My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 115: What the Sutra Would Ask of Him
Li Fan didn't rush toward Core Condensation, even with grief sitting heavier in the shop's silence than any prior season had ever asked him to carry. He'd distrusted the forced bottleneck in other cultivators for too many years to let loss talk him into the same mistake now, and the discipline of that distrust proved, in its own quiet way, a kind of anchor through the worst of the first month alone.
He spent the weeks that followed in careful study instead, working back through every text he owned that touched on the realm ahead of him. Wei Baishan's old manuals described Core Condensation the ordinary way — accumulated qi compressed steadily until it crystallized into a stable core. The Primordial Origin Dao Sutra offered something less definite and considerably more unsettling: a passage describing the sutra's method not as compression at all, but as origin, a core formed by returning qi to whatever shape it had held before accumulation ever began.
He didn't know what that would mean in practice. He trusted, the same way he'd trusted every prior breakthrough, that whatever core eventually formed inside him would look and behave differently than an ordinary cultivator's — the same quiet difference that had let him fight a Core Condensation-level opponent to a standstill while still, technically, standing at Peak Qi Sea.
That difference mattered more now than it ever had. The Jiang family had studied his economy, his preference for minimal force, closely enough to build a formation meant specifically to counter it. Whatever cultivation base he built from here forward needed to be harder to read than the one they'd already learned — not merely stronger, but stranger, resistant to exactly the kind of patient observation that had nearly killed him in that street.
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He turned his attention to the concealment array beneath the training room with fresh urgency, refining it further, layering a second, subtler shell around his qi's usual signature that would, once a core formed, hopefully mask not only its presence but its particular character. He tested drafts against his own Peak Qi Sea reserves for over a month, until the silver shimmer that answered his qi held steadier and quieter than anything he'd managed before.
The shop stayed closed through most of that stretch. He'd considered, briefly, asking someone to keep it running in his absence, and found he had no honest heart left for the idea. Old Mu had run it beside him for a decade. He wasn't ready to hand its rhythm to a stranger's hands so soon after losing the only hands he'd ever trusted with it.
He settled his other affairs over the following days with more care than he'd given any prior cultivation attempt — the courtyard's outer wards reinforced and tested twice over, a modest store of medicine and supplies left within easy reach, a note left with the lumber merchant explaining a lengthy absence without explaining its cause. He didn't yet understand, sitting beneath the plum tree the night before he finally meant to begin, quite how thoroughly this particular breakthrough would teach him the value of that preparation. He understood only that the fight in the street had cost him something worth answering properly, that grief had taught him how quickly a life could be interrupted without warning, and that Peak Qi Sea, however far it had carried him, had finished carrying him as far as it safely could.
He set the small unfinished bird beside the resting crane on the shelf, where both would wait undisturbed for however long this took, and rose the next morning to descend into the chamber beneath the training room. He sealed the entrance behind him, and began.
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