My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 107: The Fifth Terrace
The sect accepted deliveries of finished wares twice a season, and Li Fan had carried Old Mu's commissions up the mountain's lower terraces himself often enough over the years that the gate stewards no longer bothered checking his basket beyond a glance. This time he carried a set of shrine boxes bound for the outer disciples' quarters, and let the errand take him one terrace higher than his usual route required, following a supply path he'd noted on prior trips but never once had reason to walk.
The sect's grounds rose in five broad terraces above the city, each one carved into the mountainside and walled off from the next by low stone barriers meant more for order than defense. Outer disciples trained on the first two. Inner disciples and the sect's various craft peaks occupied the third and fourth. The fifth terrace, Li Fan had always understood in the vague way a mortal understood most sect matters, belonged to the elders alone, and no delivery route had ever carried him within sight of its gate.
He reached it anyway, or near enough, the supply path curving close along the boundary wall before doubling back toward the disciples' quarters he was meant to be delivering to. The gate itself stood shut, unremarkable iron reinforced with a formation Li Fan recognized in its broad structure but couldn't read in its finer detail, years of formation study giving him just enough understanding to know the array was old, dense, and built by someone considerably more skilled than the concealment work he'd spent a decade refining beneath his own training room.
What caught his attention wasn't the gate. It was the mountain rising beyond it — a single peak, taller than the others ringing the sect's grounds, its upper reaches wrapped in cloud even on a clear afternoon, in a way no natural weather pattern should have produced. A pale shape moved briefly through that cloud as he watched, gone before he could resolve it into anything more definite than a suggestion of scale, vast enough that the distance alone should have made it invisible.
A steward's voice broke his attention before he'd finished processing what he'd seen. "Deliveries don't come this way."
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Li Fan turned, unhurried, and offered the same easy explanation he'd have given any misdirection. "Lost the path past the third terrace. My apologies." He held up the basket of shrine boxes as evidence of his innocent purpose.
The steward, a broad-shouldered man in the sect's grey, studied him a moment with more suspicion than the excuse should have earned, then nodded toward the correct route. "Third terrace turn's marked with a red flag. Mind it next time." He didn't move on immediately, waiting instead until Li Fan had actually started back down the correct path, watching him the whole distance with the particular attention of a man making certain a mistake didn't repeat itself.
Li Fan delivered the shrine boxes without further incident, and said nothing to the disciples who received them about the cloud-wrapped peak or the pale shape he'd glimpsed moving through it. He carried the image back down the mountain instead, turning it over with the same careful attention he gave anything genuinely new, rather than another secondhand rumor filtered through gossip or an old man's forty-year-old memory.
He found Old Mu at the shop's counter that evening and told him plainly, without the caution he'd once wrapped around every such conversation. "There's a fifth terrace above the sect's craft peaks. A gate, warded heavily enough that I couldn't read the formation's finer structure. Behind it, a peak taller than the rest, wrapped in cloud that didn't move the way ordinary weather moves." He paused. "Something was in that cloud. Large. I saw it for less than a breath."
Old Mu set down the piece he'd been sanding. "Higher up the mountain."
"Higher up the mountain," Li Fan agreed.
Neither of them spoke for a long moment, the shop's ordinary evening quiet settling around a conversation that had stopped being ordinary the instant Li Fan finished his description. Old Mu finally broke the silence, his voice carrying none of its usual dry humor.
"You mean to go back."
"Not yet. Not carelessly." Li Fan met the old man's eyes, and found, for once, no hesitation in his own certainty. "But yes. Whatever's behind that gate, it's the first true thing I've found in all of this — not a rumor, not a secondhand memory, but something I saw with my own eyes. I won't ignore that simply because it's dangerous to look closer."
Old Mu studied him a long moment, then gave a slow, resigned nod, the particular acceptance of a man who'd stopped expecting Li Fan's caution to mean the same thing as retreat. "Then be considerably more careful climbing that mountain than you were walking home from the tanner's yard," he said. "Whatever lives behind wards that heavy didn't earn them guarding nothing."
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