My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 121: Notices on Every Gate
The sect posted its first notice within a day of the bell, brief and carefully worded, pinned to every gate and market post across the city by outer disciples who offered no further explanation than the paper itself provided. Mortal residents were advised to keep to their homes after dark. Travel beyond the city's walls was discouraged until further notice. No cause was named.
Li Fan read it twice, then walked the market anyway, gathering what the day's ordinary gossip could still offer even with half the stalls shuttered early. The picture that emerged, pieced together from a dozen half-informed sources, was considerably larger than anything the notice's careful language admitted.
The seven sects, it seemed, had been summoned together — an emergency council, unprecedented in living memory, called by the Myriad Craft Sect itself rather than by any of the stronger powers that usually dictated such gatherings. Whatever matter had forced that summons, it had not gone well. A merchant who traded regularly with runners from the Falling Star Sword Sect swore the council had broken apart within two days, voices raised loud enough to carry beyond closed doors, at least three of the seven ancestors departing before any agreement had been reached.
"Something about the mountain," the merchant said, lowering his voice the way most people had taken to lowering their voices this past week. "Something the Myriad Craft Sect's been sitting on for longer than any of the others knew. They wanted it handled quietly. Word is, not everyone agreed quiet was still possible."
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Li Fan carried that fragment home and turned it over with considerably more weight than the merchant himself likely understood it deserved. Something the mountain had been sitting on. He thought immediately of the Ancestor's Peak, the warded gate, the cloud-wrapped shape he'd glimpsed once and never fully explained, and felt the two mysteries he'd spent years carefully keeping separate finally, unmistakably begin to press against each other.
He didn't force the connection into certainty. He'd learned that discipline too thoroughly to abandon it now, even with a city bracing itself around him. But he stopped pretending, sitting with his own tea gone cold in the shop's silent back room, that whatever secret the sect had guarded for generations and whatever crisis had just shattered a council of seven great powers were likely to remain unrelated much longer.
The second notice came four days later, considerably less careful in its wording than the first. A formal curfew, guards doubled at every gate, all non-essential travel to the outer sect grounds suspended entirely. Rumor filled the gap the notice left plainly enough — negotiations attempted and failed a second time, one sect withdrawing its delegation entirely rather than continue talks it apparently no longer trusted, another quietly recalling its own outer disciples from the city's markets and inns without explanation.
Li Fan closed the shop earlier than usual that evening, and sat beneath the plum tree once night had properly settled, watching the sky above the mountain's peaks for any repeat of that strange, bruised color he'd glimpsed the morning the bell first rang. He found nothing yet, only ordinary stars above ordinary dark ridgelines, the mountain holding its breath the same way the whole city now seemed to be holding its own.
He understood, sitting there in the cold, that whatever quiet preparation these past months had given him, it would need testing considerably sooner than he'd once hoped. The Ten Quiet Years, he understood plainly now, watching the mountain's silent shape against the dark, had finally, completely ended.
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