been.

Over the following days — and he counted them, obsessively, the way a drowning man counts breaths — Li Wuchen relearned the shape of being an infant while his mind ran laps around a truth he couldn't yet prove: something about this reset had not simply sent him backward. It had sent him backward further than his own memory could verify.

His new mother called him Xiao Chen. His new father was a woodcutter, dead of a lung sickness before Xiao Chen turned two — a fact Li Wuchen absorbed with the same flat, professional grief he'd once reserved for disciples lost in battle. Grief for a father he'd never met in this life, layered over grief for a death that hadn't happened yet in this one. It was an exhausting way to feel things.

By the time he was five, his mother followed his father into the ground — fever, the kind that swept through poor villages every few years and took whoever had the least to spare. Li Wuchen, in the body of a boy not yet old enough to hold a proper sword, buried his second mother in as many lifetimes and did not cry this time. He'd used up that particular grief already, on the floor of a feast hall he hadn't been born near yet.

The orphanage that took him in sat on the edge of a nothing village called Stone Hollow, three days' walk from the nearest town large enough to have a name he recognized from any historical record he'd ever studied. That, more than anything, confirmed it. This wasn't just his childhood repeated. This was some other, earlier thread of the same tapestry — a village that either hadn't survived long enough to be remembered by the time he was born the first way, or had never mattered enough to be written down at all.

I know things that haven't happened yet, he told himself, lying awake on a straw mat in a room with six other orphaned children, listening to their breathing. That is worth more than a sword. It is worth more than sixty-one years of cultivation, if I use it right.

He was seven years old when he decided, with the total certainty of a man who had already died once and found it survivable, that he would never again let anyone he trusted get close enough to hold the knife.