Revenge13 min read
"I Was the Sweep—Then I Broke the Rules"
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I woke up before dawn as I always did, carrying the broom that was my badge and my burden. I am Chauncey Song. I am sixteen, thin, and I have a small clay doll tucked in my shirt—Teresa Burnett made it for me before I left home—and a letter from home that smells like river smoke and boiled greens.
“I will not give up,” I told myself, breath fogging the valley air. “I will keep going.”
Someone laughed behind me as I stepped into the path. “Look, isn’t that the former outer disciple?” a voice said.
“He’s just a sweep now,” another replied. “What a waste—handsome kid, too. Used to be an outer disciple. Now? Trash.”
“He couldn’t absorb qi. The elders demoted him. Sword Sect’s first-ever failure. The name sticks.”
I tightened my grip on the broom. I had been an outer disciple once, taken by Ike Rios, the elder who believed in strange things. I had trained for months, every ounce of me aching to hold celestial qi, and nothing came. They humiliated me then, put my face into lesson stories, and I was cast into the Dustwork Peak—the chores peak—where we sweeps lived like the roots of grass.
“I’m still me,” I whispered, and walked on.
Clearwind Hollow sits behind Dustwork Peak, a sunken bowl where we dragged wood and took medicine from under old trees. I left the broom by a stone and took out the envelope and the clay figure. Teresa’s little hands and crooked eyes made something inside me soften.
“Brother,” her letter read, “we got your coins. Aunties brought sweets to see us. Those neighbors—they’re flattering because of you. Little Yao says she’s being asked to be a concubine by the Li family’s fat son. Do not laugh at her if she’s shy, brother.”
“Li family,” I hissed. They had pressed my mother and sister in Annan for years, trying to force a marriage. My mother had refused. When the Sword Sect took me, they finally stopped. But now—if word reached the Li clan that I was stripped of my place, my mother and Teresa would be prey again.
“I will not let that happen,” I said aloud. “Even if I sweep the whole sect.”
I pushed aside a brush and found the iron shackles I wore during training—four black iron bands hidden under a bush. I slid them onto my wrists and ankles. They were heavy then. They were heavier now, but my muscles were used to them.
“Forged strength,” I said. “This is the only leverage I have.”
I swung from a low branch and practiced “Body Tempering Art” until my arms felt like ropes of lead. The technique was simple: push until bone and sinew answered, until qi—if one had it—could come. They told me I was a failure because I never mirrored the others. They called me the Sect’s first waste.
I kept my mouth shut and practiced in the cold. One morning, when my arms nearly broke and my face was a map of sweat, something small-wise and searing trickled into my belly. I felt qi. A thin, trembling thread flowed along veins until it sank into the usual place—my dantian.
“It is here,” I breathed. Then the thread vanished like a thief. I reached, and I felt another pocket deep—an impossible spiral the size of a palm lying below the dantian. The spiral sucked everything into itself.
“I have two dantians,” I whispered.
All the barriers that had built up in those cruel months crumbled. I laughed until I cried, the kind of laugh that surprised me in its ferocity.
“I’m not a waste,” I shouted. “Not anymore.”
I trained until sunrise, then returned to the training yard to sweep. Today my assignment was the outer disciples’ practice field—three hundred yards of stone and a giant stone sword in the center. The field belonged to them; it was my work to polish what they practiced on.
“Look who it is—our famous waste!” a voice called as I approached. Sterling Perrin, who never worked and wore the arrogance of an entitled nephew, leaned on a broom handle with two dogs at his side, Eladio Burch and Owen Andersen.
“You think you are holy because you were an outer disciple?” Eladio mocked. “Now you pick up a broom like us.”
“You want us to do the work?” Sterling asked, grinning as if the world was his coin to spend. “We’re sick today. Sweep it yourself.”
“We’ll split it,” Owen said. “One side each—so great, right?”
“Fine,” I said. “Four sides, fair.”
They laughed and pushed words like knives. Then Sterling’s hand landed on my shoulder—mocking and heavy.
“Do what we say, waste,” Sterling said. “One man’s work for three men—how generous.”
“You’re generous with other people’s backs,” I replied. “You and your mouth. I know you eat off other people’s labor.”
Sterling’s face shifted. He reached for me, and Eladio swung first. I moved with the broom and collided with a fist. A crack of wood and skin; grit in the eyes; the field slowed. I struck back and Sterling tasted the broom’s edge along his face. Eladio staggered, clutching his jaw as dust stung his eyes.
“Get him,” Sterling hissed. But he didn’t run; his mouth tightened. He drew a fist and aimed for my neck. I thought of Teresa’s face—those small hands shaping clay—and remembered what real fear felt like.
I moved my broom like a blade; a clean crack, and Sterling folded, an iron taste in his mouth.
“You hurt him?” a voice called from the work circle. I did not answer. I did not run. The three of them had been the tyrants of our peak for years, fat on favors from Armando Crosby, Sterling’s uncle who ran the Dustwork Office. That protection ended when I made them sweep.
They told everyone I was a rogue. Whispering spread. That evening, I returned to the Hollow to check the hidden iron bands and to practice until my arms tore with the rhythm again.
I will not be soft. I will be stronger.
*
On the pond under an old willow I sat calm and reached inside, finding the small spiral and coaxing at it. It had a will like a small animal—slippery, stubborn. I begged. I negotiated. Finally, it uncoiled and let a thread of pale gold leak out. It filled my dantian and sang like a bell. Muscles mended; aches eased. Something crawled under my skin—like old armor being replaced by a new shell. My skin sloughed like bark. I dove into cold water and emerged raw and brighter.
“I am a fourth-rank practitioner,” I whispered. The little whirlpool, the hidden thing that had stolen my qi for a year, had emptied itself into me. I felt tremendous, like the sky had given me a bent ladder.
A child howled in the woods: “Help! Not the snake, not the snake!”
When I ran, a girl in a faded flowered dress burst through the saplings. She was a tangle of terror and cheekbones—Gia Moreau. “Run! It ate my herb—my herbs!” she shrieked.
From under her was a shape like a three-man long python: a five-rank serpent with glossy black scales and the slow intelligence of a mountain beast. It had been following her for the green tufts she held.
“Go!” I shouted, grabbing a loose rock.
She aimed the other way to lure it off. She could have run. Instead she tried to draw it away from me. I remember that moment. I remember choosing to act.
I threw stones and failed. I charged at the beast and it slammed me with a tail as wide as a log. My ribs broke like reeds. Blood sprayed. Pain returned me to a rawness I’d known since the Unschooled Months. I thought I would sleep and not wake. The little girl came running back, a strip of paper in her hand. She slapped it onto my shoulder like a talisman.
“Strong charm!” she sang. “Grandpa taught me—no one eats Grandpa’s kids.”
The charm was a flash of green and warmth. My bones stopped burning like coals. Energy—real, raw—flushed me. My fists glowed with a faint gold. Under that blessing and the gold inside me, my punches rang like iron on hide. The beast staggered. I pummeled its tail until it could not lift me again. The girl bottled its body and took it away like a pickled thing. She wore a pride like a crown.
“You’re a glyphsmith’s granddaughter,” I said.
She laughed. “I’m Gia. I make marks that make things do as I want.”
“You’re a young master at work.” I bowed—because when someone helps you in the mire, you bow.
She smirked. “You got gold qi. That’s rare. You can draw into stone and it will stay.”
“I—do you mean—can I?” I asked, half a child myself.
Gia pressed a scrap of paper into my hand. “A tiny ledger, lessoncy. Don’t tell anyone. Grandpa left me scrolls. You owe me one.” She winked like an oath.
I spent the next week reading her scroll by lamplight. The glyphs were a new language, and I learned to draw them with my gold qi. I carved a single golden “Song” into a river stone; the mark stayed. It was proof not only of who I was, but of what my qi could do. My body was changing. The spiral inside me had finally finished its feast and become my tool.
*
They still tried to crush me.
“Chauncey Song,” Armando Crosby sneered in the mess hall. “Do you think your punches make up for a lack of birth? You hit my nephew.”
“You coveted my sister,” I answered. “You twisted your mouth into a bargain.”
“Want to speak with me?” he asked, hand finding a whip he kept when people grew too loud. He raised it like he might wake a sleeping god.
“Strike me, if you will,” I said. “You made me a clean kind of angry.”
I struck the whip aside and then I struck him. I did not stop. I did not float the fight; I punished him as he had punished others a thousand times. I never killed him, but the whip’s iron did for his ribs what his arrogance dared to do to others.
“Stop!” a voice thundered, and I turned to see Ike Rios, my old recruiter, standing at the mess hall ladder. He was a narrow man with eyes that had seen storms and kept their distance.
“Chauncey, stop.” He wore the patience of someone who had been betrayed by fate, too.
I bowed my head instantly. “Elder Ike,” I said.
Armando crawled and begged and told a story of being wronged. “Ike! He attacked me, elder! He—” he choked.
Ike looked past Armando to the room. Stories spilled. People told of the treats withheld from the houses, the small cruelties. The room lit as rumor became flame.
“Enough,” Ike said. “Armando Crosby, you will no longer be manager of Dustwork Peak. You and your three will go to Star Mine for ten years. Everything you extract belongs to the Sect. After ten years, you will be cast out from Sword Sect, never to return.”
The floor hummed with the sound of their stifled collapse. I felt the field tilt like a stone had been lifted from the house roof.
Sterling, Eladio, and Owen stumbled backward. They had been eaten by their own arrogance. The men who had laughed at Teresa’s name were sent to dig where light never touched. The crowd cheered in the way the hungry cheer for bread—they were not proud, but they were alive with relief.
Ike put his hand on my shoulder, and there was a warmth like a promise. He said, “You have hands that belong to a sword. Now go prove it.”
*
I trained like someone who was late for the end of the world. I studied the massive set of lessons an outer disciple learns—the basic sword art the Sect kept on dusty shelves. I learned rhythm: swing, step, breathe. I drilled until my motions were like weather. When I could draw a seam of wind with a tree branch, I knew I had become a hunger.
Then fate came to test me in the place it always did: the arena built to strip you bare.
“Chauncey,” Eladio’s cousin—no, the blood of bullies had an outside hand—Arturo Patel, arrived like a cold wind. He was an outer disciple, eighth-rank, and he had returned from the world beyond with a list of favors to collect.
“You sweep my field, you break my nephew, you think that buys you pride,” Arturo told me as hands gathered. He curled a sword the way men curl coins.
“You will answer to me if you kill people on Stairstep Peak,” I said.
“You talk like a man with a sword. Good. Let us test that talk with blades instead.” He smiled like a beast.
I never wanted blood. I wanted strength. But when he lunged—deliberately out of bounds, palm closing to finish me—he had chosen to be a murderer on the floor of the hall. Because he had moved first, I took the only chance that guarantees fairness: I demanded the life-ground duel—Death Platform. The elders could not deny a properly placed challenge. So I did what a desperate man must: I took the law and turned it into a trap.
“Three strikes,” Arthur (Arturo Patel) said. “You will die in two.”
We stood at the platform. The air tasted of rain. I breathed, swallowed the old shame, and let my sword move.
He stabbed first. I replied, and in one motion I struck so hard at his hand that bone cracked. Then, with a twist of the blade, I countered and struck again. He fell and writhed like a lantern with its glass crushed. He screamed and rolled. I had no right to sever limbs—but when a man comes to kill, he must be answered. I moved as a man who had practiced at night for the worse, and I cut methodically.
“Stop!” the old master called, but his voice was a thin thing, swallowed by the field.
I paused only long enough to watch the delirium of entitlement bleed out of Arturo’s eyes, then I cut his right and left, until his hands and feet were gone. The crowd became a knife that opened their mouths and could not close them.
“You said you would not kill,” Arturo howled. I looked down. “I said I would not kill you,” I replied. “I did not. I broke what would have been used to break others.”
He was dragged away writhing. He screamed at me between coughs of blood. People moved as if jerked by tendons—some to shield eyes, others to film with small boxes that blink. The elder, Ike Rios, whispered, “You will be punished by law,” and the law—cold, unsentimental—took him. He had been an instrument of cruelty; the platform had rendered him useless. The crowd did not clap. They did not cheer. They watched.
The spectacle lasted long enough to sear—an ordeal the watchful would not forget. Arturo’s face slid from rage through denial to raw fear. He kept saying, “Mercy, mercy,” and men who had once felt his boot now captured his voice on their devices. “Fight and win,” they would say to younger men later, “but never be blind enough to be drunk with a weapon.”
I did not feel victory. I felt the old debt lift like mist.
Ike Rios did not praise me. “You have walked gray roads, Chauncey,” he said. “You have honored blood with justice tonight. Be prepared—light and shadow will not let you rest.”
Yet in the thrall of that night, a small, fierce part of me smiled. When the bell of justice rings, sometimes the bell must be swung by a hand that used to be bound.
*
Word of the fight grew like a blossom that would not be cut. In three months there would be a much larger test—outer disciple trials—and the man who had been my childhood’s enemy, Fox Mahmoud, a name on the outer lists and a boy who would grow into far more, had risen like a sun in the rankings. He stared at me from the practice field with a face that said he could not see me as anything more than a stop sign in his road.
“You challenged a rank eight?” he asked the day he saw me on the yard. “You will die at my feet.”
“Three months,” I said. “We fight in three months. We will do it on the Death Platform.”
“You are a fool,” Fox said and turned with the wind like a man who believes storms avoid him.
But I had a plan. If I allowed him to move freely while I stood still, he would strike me whenever he wished. So I forced him to a date. That date was armor against cowardice and the cruel choices of men with rank.
“Then prepare yourself,” Ike said quietly. “Three months is a narrow span. Some things cannot be rearranged. I cannot keep your family safe forever.”
“I will make them safe,” I said. “By the time the bell rings, I will be a knife that can cut a thick rope.”
I trained like a man with nothing left to lose. I studied the old techniques through the night with the second-knowledge Gia had given me. I forged basic swordwork into a form that could split a sword’s spirit. I practiced until my body was an instrument and my spirit like a sharpened river rock.
But the spiral—my dark secret—grew hungry. The little whirlpool inside shifted, asking for something it had not asked before. I fed it energy and it fed me nothing. Instead it swallowed until the ladder of my energy store thinned. For three days I sat in the Hollow like a fool and fed it jewel after jewel—energy stones until the stacks in my chest thinned. At dawn on the fourth day I slept and dreamed of an iron slope; then the spiral opened and poured out its gold in a cascade that filled me.
When it finished, skin shimmered. My muscles reformed. I felt surer than I had any right to be.
“Now,” I said to myself. “Now we are a weapon.”
*
Gia came to the training yard more than once. She pressed a small, brittle scroll into my palm. “Practice the glyphs,” she said. “And when you fight, remember: marks hold when you mark with what you truly are inside.”
“You saved me for no reward,” I said.
“You were doing the same for me,” she answered. “Besides, who would believe me if Grandpa called? He says you’re a good project.”
I laughed. She tossed me a strip of glyphs. “In three months, Death Platform,” she said. “I will sit in the first row. I’ll bet on you.”
And in the hollows of the day, I wrote a single golden sigil on the stone by my bed. The mark remained. It was a promise.
*
The trials came. The outer trial lists were a beetle’s throng of men hungry as locusts. The Sect had a way of thinning talent to gold: give little and demand empire. I took what I needed and left the rest to the climb.
One afternoon the word spread that I had challenged an outer-listed rival—Fox Mahmoud—to duel in three months. The whole compound hummed. Those who had scorned felt like rats whose holes were in daylight. Some laughed. Some clenched.
“Do you believe he can do it?” a voice asked in the washroom. “He’s only four months old as an inner rank.”
“He’s been training like a man possessed,” another answered. “If anyone can force a miracle, Chauncey can.”
I kept my head low. I kept the book closed when I slept. I let the people think what they wished until the day when I would let them see.
On the day the Death Platform challenge came, my hands were steady. I stood in the center of the yard and looked outward. I had made friends—boys who used to sweep for a difference—and those friendships were a cloak against the greed of the rich.
Fox—tall, lit like a column—appeared at the steps. He let his rank stir the air like a banner. He smirked.
“You asked,” he said. “Prepare to take your fall.”
“I have no more falls to take,” I answered. “Only climbs.”
The bell sounded. The platform was our world.
We fought, blade for blade, breath and step. He was fast. He was taught to be a mountain storm. I answered with something like patience. I let rhythm guide me. And when he unleashed a long white sword aura, I split it with a single stroke—my basic form made precise enough that it cut the very air that made his blade move.
He blinked.
He had thought in lines and I used curves. He had thought in one giant brush and I had become many small ones. The crowd watched as he lost balance. He stumbled. In a motion of reflex, I ended him like a lesson: I left him alive but broken. I did not kill. I took his ability to strike again easily. That was my judgment.
He screamed and something inside the crowd fell still. In the stands someone pounded a drum and other men shouted. I kept my breath and the quiet in my throat. A man who had held power had been carved down. It was not a joy. It was weather.
Afterward, the elders approached and gave gifts I could not refuse: a blade of yellow-rank iron, a patch of iron armor, and most of all, a bag containing energy and a card that would be accepted in the market of the Great Qin. The same elders whispered they had been wrong and would not be wrong twice.
I accepted their gifts. I took Gia’s hand and bowed.
“Do not be soft on them,” she said. “They learned how to be cruel on the backs of others.”
“No,” I said. “I will not be soft.”
I have more to do. Fox will return in three months. Stars will move, and the spiral inside me will have more demands. But a promise is a law of the soul. I have placed it in the world like a coin in water.
I will lift my family out. I will pull them from rotten soil and plant them on rock.
“We will go to the Death Platform together,” Gia said once. “I will sit in the first row and carve your name among the lucky stones.”
“Then carve bold,” I said. “Because I cannot afford anything else.”
I am a sweep no longer. I am Chauncey Song. I hold a sword and a clay doll and a promise.
The End
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