My dao to eternity

The silence struck him before anything else did.

Li Fan had walked the edges of the Myriad Beast Valley before, years ago, as a frightened Body Refining cultivator with nothing to guide him but instinct and a scripture he barely understood. He remembered that wilderness as loud in every direction — birdsong overhead, insects droning through the underbrush, the distant calls of beasts marking territory or warning off rivals, a constant, layered noise that made the valley feel alive even in its most dangerous stretches. Even the outer regions near Myriad Beast City, tamer by comparison, had never once fallen this quiet.

Here, past the boundary and deeper into ground he'd never personally walked, almost nothing stirred. He stood still for a long moment, letting the wrongness of it settle fully into his awareness before moving further. No birds called overhead. No insects droned through the undergrowth pressing close on either side of the narrow game trail he'd chosen to follow. The trees themselves seemed to hold their usual creaking stillness without any of the small, constant motion a living forest ordinarily carried — no rustle of some small animal moving through fallen leaves, no distant snap of a branch under a larger creature's weight. A wilderness this rich, home to beasts and spirit herbs and dangers the Seven Great Sects themselves had never fully mapped, should never sound like this.

He extended his divine sense outward, carefully, staying well within what he judged a safe margin below his true range — a caution earned the hard way, on a night months ago when an open awareness had found a path he hadn't meant to give it. At roughly two thousand miles, the coarse, blurred edge of what his current cultivation could reach, he swept the surrounding region in slow, deliberate passes.

He found scattered signs of life at the edges of his perception. Hunters and loose cultivators, some still searching for resources with the particular focus of people who hadn't yet heard whatever news had emptied this stretch of forest. Others moving with obvious urgency, retreating rather than advancing, several groups traveling with a caution that read, even at this distance and through the coarse resolution his range imposed, as fear rather than ordinary care. He avoided every one of them, adjusting his path with small, unhurried corrections that cost him little time and considerably reduced the chance of drawing anyone's notice. He had not entered this valley to be seen, and a masked, unaffiliated cultivator moving alone through ground this dangerous would draw exactly the kind of curious attention he needed to avoid if he intended to actually find anyone.

He continued deeper, the silence unbroken except for his own footsteps and the occasional shift of wind through branches that carried no other sound with it. The wrongness of it settled into something closer to certainty the further he traveled — this was not simply a quiet stretch of forest. Something had driven every ordinary voice out of this part of the valley, thoroughly enough that even insects had apparently judged the ground worth abandoning.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

He noticed the shift in the air roughly an hour later — a concentration of demonic energy building somewhere ahead of him, faint at first, then steadily more pronounced as he adjusted his path to follow it. It wasn't scattered the way ambient demonic energy usually spread through a wilderness this old, thin and diffuse across a wide area. It was gathering, concentrated in one particular region with a density that told him, before he'd covered half the remaining distance, that something significant was happening there. He changed direction and moved toward it with the same unhurried caution he'd maintained since crossing the boundary, his divine sense extended just far enough to track the concentration's edges without risking anything closer.

What he found, once his awareness finally reached the source, stopped him where he stood.

Hundreds of demon beasts had gathered in a wide clearing below a low ridge, more than he could easily count even with his awareness spread fully across the scene. Tigers paced among wolves that would ordinarily have fled or fought them on sight. Apes crouched near crocodiles risen from whatever waterway they'd abandoned to reach this ground. Foxes moved between the legs of massive boars without any of the usual predatory tension such proximity should have produced. Black bears sat still beside giant serpents coiled loosely across the clearing's floor. Eagles and vultures perched together in the same trees, wings folded, waiting. Massive lizards and rhino-like beasts stood among all of it, patient in a way nothing about their nature should have permitted. They weren't fighting. They weren't hunting. They showed no interest whatsoever in each other, predator and prey alike settled into the same restless stillness, as though every instinct that ordinarily governed their behavior had been suspended by something considerably larger than any single beast's understanding. They were gathering.

Li Fan watched from the ridge's edge for a long while, his expression unreadable beneath the mask, turning over everything he understood about this world's wilderness and its dangers. He had read, during his years of study under both Old Sun and his own patient accumulation of manuals and texts, of one circumstance in which demon beasts gathered in numbers like this — abandoning territory, suspending their nature's usual hostilities, converging without any apparent leader or purpose beyond the gathering itself. A Beast Tide.

His expression settled into something considerably more serious than the careful neutrality he'd maintained since crossing into the valley. A Beast Tide of this scale, gathering in ground the Seven Great Sects themselves had chosen to send an expedition through, explained a great deal of what he'd witnessed on the road here — the fleeing survivors, the abandoned camps, the fighting whose traces he'd found scorched into the earth days ago. Whatever had happened to trigger this, the valley itself had reached a point where even its own beasts understood something was coming, and had begun moving in response before whatever it was actually arrived. His search had just become considerably more urgent than it had been an hour ago. He withdrew from the ridge as carefully as he'd approached it, and turned his attention back toward the harder work still ahead of him — finding two people, somewhere in a valley now sliding toward genuine catastrophe, before whatever the beasts were fleeing finally caught up to everyone still inside it.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!