My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 123: The Mountain Wakes Its Walls
The final council meeting broke apart in a single afternoon, and this time the city didn't need rumor to confirm it. Li Fan felt the change directly, a pressure rolling down off the mountain's grounds that had nothing to do with sound this time, a vast, deliberate presence unfurling itself across the sect's full territory the way a sleeping animal might finally, fully wake.
The protective formation. He'd heard of it only in passing across a decade of ordinary market gossip, an ancient array said to ring the sect's entire domain, dormant so long that most residents had stopped believing it still functioned at all. It was functioning now. Li Fan watched, from the low rise behind the carving quarter, as a faint golden lattice bloomed briefly visible against the darkening sky above the mountain's peaks, vast lines of light connecting point to point across a territory too large for his eye to fully follow, before settling back into an invisible, humming presence he could feel pressing against his own senses even from this distance.
A formal notice replaced every prior one within the hour, sealed with the sect's own mark rather than a mere administrative hand. Li Fan read it standing in the emptying market square, the paper's brief, formal language carrying more weight than any rumor had managed across the past two weeks combined.
By order of the Ancestor and Sect Master, the grounds of Myriad Craft Sect are placed under full defensive posture. All residents of Myriad Craft City are advised, in the strongest terms, to seek shelter beyond the region within three days. The sect can no longer guarantee the city's safety should conflict reach these walls.
No further explanation followed. None was needed. The exodus that had been a steady current for two weeks became, within hours of that notice, something closer to a flood, carts and foot traffic alike choking every road leading south.
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Li Fan didn't join them, not yet. He spent the remainder of that day instead doing what he'd always done when the world handed him a crisis too large to fully understand — gathering information rather than fear, walking the emptying streets with his divine sense stretched carefully outward, cataloguing which families had gone, which shops had shuttered for good, which few stubborn residents remained behind for reasons of their own.
He found Old Sun's former colleague, the physician who ran what remained of Hundred Herbs Hall's local branch, packing her own modest stock of medicine into a single cart outside her door.
"You should be well on your way south by now," she said, not looking up from her work.
"I intend to be. Not quite yet." Li Fan helped her lift a heavy crate onto the cart without being asked. "What do you know, that the notices aren't saying plainly?"
She paused, studying him a moment with the particular directness of someone too tired for careful diplomacy. "Only that the sect's own healers have been recalled from every outpost across three provinces these past ten days. That's not a defensive posture, carver. That's a full mobilization. Whatever's coming, the sect itself expects real casualties, and plenty of them." She resumed her packing. "Go. Whatever business you think is worth staying for, it won't matter to a stray shockwave that doesn't know your name."
Li Fan thanked her, and walked the rest of the way home through streets gone nearly silent, the golden lattice above the mountain's peaks pulsing faintly now and then against the darkening sky like something breathing. He reached his own courtyard as full night settled, and stood a long while beneath the bare plum tree, watching that distant, patient light.
He had three days, the notice said, before the sect withdrew even its uncertain promise of the city's safety. He intended to use every one of them, not fleeing early out of fear, but finishing, at last, whatever quiet preparation this decade of patient living had left unfinished — because whatever broke loose above this mountain, he understood now with a certainty that settled cold and absolute in his chest, was going to reach considerably further than any wall the sect could still hold against it.
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