The flight of stairs leading up to the main gate was littered with corpses, haphazardly kicked to the side. And thus it was up there, in front of a broken gate, the man in red robes spoke.
"From this point forward, the Sword between Mountains Sect is disbanded. Never will another sect bear its name for ten thousand years; never will any of you speak of its revival for the rest of your lives."
He coldly sneered as he eyed every one of us, then motioned for a burly man behind him, who was holding onto the sect's signboard. The man stepped forward, and tightly gripping the board with one hand, he clawed a hole through each of the characters with his other.
"Know of this kindness well. All of you would do well to remember it."
Although the man continued to speak, I was not able to register the next words coming out of his mouth. I just dumbly stared.
The mouth opened and closed, the lips moved up and down, and sometimes I could catch a glimpse of the tongue shifting about the teeth. By the laws of Heaven this somehow constructed a string of low-pitched noises, and accompanying this tune were the black birds in the distant that sung promises of a found feast. The periodic shuffling of shoes against gravel and the clinking of steel formed a hypnotic, loosely organized rhythm, and together they formed a cacophonous ensemble probably nobody enjoyed.
How am I supposed to feel when he gestured toward the desecrated corpses of the old masters for a third time? What am I supposed to learn by looking at the severed heads they proudly waved on wooden pikes? I do not know. I really do not know.
For a moment, I swore one of the waved heads blinked at me; I turned my attention toward it.
Among the heads were a few elders or other figures who I ashamedly did not remember, but I recognized the Sect Leader and I recognized the Elder Yao who managed the library. Although both of her eyes were gouged out, I still recognized the Elder She who loitered at Punishment Hall and the Elder Xiong who worked there and bickered with her like an old couple. And then, I saw Master.
Master definitely did not deserve this.
At some point later in time the man finished talking, so they organized us into a line as we were stripped of our belongings in quick succession. One by one, a former disciples of a disgraced sect in the front of the line handed over their removed uniform. One by one, they rummaged through it before tossing it onto a burning pile.
Another man had walked down the line to confiscate weaponry. When it was my turn, he smirked after he seized the sheathed sword by my waist.
"A good sword! Allow me to take it off your hands. As a reward, maybe you can take a nearby broken tree branch with you. Hahaha!" He guffawed at his own joke as he moved past me in the line.