Sword of Immortal Slaughter

戮仙剑 Sword of Immortal Slaughter
器属类型: 先天杀伐至宝 Primordial Slaughter Treasure
Artifact Tier: 造化凶器 (Creation-Forged Ominous Armament)
Primary Wielder: Tongtian Jiaozhu (通天教主) during the Investiture of the Gods
Current Status: Unknown; presumed sealed or dormant within the incomplete Immortal Slaying Formation

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The Sword of Immortal Slaughter is one of the Four Swords of Immortal Slaying, a set of four Primordial Slaughter Treasures associated with Tongtian Jiaozhu and the Immortal Slaying Formation. Its companion blades are the Sword of Immortal Execution, the Sword of Immortal Extinction, and the Sword of Immortal Annihilation. The war-array that binds them is recorded in the Immortal Slaying Formation Diagram, a treasure that defines the formation's rules. The sword's lore also connects to the broader Investiture of the Gods narrative, particularly the Jie School's final stand and the dispersion of its most dangerous artifacts.

The Sword of Immortal Slaughter is the second of the Four Swords of Immortal Slaying (诛仙四剑), a set of four Primordial Slaughter Treasures forged by Tongtian Jiaozhu. Its specific domain is "mass annihilation": unlike a single-target weapon, the sword unleashes a law-grade "clearing field" that targets all living beings within its range of effect. The killing energy, known as Lu Qi (戮气), bypasses most protective divine abilities and physical defenses, directly eroding the soul-flame of its victims and converting their life force into raw nourishment for the sword and its parent formation. The sword's activation requires a minimum of one century of the wielder's lifespan per draw. While no precise maximum range is given in surviving records, all accounts agree that the sword's effect extends over the entire battlefield it enters, making it a weapon of absolute area denial rather than personal combat.

The forging of the Sword of Immortal Slaughter required materials that were themselves violations of cosmic order. The primary catalyst was the collection of life-souls from eighty-one Pure Yang cultivators (纯阳修士), each taken at the moment of their most concentrated vitality and used as an ignition spark to awaken the "Slaughter Karma Flame" (屠戮业火) within the blade. The source of the blade's physical body is linked to the residual killing intent left over from the Honghuang Era's primordial conflicts—an accumulation of unsorted, undigested death-energy that settled into the earth's veins. No single mine or mountain is recorded as the source; rather, the sword's substance was drawn from the Chi You's residual aura and the condensed blood-soaked soil of ancient battlefields, gathered over centuries and compressed into a single blade. The extraction of this material did not visibly scar a single landscape, but it did remove a layer of primordial malice that was part of the natural cycle of decay and rebirth, leaving those regions slightly less violent but also slightly less fertile for new growth.

The sword contains a Qi Ling—but its nature is not that of a single sacrificed soul. The consciousness inside the Sword of Immortal Slaughter is an amalgam formed from the collective death-screams of the eighty-one Pure Yang cultivators used in its forging, fused with the residual will of ancient battlefields. This entity has no personal identity, no memory of a former life, and no capacity for anything except hunger. It does not think; it registers only the presence of living souls and the craving to extinguish them. The amalgam is bound into the blade's core matrix through a ritual that burned the cultivators' bodies to ash while locking their escaping souls into the forming metal at the exact instant of death. No hope of release exists: the amalgam cannot enter the Six Paths of Reincarnation, cannot be purified, and cannot be dispersed through ordinary means. It exists in a state of permanent, insensate rage, and its only expression is the Lu Qi that flows from the sword's edge.

Master Recognition (认主) for the Sword of Immortal Slaughter is not a bonding ritual but a conditional contract of mutual destruction. The wielder opens their soul-sea to the sword and offers a continuous stream of their life-force as tribute; in return, the sword grants access to its slaughter-field. However, the sword's terms are harsh and irreversible. Each draw costs the wielder one hundred years of lifespan, used to maintain the density of Lu Qi. If the sword is drawn and does not taste blood, the amalgam spirit turns its hunger inward and devours the wielder's seven emotions and six desires, leaving them emotionally hollow or driving them mad. Long-term possession slowly corrupts the wielder's Dao-heart: the accumulated killing intent bleeds back through the bond and overwrites the wielder's personality, gradually converting them into a weapon themselves. The sword does not "eat" its master in a single event; it erodes them over decades, and only a wielder of extraordinary will or those who use the sword sparingly can avoid total consumption.

The only stable wielder recorded in the canonical tradition is Tongtian Jiaozhu, the founder of the Jie School during the Investiture of the Gods. He deployed the Sword of Immortal Slaughter as part of the Immortal Slaying Formation, a war-array that bound all four swords together. Tongtian Jiaozhu's fate after the formation's defeat is ambiguous: surviving texts record that he was led away by his master, and the four swords were dispersed or sealed. No further wielder is reliably documented. Some later apocrypha mention martial artists or rogue cultivators who briefly held the sword and were immediately consumed by its Qi Ling, but these accounts are treated as local folklore rather than stable myth. The tradition is clear: only Tongtian Jiaozhu could withstand the sword's cost for any sustained period, and even he did not escape without consequence.

The sword's most famous activation occurred during the full deployment of the Immortal Slaying Formation. In that war-array, the Sword of Immortal Slaughter served as the formation's "cleanse" function: any cultivator who entered the formation and was not of the highest realm was annihilated by the sword's Lu Qi field, their life-force absorbed to sustain the formation's cycle. The tradition does not specify a numerical limit on the sword's uses or a precise count of victims. What is recorded is that the formation could not be maintained indefinitely; the four swords' accumulated killing energy would eventually destabilize the matrix and threaten to consume the formation master. Tongtian Jiaozhu is said to have stopped the formation precisely at the edge of that threshold, preventing the swords' spirits from turning on him.

The Sword of Immortal Slaughter is the second blade of the Four Swords of Immortal Slaying (诛仙四剑). Its paired counterpart is the Sword of Immortal Execution (诛仙剑), the first and most powerful of the set, which governs the principle of "judgment." The Sword of Immortal Slaughter is complementary: where the first sword passes final sentence, the second carries out the extermination. The four swords together are bound by the Immortal Slaying Formation Diagram (诛仙阵图), a war-array that links their killing fields into a self-reinforcing slaughter matrix. A known countermeasure exists: the Four Swords can be neutralized only if four Da Luo Jin Xian–level beings each take one sword simultaneously, breaking the formation's synchronization. No single artifact is recorded as a direct natural counter to the Sword of Immortal Slaughter alone.

The current location of the Sword of Immortal Slaughter is not recorded in any stable source. The most widely accepted tradition holds that after the Investiture of the Gods concluded, the four swords were sealed separately by the highest celestial authorities, their locations hidden to prevent future deployment. Some texts claim the Sword of Immortal Slaughter was entrusted to a guardian entity; others state it was buried beneath a mountain formation that slowly leaches its killing energy. No one has reliably confirmed its location in the present era, and the tradition treats its current status as unknown.