My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 125
Chapter 125: What Crossed the Perimeter
The sound Li Fan had heard from the courtyard the evening before found its source just past dawn.
He was three streets from the southern gate, moving with the last thin current of refugees still funneling toward the open road, when the sky to the north split apart. Not clouds parting — the air itself tore, a long jagged seam of white light opening above the mountain's outer ridge and holding there for the length of a held breath before the first vessels came through it.
They were enormous. Twenty zhang or more from bow to stern, their hulls built from overlapping plates of dark iron that hadn't been refined smooth, each seam visible even at this distance, and their undersides pulsed with a slow, ink-black light that turned the frost on the rooftops beneath them faintly blue as they passed overhead. Cultivators swarmed around the vessels in loose formation, hundreds of them, robes and blades catching what little morning sun made it through the cloud cover.
The crowd around Li Fan didn't scream so much as go silent all at once, the kind of silence that came a half-second before people remembered how to run.
The Myriad Craft Sect's barrier met the lead vessel somewhere above the mountain's northern face.
Li Fan felt it before he saw it — a pressure against his ears like standing too close to a struck bell, deep enough that it settled into his teeth rather than his hearing. Then the golden lattice he'd watched flicker faintly over the peaks for the past week flared to a brightness that threw shadows across the street, every rune in the formation's visible lines swelling to a size that made the mountain itself look, for a moment, like it had been redrawn in gold ink.
The vessel didn't stop. It slowed, its bow crumpling inward where the barrier caught it, and a stray tendril of the ward's lightning — thin as a hair from this distance, though Li Fan understood exactly what that meant about its true size up close — snapped sideways and struck a granary at the edge of the terraced farmland below the mountain.
The building was gone before the sound of the strike reached him. Not burned. The stone foundation had gone dark and glassy, fused smooth in a shape that still held the granary's outline the way a footprint holds the shape of a foot, and the grey ash that had been its walls and roof drifted sideways on the wind for several seconds before settling.
Li Fan kept walking.
Behind him, someone was screaming a name over and over, the same two syllables, and did not stop even after a second voice — older, rougher — told them sharply to keep moving, that standing still here would kill them faster than anything falling from that sky. Li Fan didn't turn to see whether the two voices found each other. He filed the sound away the way he filed away everything else in that stretch of road: useful information about how frightened people behaved when a battle they couldn't understand was happening above their heads, and nothing more than that.
He didn't let himself watch longer than that single look required.
He understood, the way he'd understood it standing in the limestone crevice three days from now that hadn't happened yet, that a battle at this scale didn't need to notice him to kill him. Every additional second spent staring upward was a second not spent putting distance between himself and whatever came down out of that torn sky next.
He drew his concealment tighter instead — not the ordinary suppression he'd worn for a decade in this city, but the fuller weave he'd spent the past year refining, Returning Breath folded beneath the spiritual shroud so that even the rhythm of his own qi matched the uneven, frightened breathing of the mortals around him. His Primordial Origin Core sat quiet and still in his dantian, drawn inward rather than circulated outward. To any divine sense sweeping this street, he would read as exactly what he looked like: a man in traveling clothes, one chest strapped to his back, moving with the same hurried, ordinary fear as everyone else on the road.
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He refused to spend qi buying himself speed. There was no need. Origin Stance kept his footing sure over broken paving stones and the debris already scattered by the ward's backlash, and years of walking continent-length roads on nothing but his own legs had left him capable of covering ground quickly without ever looking like he was covering it quickly. He let the crowd's own current carry him rather than cutting against it, matching his pace to the family ahead of him — a father with two children, one on each hip, moving as fast as his legs would take him without breaking into an outright run that might have separated them.
The gate itself was chaos by the time he reached it.
Sect guards who would ordinarily have processed departures with some order had abandoned the pretense entirely, simply waving the crowd through in a continuous stream while their own attention stayed fixed on the sky behind them. One guard, young enough that his hands were shaking on his spear, caught Li Fan's eye for half a breath and said nothing, said nothing to anyone, just kept waving people past.
Beyond the gate, the southern road was already packed tight enough that walking required patience rather than speed — carts abandoned at the roadside where their owners had decided legs would serve better than wheels, a merchant's mule standing riderless and placid amid the noise, someone's dropped bundle of clothing trampled flat into the mud. The smell of the crowd pressed close around him: unwashed wool, woodsmoke still clinging to clothes packed hastily near a hearth, the sharp copper edge of at least one person nearby bleeding from a fall.
He kept his sword beneath his outer robe, the hilt resting against his ribs where his hand could find it without appearing to reach for anything. He kept the chest's weight balanced against his spine rather than letting it swing and draw a second look from anyone walking near him. He kept his face arranged the way he'd arranged it for years on quieter, smaller dangers — not blank, because blank drew attention, but tired and afraid in exactly the measure everyone else around him was tired and afraid.
A second tremor rolled through the ground an hour later, softer than the first strike but longer, the kind of shaking that came from something enormous losing its footing rather than something small being struck. Li Fan felt it through the soles of his boots before he heard it, a low groan traveling up through packed earth that made several people around him stumble and one elderly man sit down hard in the road, too winded by fear to immediately stand back up.
Li Fan helped him up without breaking his own stride by much, got a muttered thanks that didn't wait for a reply, and kept moving.
Dust hung thick enough over the road now that it coated the back of his throat, gritty and mineral, mixed with something faintly acrid underneath that hadn't been there an hour ago — spent qi burning off somewhere behind them, or the granary's fused stone still cooling. He kept his breathing shallow and even, matching the crowd's own ragged rhythm rather than his own controlled one, and did not let himself think too long about how far that smell might be traveling, or how much further it still had to go before it stopped reaching him at all.
He did not look back at the mountain again. He'd already seen enough of it to know that looking wouldn't tell him anything useful — not at this distance, not with a battle unfolding on a scale his own cultivation couldn't yet meaningfully read. What mattered now was the road ahead of him, the crowd's slow current carrying him further from the perimeter with every hour, and the plain fact that the city behind him — the shop, the courtyard, the decade he'd spent building a life quiet enough that no one had thought to look twice at it — had already become somewhere he used to live rather than somewhere he still did.
The sky to the north kept tearing, in flashes he caught only at the edge of his vision now, distant enough that the light no longer threw shadows across the road. He let it stay at the edge of his vision. There was nothing behind him he could change, and a great deal ahead of him that still required his full attention if he meant to see it.
He walked on with the crowd, one more frightened, ordinary face among thousands, and did not stop until the mountain itself had shrunk small enough behind him that he had to turn his head to find it at all.
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