My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 108: Three Small Pieces
Li Fan didn't return to the fifth terrace's gate. He'd meant what he told Old Mu, but meaning it and rushing it were different things, and he spent the following weeks instead gathering whatever pieces he could reach without ever setting foot near that ward again.
The first piece came from his own memory of the array itself, worked out slowly over several nights in the training room's lamplight, sketching what he'd glimpsed of the gate's formation from recall and comparing it against every structural principle he'd taught himself across a decade of copied manuals. The ward wasn't merely a concealment or a defense. Buried in its deeper lines, as best he could reconstruct them, sat a containment structure — built, unless his reading was badly mistaken, to keep something in rather than to keep intruders out.
The second piece came from an outer disciple he'd treated twice before for minor training injuries, a young man grateful enough for the free care that a careful, idle question earned an honest answer rather than suspicion. Li Fan asked only what any curious mortal might ask — whether the sect's elders ever climbed higher than the fourth terrace, and what business took them there.
"The Ancestor's peak," the disciple said, lowering his voice more from habit than real caution. "None of us go near it. Even the elders only climb when summoned, and they come back saying nothing worth repeating. There's a keeper's rotation, though — junior elders assigned to tend the gate itself, month by month. Miserable duty, they say. Nobody volunteers twice."
Li Fan filed the detail carefully. A keeper's rotation meant regular traffic, regular traffic meant patterns, and patterns, given enough patient watching, eventually revealed something useful.
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The third piece came from his own shelves, from a portion of Wei Baishan's old library he hadn't opened in years — dense regional histories, bought or looted decades before Li Fan had ever been born, describing in guarded language the ancient catastrophe that had scarred this entire continent long before the seven sects existed to inherit its ruins. He found, on a page he'd skimmed once and never properly read, a single line describing the battle's epicenter as a single peak "since claimed and sealed by those who witnessed its cost, that its lesson might never walk free again."
No name. No location specific enough to confirm anything. But a claimed and sealed peak, guarded by the descendants of those who'd witnessed some ancient cost firsthand, fit uncomfortably well against a cloud-wrapped mountain rising above a sect founded, according to every account Li Fan had ever gathered, in the direct aftermath of that same catastrophe.
He laid the three pieces out for Old Mu that same week, plainly, without dressing them up as more certain than they were. "A containment ward. A keeper's rotation nobody wants twice. A regional history naming a sealed peak tied to the ancient war that scarred this whole continent." He shook his head slowly. "None of it proves the fifth terrace is that peak. But if it is, the sect isn't merely hiding something up there. They're guarding against it."
Old Mu turned that over with a frown. "And the dragon mark. Your black-robed men. Where do they sit in a story like that?"
"I don't know yet." Li Fan said it plainly, without the frustration the admission might once have carried. "Maybe nowhere. Maybe they're hunting something entirely separate from whatever's sealed up that mountain, and I'm forcing two mysteries into one shape simply because they both frighten me." He met Old Mu's eyes. "I'd rather admit that honestly than pretend I've solved something I haven't."
Old Mu nodded slowly, some quiet approval in the motion. "Good," he said. "That's the difference between you and most men chasing secrets, boy. You're willing to say you don't know." He picked his chisel back up. "Keep saying it, as long as it's still true."
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