Chapter 1: The Boy Who Would Not Die

The Sword Saint found the boy at the bottom of a ravine, three arrows in his back and a broken leg, eating a stolen meat bun with the focused expression of someone with no intention of dying before he finished it. Every reasonable assessment said the child should be dead. The Sword Saint had stopped trusting reasonable assessments forty years ago. He sat on a rock, waited for the bun to be finished, and said, "Can you hold a sword?" The boy looked up. "I can hold anything."