"These people despised the dragon king for his arrogance, but they also feared him for his strength and envied his lofty position as king of the cloud palace! One day, the dragon distanced himself from his castle for a short period of a few days… Unfortunately, he had left for one day too long: he would come back one morning, only to find his subjects killed, his flying castle in ruin, and his treasures plundered. A warning discouraging him from ever showing his face to the world again had also been painted on the ruined garrisons with the blood of his dear ones! The humans actually believed that the might of the entire human race would deter the dragon from seeking revenge. Unfortunately for them, they had underestimated the extent of the dragon king's wrath..."

At that point Cheng Hao paused: the wooden mannequin that had remained silent until then suddenly made its move right in that moment! It swung its wooden blade extremely fast, heading straight for the child's forehead, right in between his eyes!

A sharp glint flashed by the golden pupils and they turned into a golden trail as the black-haired youth cocked his head to the side and easily evaded the blow. Then came another, which Cheng Hao also dodged. A third attack also did not meet its target. As he moved about, strangely, the Black Dragon Blade hovered in a fixed place behind him: just one palm below his right shoulder and one palm away from his body, the weapon's tip pointing straight at the mannequin's chest and all the while, emitting a bizarre homing sound. As all that happened and he care-freely dodged slash after slash, the child would continue speaking without a worry in the world:

"The poor dragon king... No matter how tyrannical and arrogant he might have seemed to his enemies, the black dragon had loved his people as much as he would have loved his own children! The rage that seethed in his chest at the sight of such children piling up into mountains of damaged corpses broke him: it took away everything good in his heart... and buried it where it would never see the light of day again. All that remained in its place... were pure wrath and insurmountable pain! A vortex of negative emotions pushed him to seek revenge in order to quench its bloodthirst! He did not know who the assailants were, but in his crazed state, he did not care! He would kill, kill, KILL!"

"Exterminate until there was nothing left to kill at all!"

"It rose up into the sky accompanied by an earth-shaking roar! As he glared downwards with bloodshot eyes, it wrathfully dove down from the clouds. All that followed would be mountains of charred corpses and seas of putrefied blood."

Fifty strikes. As he was narrating his story, Cheng Hao had evaded roughly fifty strikes without retaliating. Finally, a strange glow filled the child's eyes as this time around suddenly he exploded with speed, immediately disappearing from the field of view of the wooden mannequin, still in the midst of its swinging motion: in less time than it would take to blink, Cheng Hao had ducked below the swinging, wooden arm and had elegantly twirled to land right beside the wooden mannequin.

Before it could react to the sudden burst of speed, Cheng Hao had already pointed forward with his left finger...

The mannequin went to turn around when, suddenly, in its emotionless, glowing crimson eyes, the image of an enraged black dragon was reflected!

"The Black Dragon, from his dominion up above in the the clods, dives down onto the land and seeks revenge..." Cheng Hao smiled nonchalantly as something resembling a black dragon shockingly flew back into his hand. Meanwhile, beside him, the poor mannequin, a gaping hole in its upper body, collapsed to the ground: Cheng Hao's hand was now holding a black sword three feet and some in length.

Xiao Wu paled as she saw the large hole that had appeared in the mannequin's chest. It was as if something had eaten its way from one end to the other, an horrendous wound! There were even bite marks! Had the wooden mannequin been a real person, that blow would have thoroughly destroyed their heart!

As for what exactly had happened… Cheng Hao had been keeping the Black Dragon Blade in a certain position right behind him, so that when he eventually dodged, the blade had shot forward right after him! At the same time, the blade had also made use of the momentum of the wooden mannequin to strike even harder! This time around, Cheng Hao had only needed to strike once. However, an ideal execution of the technique would be to keep the position of the Flying Sword fixed some place behind the cultivator, aligned with the enemy and then send the blade forward whenever one evaded an attack. This way, with each successful dodge, all a cultivator would have to do would be to shoot the blade forward and a quasi-sure-kill fierce counterattack would be thrown out, harassing the opponent to no end!

Flying Sword; so was called any object that could be controlled through one's cultivation base, ranging from swords, to axes, to spears, with the even more unusual ones having the shape of shields, armors... even the mannequin from earlier could be counted in, and the list went on!

There were two ways to use a Flying Sword; one was by controlling it manually, the other would be handing instructions to the Flying Sword in order for it to move on its own.

To control it manually, the cultivators would imbue the blade with their cultivation base and connect it to their consciousness. This was basically as if a new limb had sprouted off the wielder's body, and could turn out exhausting to the mind on the long run. Furthermore, the more one's focus fell, the more likely the chance of losing control over the Flying Sword. A situation in which a cultivator was exhausted mentally would turn even the most awe-inspiring blades from magical weapons to mere walking sticks.

But if that was so, why didn't cultivators stick to normal weapons? The answer to that laid in the fact that unlike mortal battlefields, the battleground of cultivators was not the bi-dimensional land. Rather, it would be the three-dimensional open space that was the sky! Attacks and opponent would not stick to the front, back and sides, but would also extend to strikes coming from above and below. And most importantly, why limit oneself to wield a blade to attack from the front when, with a weapon that followed one's thought... countless more trajectories existed?

At the same time though, cultivators had to find a way to get around the mental fatigue problem.

The answer to that dilemma came under the premise of a so-called "pre-programmed mode". In this mode, the cultivator would imbue the blade with some of their Will; the reasoning behind it being to instruct the Will strand with strings of simple commands, such as how much distance it should stay away from the cultivator's body, or what it should aim at, what position it should occupy, or what trajectory it should follow, etc.

Also, in order to avoid fatal accidents, if a condition wasn't met, the Flying Sword would try to meet it while still carefully following the others, while - in the case none at all were met - then the auto-piloting of the weapon through Will would end up in failure, causing the Flying Sword to fall back down lifelessly until the cultivator acted himself and directed the weapon manually to resolve the problem.

As for the way the instructions were inlaid into the Flying Swords, the short strings contained in the Will could be compared to functions, and the Will itself as a brain that ensured those functions acted as they should; what the blade should do or where it could and could not go were instructed similarly to functions on a Cartesian plane, only allowing the flying sword to follow the path given to it.

A cultivator would be able to control the Flying Sword manually at any moment in time, or just the other way around he could leave the job to the Will at anytime. However, by default, the Consciousness (hence the cultivator) took precedence over the Will (the rules). For that reason, during the time one used the Flying Sword manually, the rules would be momentarily overrun by the cultivator, and would only kick back in action after the cultivator "let go" of the blade, ergo quit the manual mode.

This all had spawned a new branch of sword cultivation, which could basically be summed up as a search for better and better sets of instructions, all in order to increase the efficiency of Flying Swords. In a way, Flying Sword cultivators became mathematicians, or more accurately, researchers, looking for the best algorithms to imbue a flying sword with.

In this new branch, cultivators could ‘Manually’ control one or a few flying swords, and at the same time control many more ‘Automatically’... or like Xiao Lan had done, they could ‘merge the two together’ to create extremely fearsome combinations! And in the case of the attack Cheng Hao had just shown, where switching back and forth between automatic and manual mode was required, the best efficiency would be to find a few, short strings of clear commands, which wouldn't take too long for the Will within the Flying Sword to compute.

Flying Weapons were finely tuned instruments. They followed the consciousness of a cultivator and, just like the wooden mannequin, could be given a set of simple instructions. The cultivator's own Will would be computing those commands, basically a second mind sharing the thought processes of the original, so there would be little to no problem regarding the ambiguity of the instructions.

Unlike complex maneuvers that required much of one's attention, keeping the blade fixed somewhere compared to the cultivator and keep it aligned towards the opponent every time one dodged was something easily accomplished! All one would have to do was to give two commands to the Will he imbued in the blade. These simple yet effective commands would be: one; "Stay behind me, one palm below my shoulder with a distance of one palm from my back", and two; "Keep your tip aligned with the heart of my opponent". These first two commands made it so when the Flying Sword was shot forward manually, the blade would roughly be in a straight line with the opponent's heart, nothing special here.

However, what Xiao Lan had done had been to take advantage of the fact that when manually controlled, the rules wouldn't abide anymore. Instead, the blade would momentarily halt in mid-air before computing the immediate next command sent by the cultivator. He had mixed that fact, together with the knowledge that his sword would remain for the most part in a blind spot his opponent wouldn't be capable of seeing... and had come up with a counter strike that could be actuated while dodging! As he took manual control over the Black Dragon Blade, the sword would immediately freeze in place. If timed right, and this was during the attack of the enemy, when the finger was lifted (or some kind of similar signal was given to the weapon) the blade would shoot forward, straight at the oncoming opponent: a dodge transformed into a vicious counter!

It would require time and repetition before one would be able to grasp the exact timing for the dodge and the manual takeover, but the results would be ‘oh so worth it’...

As for whether it was possible to do it all over again after sending the blade shooting straight out... Of course it was! All it would take would be a third rule; "If you find yourself in a position different than the one set to you, align yourself while keeping the distance of one palm from my body!" That would bring the Black Dragon Blade back to its starting position as soon as one stopped controlling the sword manually, with the one palm distance addition also being there just to make sure one wouldn't stab oneself in the meantime.

More rules could be added to make the Black Dragon Blade even more fearsome or to add another layer of safety, but all it had taken Cheng Hao to blow away the wooden mannequin had been these three - of which all he had really used had been the first two - plus a monstrous judgment when it came to timing. And with just those three instructions, the results would be absolutely terrifying: as long as she mastered this technique, with each attack she - Xiao Wu - made, her opponent would be facing a full-power counterattack aiming for their very heart!

"This particular move is the first of four compilations of Flying Sword commands created by the Flying Sword Guru Xiao Lan. With it being the first, ‘beginner set’ meant for a low cultivation base, it only contains within it a total of twelve rules - three main and nine auxiliaries - that when put together are widely accepted to be the very best compilation for a dodge-counter, shining more and more as more Flying Swords are added to the mix to hover behind the cultivator. It takes the opponent's momentum and the element of surprise and turns them into death! Just like the Black Dragon King that, after being angered, dove down from the clouds, seeking his brutal revenge upon the puny humans that had dared to rouse its wrath!”

“IIt is the fiercest Flying Sword counter recorded in history. And in the honor of the First Act of White Branches, Black Talons, Xiao Lan called this first set of twelve rules the Black Dragon's..."

Cheng Hao grinned as he raised his left hand and playfully clawed at Xiao Wu.

"Vengeful Talons!"