Li Fan treated their worst injuries before they'd covered even a mile from the ravine, working quickly in a sheltered hollow between two boulders — setting Mu Qinghe's poorly bound leg properly, cleaning the deepest of Luo Yulan's cuts, feeding both of them a modest pill from his own supply that he explained, without elaboration, as something useful for recovering spent strength. Neither questioned where a masked stranger had come by medicine of that quality. Exhaustion left little room for suspicion.
They could stand on their own within the hour, could walk without the visible strain that had marked every step out of the ravine. It wasn't much. It was enough.
His divine sense caught the shift before either of his companions felt anything at all — a vast, directional pressure building somewhere behind them, the scattered restlessness of the gathering he'd witnessed the day before finally resolving into motion. The Beast Tide was moving. Not toward the three of them specifically. Toward the outer valley. Toward Myriad Beast City itself. "We leave," Li Fan said. "Now."
They didn't ask him to explain. Something in his voice carried enough weight that Mu Qinghe simply nodded and started moving, Luo Yulan a half-step behind him, both of them finding a pace considerably steadier than their condition should have allowed. They began running rather than walking, Li Fan positioned near the rear of the group, his senses sweeping the surrounding forest in constant, careful passes.
The first beasts caught up within the hour — Qi Sea-level wolves, driven ahead of the tide's main body by whatever pressure was pushing everything in this valley toward the same direction. Three of them broke from the treeline at once, converging on the fleeing group with the particular single-minded hunger of predators that had already sensed easier prey ahead of the tide's true danger. Li Fan didn't stop moving. He drew his sword mid-stride, the blade already circulating a thin, efficient thread of qi through steel the way transmission had taught him a piece of pine could carry current without loss. The nearest wolf leapt. One stroke. Origin Drawing, economical and precise, opened its throat before its paws left the ground on the downswing. It fell without a sound beyond a single choked yelp. A second wolf came from the side. Li Fan turned only enough to meet it, his blade catching the beast beneath its jaw in a stroke that owed nothing to force and everything to angle. Dead before it landed.
He wasn't displaying anything. No flare of visible qi, no wasted motion, nothing that would mark him as anything beyond a competent, unremarkable cultivator defending a group under pressure. Every strike carried exactly the qi it needed and no more, exactly the reach it required and no further. Mu Qinghe killed the third wolf himself, a clumsy but effective stroke born of genuine desperation, and the group didn't slow.
They gathered others as they ran. A cluster of loose cultivators emerged from the trees within the second hour, exhausted and frightened in the same way Mu Qinghe and Luo Yulan had been an hour earlier, falling into step with the group the moment they recognized shared direction and shared danger. Two injured disciples, separated from whatever sect banner they'd once followed, joined soon after. By the time the sun had climbed past its highest point, the small group Li Fan had started with had grown to nearly twenty, none of them trusting each other beyond the simple, practical math of survival — more hands meant more beasts killed before they reached anyone specific, and no one questioned the arithmetic closely enough to worry about anything beyond it. Li Fan didn't object to the growth. More people fighting the weaker beasts meant fewer demands on his own attention, and attention, in a retreat this long, was the resource he could least afford to spend carelessly.
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The beasts grew stronger as the group pushed deeper toward the boundary. Qi Sea gave way to early Core Condensation within the third hour — a boar the size of a small cart crashing through the undergrowth, gored through by two of the stronger loose cultivators working together before it could reach the group's weaker members. A mid-stage Core Condensation lynx dropped from a low branch directly into the group's path, and Li Fan met it himself, Origin Severance finding the tendon behind its foreleg before it could complete its leap, the beast collapsing mid-motion into a heap that the group simply flowed around without breaking stride. The stronger cultivators took positions at the front and rear without anyone formally assigning them there, the same instinct that organized any desperate retreat asserting itself without discussion. Li Fan remained among them, fighting while moving, never stopping fully, never displaying more than the situation strictly required. A beast charged from the left. He sidestepped without looking directly at it, his sword passing clean through its neck on the follow-through. Another came from behind. He turned without breaking his running stride, the blade arriving a half-beat before the beast's own attack could land. To anyone watching closely enough to notice the pattern, it would have read as the work of an experienced cultivator who had fought countless such battles before — controlled, economical, entirely unconcerned with impressing anyone watching.
Luo Yulan fought near him for a stretch as the afternoon wore on, her own blade finding what openings her exhaustion still allowed, and Li Fan noticed her glance toward him more than once between strikes — not suspicion exactly, but the same flicker of half-formed recognition he'd caught from her back in the ravine, quickly buried beneath the more immediate demand of simply staying alive. He gave her nothing further to build that recognition on. Every motion stayed within the narrow, deliberate range he'd allowed himself since crossing the boundary, competent enough to keep everyone around him alive, restrained enough that nothing about it should have reminded anyone of a quiet formation master who'd never once, in two years of neighborly acquaintance, shown either of them anything beyond patient craftsmanship.
The group pressed on as the light began to shift toward evening, the sound of the valley behind them growing steadily louder — not the isolated snarl of a single pursuing beast, but something broader, more sustained, the unmistakable voice of a tide still gathering momentum somewhere beyond the trees. Li Fan kept his place near the rear, watching the forest behind them with senses stretched to their careful limit, and understood, without needing anyone to tell him, that whatever waited ahead would demand considerably more from all of them than anything the retreat had asked so far.
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