My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 142 — The Price of Thunder

The news reached Quiet River Town on the back of a grain merchant's cart, five days after the night Li Fan had spent sitting in the dark beneath his own floorboards.

He heard it the way he heard most things — standing at his workbench with a chisel in hand, the workshop door open to the street, half-listening to two men trade gossip outside Widow Bai's stall.

"Whole camp," the merchant was saying, his voice carrying the particular relish of a man delivering the best story he'd told in months. "South of here, past Miller's Ridge. Nothing left but a scar in the ground. Trees flattened for half a mile in every direction, black as a smith's forge, and not a body left whole enough to bury."

"Bandits?" the other man asked.

"Blood River scum, they're saying. Whole nest of them, wiped out in a single night. My cousin's boy rode past it three days after — said the ground was still warm under the ash. Said the air smelled burnt clean through, like lightning had struck the same spot a hundred times over instead of once."

"Heaven's judgment," the other man said, and there was no irony in it. "Those bastards had it coming."

"Judgment or something else. My cousin's boy said there were men out there already, poking through what was left. Not local. Cultivators, from the look of their robes. He said one of them stood over the scorch mark for the better part of an hour, just staring at it, not saying a word to anyone."

Li Fan set the chisel down with the same steady motion he'd been using a moment before, betraying nothing in the movement, and let the conversation continue past him without turning to look. Twenty-five miles, by his own later, careful estimate. A stronghold and everything within a wide circle of it scoured down to blackened earth, in a single strike he hadn't consciously aimed and couldn't have consciously repeated.

Over the following weeks, he gathered what more he could without ever asking a direct question of anyone. What emerged, piece by piece, unsettled him more than the destruction itself had. The cultivators who came to study the site found no trace of a formation array in the scorched earth — no burn pattern radiating from a central casting point, no residual qi signature belonging to any known Lightning-attribute technique. A proper Heavenly Tribulation-style strike left its own unmistakable fingerprint in the ground, distinct from an ordinary storm's lightning the way a signature differed from a smudge. This left none of that. What it left instead, according to a rumor traced back through three retellings to someone who'd actually stood on the site, was residual energy of a character none of them recognized — clean, total, and utterly without the layered complexity a cultivated technique should have carried. No caster's mark. No formation. And, strangest of all, no plausible source close enough to have reached the camp at all. Every technique capable of that kind of destruction required a caster within some meaningful distance of the target — a mile, perhaps two, for the most powerful array-based strikes any of the investigating cultivators had ever heard of. Miller's Ridge sat in open, empty country. Nothing powerful enough to produce that scar had been anywhere near it.

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He felt, turning the rumor over in the quiet of his workshop each evening, something he recognized from long practice as a familiar discomfort — not guilt exactly, and not regret, since the men who'd died had spent years extorting and beating and occasionally killing people who'd never done them harm. But a plain, clear-eyed understanding that he had ended thirty lives without deciding to, and that the distinction between deciding and not deciding mattered less to the dead than it did to him. He set the thought down without dwelling on it further, the way Old Sun had once taught him to set down a death he couldn't have prevented before the next patient arrived. The Blood River Gang was gone. Quiet River Town had lost nothing it would miss.

What concerned him more was the shape the investigation had begun taking. A destroyed bandit camp with no identifiable cause was the kind of mystery that could occupy idle cultivators for a season and then fade, unresolved, into local legend. But the questions being asked, as best he could piece together from fragments overheard across three different market conversations, had already moved past who and settled onto something closer to what — what kind of cultivator, what kind of technique, what kind of power could reach a target from a distance no known method allowed. That was a far more dangerous question than the first. Curiosity about a strange death faded. Curiosity about an impossible capability did not.

There was a second thread beneath the first, one he only caught because he happened to be repairing a merchant's strongbox the week a particular customer mentioned it in passing, complaining about delayed trade caused by "all this business with Blood River's old debts." Old debts. Li Fan said nothing, and kept working the lock's mechanism with a fine file, letting the man talk uninterrupted the way men always talked more freely to someone whose hands were occupied with something else. It emerged, in scattered pieces over the better part of an hour, that some of the investigating cultivators had shown as much interest in Gou Feng's old dealings — his debts, his associates, whatever ledgers or arrangements the gang had kept — as they had in the scorched ground itself. One had reportedly asked, in a village two days south, whether anyone knew who the gang had answered to. Li Fan finished the lock, handed the strongbox back, and did not let his expression change even slightly. He thought, instead, of a thin, nervous young man carrying a sealed pouch north along a towpath once every fourth week, and of a debt from Gou Feng's boating days that a drunk boatman had laughed off entirely too quickly. It was possible the two threads were unrelated. He did not believe, turning the coincidence over with the same patience he gave everything, that they were.

He extended his awareness carefully in the nights that followed, staying well short of the reach he'd touched during the enlightenment itself, unwilling to risk leaving anything open the way he now understood, with a clarity that still unsettled him three weeks later, he had left something open before. What he found, at the edges of a more modest range, was activity — small groups moving through the region south of Miller's Ridge, methodical, patient, the kind of searching that belonged to people who suspected there was something specific to find rather than simply satisfying curiosity about a strange piece of gossip. They had not yet reached Quiet River Town. But they were moving in its general direction, in the unhurried, comprehensive way of men who intended to search every settlement within a reasonable distance of the scorched ground before giving up.

Li Fan continued his ordinary work through those weeks exactly as he had every week before — repairs finished on schedule, the ledger kept current, Widow Bai's grandson stopping by most afternoons to watch him carve. Nothing in the rhythm of Master Lin's days changed. But for the first time since he'd walked into this town with a tired horse and a false name, the cultivation world was moving toward him instead of away, asking two questions at once instead of one — and he no longer had any way of knowing which of the two, if either, would eventually lead them to his door.

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