My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 126
Chapter 126: What the Ridge Could Not Hold
By midday the crowd had thinned enough that Li Fan could see the road ahead of him again instead of only the backs of the people walking it.
He left the main current an hour after that, cutting east off the packed road and into broken country where the ground rose in long limestone folds too steep for carts. It cost him time. It also put stone at his back instead of open sky, and after what he'd watched cross the mountain's perimeter that morning, he judged the trade worth making.
He found the crevice a little before the sun reached its highest point — a narrow split in a limestone outcrop, barely wide enough to turn sideways in, deep enough that a man standing inside it could see out through a gap no larger than a spread hand without being seen from the other direction. He set the chest down, drank from his waterskin, and had just begun to consider how much farther he could push before dark when the sky over the mountain went silent.
It wasn't an absence of sound. Birds still called somewhere in the scrub below him, and wind still moved through the crevice's narrow mouth, cold against the sweat drying on his neck. But the deep, rolling pressure that had followed him since dawn — the one that had settled into his teeth outside the granary, that he'd stopped consciously noticing somewhere around the fifth hour of walking because it never stopped — simply cut off.
Li Fan went still without deciding to.
He pressed his eye to the gap in the stone and looked north, toward the mountain's crown, and understood a moment later why the pressure had stopped. It hadn't ended. It had been drawn inward, gathered somewhere above the peaks into something too concentrated to spread the way it had been spreading all morning.
A figure crossed the sky.
He caught it only as motion at first — a dark shape moving faster than anything should move, covering what he judged to be several li in less time than it took him to draw one full breath. It stopped above the mountain's northernmost ridge, and where it stopped, the blue overhead simply came apart, a long tear opening across a stretch of sky wide enough to have covered the entire southern road he'd walked that morning. Behind the tear hung something crimson, vast, covered in burning script that Li Fan's eyes could not hold steady on for more than a heartbeat before the characters seemed to rearrange themselves into shapes his mind refused to keep.
A second presence answered it from the mountain itself. Li Fan felt that one directly, a weight dropping onto the whole region at once, heavy enough that his knees bent slightly before he caught his own balance against the crevice wall.
The two collided.
There was no explosion, not in any way Li Fan's years of experience with qi had taught him to expect one. What happened instead arrived in layers, each one reaching him a fraction of a second after the one before it, as though the event itself were too large to travel through the world all at once.
First the light — white, absolute, bright enough that even through the narrow gap in the stone it forced his eyes shut and left a burning afterimage against the dark of his own eyelids. Then the pressure, a wall of air slamming down the ridge and through the scrub below with enough force that he heard trees snapping somewhere beyond his line of sight, a series of dry cracks like knuckles breaking, dozens of them at once. Then the moisture left his skin entirely, all at once, the sweat on his neck and palms simply gone as though the air itself had drunk it, and a thin trickle of warmth ran from his nose down over his lip before he'd registered that the pressure change had been enough to burst something small inside it.
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The ground beneath him groaned.
He felt it through his boots first, then through his knees where he'd braced against the stone, a long low shudder that built rather than struck all at once. Somewhere to the north, a ridge he'd walked beside not three hours earlier simply moved — shifted several body-lengths sideways as though some enormous hand beneath the earth had shrugged, and a column of dust rose from where it had stood, climbing into a sky that had gone the color of an old bruise.
Li Fan drove his qi down through his legs and into the stone beneath him, not to strengthen himself against an attack meant for him — nothing here was meant for him at all — but simply to keep his footing as the shockwave's tail end rolled through the crevice. Returning Bone answered the pressure the way it always did, his skeleton taking the weight and passing it into the ground rather than letting it rattle through muscle and organ unchecked. He held his position, breathed through the ash and mineral tang that had replaced the clean cold air of a moment before, and did not step back from the gap in the stone.
The battle did not end. It simply moved, the way weather moved, drifting east along the ridgeline in a series of further collisions that each announced themselves the same way the first one had — light first, then pressure, then sound arriving late and wrong, as though the world itself couldn't decide what order to deliver the damage in.
A village Li Fan had passed near that morning, a cluster of perhaps thirty low roofs tucked into a fold of the hills below the mountain's eastern face, went dark under a shadow that passed low enough over it to flatten half its structures with wind alone. He watched it happen from too far away to hear anything from the village itself — no screaming, no collapsing timber, nothing but the visual fact of roofs there and then not there — and understood, in the plainest and least comfortable way he had yet understood anything in this world, that whoever was fighting above that ridge had not chosen to destroy that village. They likely hadn't noticed it at all.
He thought, distantly, of every story he'd half-believed and half-dismissed since the day he first opened the sutra in a stone alcove with no idea what world he'd fallen into. Cultivators who moved mountains. Battles that boiled seas. He'd read the words in mortal storybooks and later in sect texts and had filed them, without quite meaning to, somewhere adjacent to legend — impressive, but softened by distance, the way any story is softened once enough retellings have worn its edges smooth.
There was no softness in what he was watching now. The mountain ridge that had shifted sideways an hour ago was still settling, small slides of rock and dust still running down its new slope. The village was simply gone from the place it had been. And the two beings responsible for both were, as far as Li Fan's own cultivation could judge, still only beginning.
He did not think, watching it, that he wanted to stand where they stood. He thought, with the same flat clarity he'd used to weigh every dangerous choice across the past decade, that remaining anywhere within reach of this fight was the single most reckless thing he could do with the rest of his life, and that the life in question was worth considerably more to him than one more look at something this far beyond him.
He waited until the pressure eased enough that his ears stopped ringing, gathered the chest back onto his shoulders, and left the crevice moving southeast, away from both the road and the ridge, cutting a line through broken ground that put as much stone and distance between himself and the mountain as the terrain would allow.
Behind him, the sky continued to tear and mend and tear again, the light of it visible even in daylight now, a slow pulse against the clouds that didn't fade no matter how many li he put beneath his boots. He didn't look back at it again. He had already seen enough to know exactly how small he was standing next to it, and unlike some lessons, that one required no repetition to take root.
The sun dropped behind the hills to the west while he walked, and the light from the mountain kept burning against the dark long after everything else around him had gone quiet.
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