My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 130
Chapter 130: Crow's Throat
The gorge earned its name honestly. Two walls of grey stone rose sheer on either side of the path, narrowing near the middle to a gap barely wide enough for two men to walk abreast, and somewhere above the crows themselves sat in silent rows along the ledges, watching the narrow strip of sky rather than the ground below it.
Li Fan had chosen the route deliberately. A gorge this tight left almost nothing for a pursuer to hide behind, and after three days spent checking his own back trail more carefully than he'd ever needed to before, the idea of a corridor with clean sightlines in both directions had seemed, that morning, like a reasonable trade against the risk of being boxed in.
The gorge's floor was littered with old rockfall, boulders worn smooth by whatever seasonal water once ran through here, and Li Fan picked his way between them without hurrying, listening to his own boots against loose shale, to the thin whistle of wind funneling between the stone walls, to the dry rattle of a pebble dislodged somewhere above and clattering down into a crevice out of sight. The air smelled of old dust and cold stone, the particular mineral scent of a place the sun rarely reached deep enough to warm.
He understood the mistake the moment he was a third of the way through, when the ordinary sounds of the gorge — wind, shale, the distant complaint of a settling crow — went quiet all at once, the way a room goes quiet when someone has just walked in that everyone else recognizes and fears.
He felt no divine sense reaching for him. No presence brushed against his awareness at all. That absence was itself the warning, the same specific wrongness he'd learned to recognize in the open scrubland days before, except sharper here, more deliberate — the quiet of people who had trained for years to make certain their own qi left no ripple for anyone to catch.
Li Fan stopped in the center of the path and did not reach for his sword yet. Whoever this was, they had chosen their ground with more care than the two groups before them, and drawing a weapon before he understood the shape of the trap would only tell them he'd noticed it too late to matter.
A single, thin note rose from somewhere above him.
A bone flute, its pitch high and clear, cutting through the gorge's stillness like a blade through silk.
The stone walls answered it.
Vines erupted from cracks in the rock face on both sides.
Thick and fast-growing, wood-attribute qi driving them forward at a speed no natural plant could have matched.
Li Fan cut left on instinct, Origin Stance keeping his footing sure over the loose shale.
The first grasping tendril missed his shoulder by less than a hand's width, close enough that he felt the rough bark scrape across his sleeve.
An old woman stood on the ledge above where the flute's note had come from, robes the faded blue-grey of someone who had walked this gorge and others like it for decades, the bone flute still raised to her lips. Azure Flow Control Art moved in the air around her, a fine mist gathering at her feet and pouring down the rock face in a slow, deliberate current — meant, Li Fan understood watching it, to slick the stone beneath him rather than strike him directly.
He drew his sword now.
There was no more use in patience.
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A second figure dropped from the opposite ledge.
Impossibly heavy for the speed of the fall.
He struck the ground with a concussive crack that split the shale beneath his boots and threw a spray of grey dust into the air. Copper-skinned, enormous, a tower shield strapped across one forearm nearly as tall as Li Fan himself.
The moment his feet found the ground, the pressure changed.
It came down like a hand pressing flat against the whole gorge.
Not painful yet. Heavy. A Gravity Lock Array spreading outward from the giant's stance and settling over the stone corridor with the weight of something that intended to make every step cost more than the last.
Li Fan's boots sank a fraction deeper into the loose shale than they should have.
His own qi strained against the pressure the instant he moved. Returning Bone answered automatically, his skeleton bracing against a weight that had no physical source and no physical limit either.
The third attacker announced himself with light rather than sound.
A rapier blade crackling white-blue at its edge, lightning-attribute qi coiled tight along its length, wielded by a white-haired youth who dropped into the gorge from directly overhead — too fast for Li Fan to track him cleanly against the narrow strip of grey sky.
Three points.
Vines from the walls. A crushing weight from below. A blade of gathered lightning already descending from above.
All three closing before Li Fan had finished registering that they'd begun.
He read the shape of it in the half-second he had.
This was not three cultivators attacking together by chance. This was a formation, rehearsed and precise, each piece built to close whatever gap the others left open.
He committed to the lightning first, judging it the fastest and least forgiving of the three.
Origin Severance sought the rapier's structural weakness on reflex, his blade angling to intercept along the seam where the youth's qi thinned near the crossguard rather than meeting the crackling edge directly.
The youth's blade shifted mid-strike. A subtlety of technique Li Fan hadn't accounted for.
The intercept came a fraction late.
The rapier's tip caught his shoulder instead of sliding past it clean.
Pain arrived a half-second behind the impact, sharp and immediate, lightning-attribute qi discharging directly into muscle and nerve in a way that made his whole arm seize before he forced it back under control through sheer will.
Blood welled dark and fast around the wound.
Beneath it, something worse — a faint, stuttering resistance in his own qi circulation on that side, the lightning's charge lodging itself in his meridians rather than dispersing cleanly the way an ordinary cut would have.
He did not let the shock slow him.
He drove his good shoulder down and back, Returning Bone hardening the joint enough to trap the rapier's blade for the fraction of a second the youth needed to realize the strike had cost him his weapon's freedom rather than won him the exchange outright.
Li Fan wrenched sideways.
The blade's crossguard tore free of the youth's grip entirely, spinning off to bury itself point-first in the shale several paces away, still crackling faintly where it landed.
The youth didn't retreat to recover it.
He came in bare-handed instead, qi still crackling faint and blue along his forearms, driving a palm strike toward Li Fan's injured side with the clear intention of finishing what the rapier had started.
Li Fan turned his hip into the strike rather than away from it, letting the blow skate along Returning Bone's hardened plane across his ribs instead of driving into the soft tissue beneath.
He answered with a short, brutal elbow that caught the youth across the jaw and sent him staggering back two full steps into the gorge wall.
The gravity pressed harder before the youth had finished recovering his footing, the giant on the far ledge driving both palms downward as though physically shoving the weight of the array deeper into the stone corridor.
Li Fan felt his own knees threaten to buckle under it, Returning Bone straining to distribute a pressure that had no single point to brace against.
Standing still under this weight for much longer would cost him more than the shoulder already had.
The vines kept coming.
Two more tendrils lashed out from the gorge wall behind him, thick as a man's wrist, wood-attribute qi driving them forward faster than the first pair had managed.
Li Fan caught one on the flat of his blade, Origin Flow keeping the contact clean and nearly costless, and cut cleanly through the second with a motion that opened a long, weeping gash down its length, sap and severed fiber spraying across the loose shale.
Somewhere above, the old woman's flute rose in pitch, calling something new out of the stone.
Li Fan planted his feet against ground that fought every inch of movement he asked of it, blood running warm down his ruined sleeve, and understood that this fight had only just begun.
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