The second stage of the Heavenly Sword Sect recruitment trial began inside a narrow, five-hundred-yard stone canyon known as the Gorge of Thousand Blades.
Two senior proctors stood on an elevated wooden platform overlooking the entrance, watching as the surviving candidates from the obsidian stele test were herded between two jagged black cliffs.
The floor of the canyon was paved with old stone slabs, but every ten paces featured a narrow seam wired to hidden spring mechanisms, connecting to a vast lattice of brass tripwires running along the mossy basalt walls.
Suspended from iron brackets embedded high above the canyon rim were fifty heavy, crescent-shaped pendulum blades forged from dark tungsten steel, each weighing three hundred pounds and swinging in erratic, overlapping arcs acro
