My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 131
Chapter 131: What the Gorge Took
The gravity kept building.
Li Fan felt it settle deeper into his knees with every breath, Returning Bone straining to spread a weight that pressed from every direction at once rather than one he could brace against cleanly.
He extended his divine sense through the pain in his shoulder, short-range and precise, reading the gorge the way he'd read the discs in the creek bed days before — not watching any single attacker, but tracing the currents binding all three together.
The pattern emerged fast.
The giant's array anchored itself through his stance, both boots planted wide on a specific fold of shale that channeled the weight downward into the stone. Disturb that anchor, and the gravity lost its foundation.
The old woman's vines drew their speed from the flute's rhythm, each note timing the next surge of wood-attribute qi. Break her breath, and the vines slowed.
And the youth, recovering now from the elbow that had staggered him, was already gathering fresh lightning along his bare forearms for a second strike.
Li Fan chose his order.
The youth came first, driving both crackling palms toward Li Fan's chest in a strike meant to finish what the rapier had started.
Li Fan didn't retreat.
He stepped inside the strike instead, closing the distance faster than the youth's technique could track, and drove the heel of his palm up under the boy's jaw with the full weight of his own forward motion behind it.
Bone gave way beneath the blow.
The youth's head snapped back, his body already falling before the lightning gathered along his arms had finished discharging harmlessly into empty air.
He did not get up again.
Li Fan didn't pause over him. He caught the falling body by the collar and drove it sideways, hard, directly into the path of the old woman's next surge of vines.
The tendrils, still answering her flute's last command, tangled around the corpse instead of Li Fan, wood-attribute qi wasting itself on dead weight for the half-second he needed.
He used that half-second to move.
Not toward the woman. Toward the giant, whose stance still held the anchor Li Fan's divine sense had already mapped.
He crossed the gorge floor low and fast, the movement principle he'd once watched in a mountain monk's lecture on bird flight carrying him along the path of least resistance between the pressing weight above and the shale below — never fighting the gravity head-on, only slipping through the narrow seams where its grip thinned between pulses.
The giant turned too slowly to track him.
Li Fan's sword found the anchor point exactly where his senses had marked it, driving down through the fold of shale beneath the giant's planted boot and severing the qi thread rooting the array to stable ground.
The Gravity Lock Array shuddered.
For one instant, the crushing weight doubled, the array lashing outward as its foundation failed —
And then it collapsed entirely, the pressure releasing all at once with enough force that loose shale and dust erupted upward around the giant's own feet.
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The old woman screamed something through her flute, a note higher and more desperate than any before it, and drove a fresh wall of vines directly at Li Fan's back while he was still turning from the giant.
He felt them coming before he saw them — the same wrongness in the air he'd learned to trust days ago — and pivoted low, letting the tangle of the youth's corpse buy him one more fraction of a second as the vines struck it instead of him.
His sword was already moving.
Origin Severance found the vines' structural root at the base of her qi's flow, the exact seam where her technique's power gathered before spreading outward, and his blade cut clean through it in a single stroke that left the vines twitching and lifeless across the shale.
The old woman staggered back against the ledge, the flute falling from lips gone suddenly pale.
She never raised it again.
Li Fan closed the last of the distance and ended it, the strike clean and final, and she went down without another sound reaching the stone walls around her.
The giant recovered first from the array's collapse, roaring something wordless and driving his tower shield forward in a full-body charge that Li Fan had no room left to dodge cleanly in the narrow gorge.
The shield's rim caught his sword arm.
Steel and bone met copper-wrapped iron, and the impact wrenched his blade from his grip entirely, sending it clattering somewhere behind him into the rockfall he couldn't spare the attention to find.
Unarmed, Li Fan didn't retreat.
He let the giant's own momentum carry the shield past his shoulder rather than meeting it square, stepping inside the man's guard the instant the strike overextended, and drove three fast strikes into precise points along the ribs and throat that a decade of studying anatomy under Old Sun had taught him mattered more than raw strength ever could.
The giant's charge broke.
His knees buckled on the third strike, breath failing where Li Fan's fingers found the soft channel beneath his collarbone, and Li Fan finished it with his bare hands the same efficient way he'd finished everything else in this gorge — no wasted motion, no strike spent proving anything that didn't need proving.
The giant fell last, and did not rise.
Li Fan stood alone in Crow's Throat with the crows still silent above him, blood soaking through his ruined sleeve, his sword arm numb from the shield's impact, his qi reserves scraped down further than they'd fallen since the day he'd faced the black-robed pursuers as a boy with nothing but two spent talismans.
He retrieved his sword from the rockfall first, wiping the blade clean before sheathing it. Then he moved through the bodies methodically, gathering storage pouches, checking each for anything worth the weight of carrying, and pocketing what mattered without lingering over any of it.
He burned all three before he left the gorge. Scarlet Flame Control Art took more out of him than it should have, his reserves already thin from the fight itself, but he held the flame steady until nothing remained of the giant, the youth, or the old woman but ash and a few blackened fragments of bone scattered across the shale. Three Late Core Condensation cultivators found dead together, killed by means no search party would easily reconstruct, was a mystery worth investigating. Ash and cold stone were not. He watched the last of the smoke thin and disperse against the gorge walls before he trusted himself to move on.
He bound his shoulder tightly with a strip torn from his own undershirt, pressed a healing pill from his dwindling supply between his teeth without pausing to study its exact grade, and let his own qi begin the slow work of settling the lightning's stubborn charge out of his meridians. The taste of the pill sat bitter and metallic on his tongue, familiar from a decade of treating far smaller wounds than this one, and beneath the bitterness he could feel the medicine's warmth spreading slowly down through his shoulder, unhurried, doing exactly as much as a Qi Sea-grade remedy could do against an injury this deep.
The gorge had cost him more than either fight before it. He understood that plainly, sitting for a moment against the cool stone wall to let his breathing steady before he trusted his own legs again. His dantian felt thin in a way it hadn't since the earliest months after his Core Condensation breakthrough, the reserve he'd spent holding Origin Intent against a collapsing gravity array and cutting through two separate techniques still slow to refill even with his eyes closed and his attention turned fully inward.
Three cultivators who had studied him well enough to build a formation meant specifically to corner him, rather than simply overpower him, and he had survived it only by refusing to fight the shape of their trap on its own terms. He turned that fact over the way he turned over every hard lesson this world handed him, filing it alongside everything else he now understood about being hunted by people patient enough to plan rather than simply strong enough to chase.
He rose when his legs would hold him, checked the gorge once more for anything he'd missed, and continued south through Crow's Throat with the crows finally beginning to stir and call above him again, indifferent to what had happened on the stone below. His shoulder throbbed with every stride, a dull, insistent reminder that would need days rather than hours to fully mend, and he walked anyway, because the road south had never once cared whether he was ready to keep walking it.
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