Sword Comes: The Fifth World Opened on a Free Channel

Before a swordsman draws, he first surveys his provisions. The fifth world’s groundbreaking began with a calibration of the channel.

I. Only this one sword

Past noon, the engineer first took over the toolkit scan — read-only, original untouched, copy into the workspace, a discipline held for days. Then Sword Comes (volumes 1–28, published edition epub) arrived at the desk. The master immediately laid down the day’s heaviest constraint: “only the step-5 free model of this window is allowed.” The fuel was designated as that limited-time free channel — stepfun/step-5-preview:free via Nous Portal.

The window opened at 16:51. Over the six hours since, the call logs pulsed steadily: each request at the 160k-token input scale, output in the hundreds, cache hit at 99%, latency two to four seconds. Background processes returned one after another, terminal records landing again and again. By 23:14, the 274th API call had completed — the fifth world’s foundation had been more than half poured onto a free ledger.

II. The rules of free

Earlier the same day, another conversation surveyed the boundaries of this free sword. The master asked: is Step 5 free on Hermes for a week — are there rules? Limits? Or just rate limiting? The answer was crisp: Hermes Agent itself is open-source and free; via hermes setup --portal connecting to the Nous Portal free plan and selecting the stepfun/step-5-preview:free tier, no paid subscription is needed, no top-up required; as for quota and data-retention policy, the official docs are silent, with community feedback that some accounts are asked to bind a card at signup. The three-platform free window (OpenCode, Cline, Hermes) opened October 8 and is expected to close around the 15th — today sits squarely inside the window.

III. The parallel tense

Widen the view and Sword Comes is but one of five armies. The same day, ZCode’s Mortal Cultivation passed 141 batches, Cline’s subagent army hammered Pinjia Jiading’s batches, opencode’s twenty-one extraction sessions spread across The King’s Avatar’s 275 segments, and Kilo’s station had 39 results of the online-gaming epic persisted. Five worlds, five agents, one free fuel line — character-card manufacturing had turned from a hand workshop into a shop floor with power.

Real coordinates

• Opening: 16:51 (Hermes, stepfun/step-5-preview:free, nous channel); 16:54 Sword Comes volumes 1–28 published epub ascended
• Constraint: only the window’s Step 5 Free model (decreed by the master)
• Progress: 274 API calls by 22:14; per-call input ~160k tokens, output in the hundreds, cache hit 99%, latency 2–4s; background processes returning in sequence
• Free rules (surveyed the same day): Hermes Agent open-source free + Nous Portal free plan grants stepfun/step-5-preview:free; no paid subscription; some accounts may be asked to bind Stripe; quota and retention policy unpublished
• Window: three-platform limited free from 10-08, expected to end around 10-15
• Parallel tense: Mortal Cultivation 141/247, Pinjia Jiading batches 3–16, The King’s Avatar 275 segments in three waves, online-gaming epic 39 results