My dao to eternity

He worked backward from what little he already knew, the same methodical approach he brought to any problem too large to solve through brute persistence alone.

The Azure Cloud Sect disciple who'd recruited Mu Qinghe and Luo Yulan had spoken of the valley's deeper reaches, ground unfamiliar enough to the sect's own disciples that experienced local hunters were worth the expense of hiring. Li Fan reconstructed the expedition's likely route from that single fact, cross-referencing it against the terrain he'd walked so far and the general shape of the valley he'd studied, years ago, from Wei Baishan's old regional maps. He didn't know precisely where they'd gone. He knew enough about how a hunting expedition would reasonably move through unfamiliar ground to narrow the search considerably.

The first real evidence came two hours into his search, a broken formation plate half-buried in disturbed earth, its etched lines cracked clean through in a way that suggested force rather than simple wear. He examined it carefully without disturbing its position further, confirming what the fracture pattern told him — struck by something considerably stronger than the plate had been built to withstand, the kind of damage a defensive array took only when whatever it was defending against had actually broken through. A second plate lay a short distance further on, damaged in the same manner. Then blood, dried dark against pale stone, more than a single wound should have produced. A torn strip of cloth caught on a low branch. Broken branches at chest height, the particular pattern of something large having moved through the underbrush at speed rather than carefully. A discarded weapon, its blade notched along one edge, abandoned rather than lost. He examined all of it with the same clinical attention he'd once given a patient's symptoms under Old Sun's watchful eye, piecing together a sequence rather than simply cataloguing individual details. This had not been an orderly retreat. Something had gone wrong here, badly and suddenly enough that people had dropped weapons and fled rather than fight in formation.

The campsite itself, when he finally reached it, confirmed the shape of what the scattered traces had already suggested. Remains of defensive formations lay collapsed across a wide clearing, their anchor stones scattered, several cracked in the same manner as the plates he'd found earlier. Storage bags lay torn open, their contents spilled and mostly untouched, the particular carelessness of people who had grabbed only what they could carry in the moment before whatever happened here forced them to run. He counted the signs of violence carefully, and found, to his quiet relief, remarkably few bodies for the scale of the destruction around him. Whatever had struck this camp had driven most of its occupants to flee rather than die here. He extended his divine sense carefully across the clearing and the surrounding forest, staying within his usual cautious margin, and eventually caught the faint, weak signatures of several people still nearby — not fleeing further, but hiding, their qi suppressed as much as injury and exhaustion allowed.

He found them in a natural cave a short distance from the campsite, a group of loose cultivators, injured and clearly frightened, huddled together in the particular stillness of people who had already decided their best chance of survival was staying hidden rather than moving further through dangerous ground.

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They tensed the moment his masked, unfamiliar presence appeared at the cave's mouth, one of them raising a trembling hand toward a weapon he clearly lacked the strength to use effectively. Li Fan didn't approach aggressively. He stopped well short of the cave's entrance, kept his hands visible and his posture unthreatening, and simply asked the question he'd come to ask. "What happened here?"

The survivors explained it in fragments, several voices overlapping as the story emerged — the expedition had encountered a giant tiger, far stronger than anyone had anticipated from a beast at this depth in the valley. The Azure Cloud Sect disciple leading the group, Late Core Shattering by their account, had engaged it directly, confident in his own strength. The tiger had killed him. None of them understood exactly what had happened after that. The creature had remained beside the disciple's body for a time, still and strangely deliberate in a way that unsettled every survivor who'd witnessed it, before retreating deeper into the valley without pursuing anyone further. They didn't know what it had discovered, or why it had simply left rather than continue the slaughter its first kill suggested it was capable of. Then the Beast Tide had erupted, and whatever discipline the expedition had maintained collapsed entirely. The sect disciples had fled first, abandoning the loose cultivators they'd recruited without hesitation. Many of those cultivators had died in the chaos that followed. The survivors in this cave were among the fortunate few who'd made it this far.

Li Fan absorbed all of it without visible reaction, filing each detail away with the same care he gave everything worth remembering. The information about the tiger's strange behavior interested him — the deliberate stillness beside the body, the retreat rather than continued violence — but he set the question of what it meant aside for now, unwilling to chase a mystery that didn't directly serve the reason he'd come here. "Did anyone survive the retreat," he asked. "Besides yourselves."

The survivors offered what they remembered — several names and faces they'd glimpsed still moving during the chaos, most unfamiliar to Li Fan, none confirmed dead or alive with any certainty. Then, among the fragments, mention of a husband and wife who had been part of the expedition, hired locals rather than sect disciples, last seen alive during the retreat though no one knew where they'd gone after. They mentioned, almost in passing, that the pair had possessed unusually powerful defensive and escape treasures — talismans and formation plates that had apparently saved their lives more than once during the chaos, treasures well beyond what hired hunters would normally carry into an expedition like this one. Li Fan recognized the description immediately. The formations he'd built. The talismans he'd handed over with a casual explanation about having no immediate use for them. The preparations had worked, exactly as he'd hoped they would when he'd pressed the bundles into Mu Qinghe's and Luo Yulan's hands three weeks ago. But they were still out there, somewhere in a valley sliding toward genuine catastrophe, and knowing their preparations had held so far told him nothing about whether it would continue to hold long enough for him to actually find them.

He thanked the survivors, offered them what modest guidance he could toward a safer route back toward the boundary, and left the cave without revealing anything further about who he actually was or why their answer had mattered so much to him. The search continued, deeper into ground the Beast Tide had already begun to reshape.

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