He followed the scattered traces deeper into the valley through the remainder of that day, the ground growing steadily more disturbed the further he traveled — snapped branches at heights no ordinary animal would reach, patches of scorched earth from talismans discharged in genuine desperation, the occasional print pressed deep into softer soil by something considerably larger than anything he'd encountered so far.
The Beast Tide had reshaped the landscape's danger in ways that made careful movement more necessary with every mile. He passed a pack of wolves moving with purpose rather than the aimless gathering he'd witnessed earlier, their attention fixed on something ahead of them rather than each other. He avoided a massive shape crossing a ridge in the distance, too far to identify clearly, close enough that his instincts insisted on distance regardless. He had no need for unnecessary fights, and the valley, sliding further into chaos with every hour that passed, offered him no shortage of reasons to avoid every one he could.
His divine sense caught the first real signal well into the evening, two extremely weak spiritual fluctuations registering at the edge of his careful range — one considerably weaker than the other, both faint enough that he nearly mistook the reading for residual trace rather than active presence. He changed direction immediately, moving with more urgency than he'd allowed himself since crossing the boundary, though never so much urgency that caution fell away entirely. The traces led him toward a narrow ravine cutting through a stretch of rocky ground, walls high enough on either side to funnel movement into a single confined path.
He found them there.
A middle-aged man leaned against the ravine's stone wall, his hunting clothes torn in a dozen places, his body marked with injuries Li Fan catalogued instinctively even from a distance — a poorly set wound along one leg, bruising across most of his visible skin, the particular gray pallor that came from days without proper rest or food. Beside him, a woman supported his weight with one arm while keeping her other hand steady around a weapon, her own condition barely better than his despite the effort she was clearly spending to appear otherwise. Both of them were exhausted in the particular, bone-deep way that came from sustained fear rather than any single injury. Both of them were, unmistakably, alive.
Li Fan landed several steps away, deliberately unhurried, giving them time to register his presence rather than startling either of them into a defensive reaction their depleted reserves couldn't properly support. They tensed immediately regardless. The man struggled to raise a weapon that trembled visibly in his grip. The woman's eyes moved over Li Fan's masked, unfamiliar appearance with the careful, assessing wariness of someone who had already learned, through hard recent experience, exactly how dangerous a stranger in this valley could be.
Neither of them recognized him. He gave them no reason to. He did not ask their names. He did not call either of them by name, though he knew both well enough to have spoken them without thinking in any other circumstance. He did not mention Myriad Beast City. He did not mention their daughter, curled asleep somewhere behind a hidden concealment formation two hundred miles from here, clutching a spent jade token even now. He revealed nothing of who he actually was, and let the mask and the total suppression of his own cultivation do the rest of the work his silence left undone. He simply took in their condition, and said the only thing the moment actually required. "You're injured."
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The man managed a bitter laugh despite everything, the particular dark humor of someone too exhausted for anything else. "That's obvious." Li Fan glanced past them, toward the ravine's open end and the sound of distant movement carrying faintly on the wind — beasts, still shifting somewhere beyond easy sight, the valley's danger far from finished with anyone still inside it. "How long have you been here?"
The woman answered, her voice cautious but steady. "Several days." Li Fan nodded, filing the answer away alongside everything else he'd gathered since crossing the boundary. "What happened?"
They explained it in the same broad strokes the cave survivors had offered — the tiger, the disciple's death, the strange stillness before the beast's retreat, and then the Beast Tide's eruption scattering everyone who'd survived that far. The sect disciples had fled first, exactly as the earlier account had described, abandoning the hired hunters without a second thought for what became of them. They had survived, they explained, only because of the defensive formations and talismans they'd carried with them — plates and charms used one after another as the beasts pursuing them grew more numerous and more desperate, each activation buying them a little more distance, a little more time. Eventually, exhausted and unable to outrun what was chasing them any further, they'd been forced into this ravine, and had remained here since, rationing what little strength and resources they had left.
Li Fan listened to all of it without visible reaction, recognizing every detail with a clarity the couple had no way of understanding. He knew exactly who had given them those treasures. He knew exactly why the concealment plates had worked as completely as the cave survivors had described, why the escape talismans had bought precisely the margin needed to survive a chase neither of them should have outlasted on raw cultivation alone. He said nothing about any of it. To them, he remained nothing more than an unknown masked cultivator who had happened to find two injured strangers in a dangerous wilderness. They had no idea that the man standing before them was the quiet formation master who lived two courtyards down from their own, and he intended, for reasons that mattered considerably more than his own comfort in this moment, to keep it exactly that way.
He looked once more toward the ravine's open end, gauging the distant movement against the fading light and the two people in front of him who could barely stand unassisted. "Can you walk?" he asked. Mu Qinghe forced himself upright, swaying only slightly before his balance settled. "We can."
Li Fan turned toward the ravine's exit, already calculating the safest path back toward the boundary, already accounting for the injuries that would slow their pace and the beasts still moving somewhere in the darkening valley around them. "Then let's go."
He didn't explain who he was. He didn't explain why he'd come, or how he'd known to look for them specifically among everyone lost in this valley's chaos. He didn't reveal that he had come here for them and no one else, that a child two hundred miles away was waiting behind a hidden formation for exactly this outcome. He simply led the way, unhurried but certain, and the two injured hunters followed the mysterious masked cultivator out of the ravine and into the darkening valley beyond it, neither of them aware how completely their survival had already been shaped by a debt neither of them knew they'd been owed.
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