The divine sense swept over the road like a hand passing flat over water.
Li Fan felt it a half-second before it reached him — a pressure with no shape, no malice, no particular interest in him at all, moving out from the direction of the city walls and over the whole strung-out column of survivors at once. He didn't flinch. He didn't slow his stride. He simply let it pass through him the way it passed through everyone else, and kept his own senses folded tight against his skin.
An Infant Formation cultivator. Almost certainly one of the Seven Great Sects, stationed at the walls to read the Beast Tide's approach before it arrived. The sweep wasn't hunting for anything in particular. It was doing what any competent watchman would do — counting, measuring, gauging how much danger was walking toward the gate and how fast.
Li Fan understood, without needing to test it, that reaching back toward that presence with his own divine sense would be the single worst decision available to him. A sweep this broad, this careless, would likely pass over a masked mid-grade cultivator without a second thought. A deliberate probe answering it would not.
So he didn't answer it. He kept his eyes on the road and let the moment pass.
The three wrong signatures were still ahead of him, spaced apart in the column now — one nearer the front, two drifting closer to the middle where the crowd was thickest. Li Fan didn't approach any of them directly. He simply watched, the way he'd watched market stalls for years without ever seeming to look at them, and turned the problem over while he ran.
He couldn't warn the walls without explaining how he knew. He couldn't strike the three down himself without doing the same — and killing three cultivators in the middle of a fleeing crowd, however quietly, was not a thing that stayed quiet for long. Both options spent something he wasn't willing to spend.
What he could do was make the concealment fail on its own, in front of the one set of eyes already positioned to notice.
It wasn't an elegant plan. He recognized that plainly, the same way he recognized everything else about it — that it depended on someone else's competence rather than his own control, that it left an unpredictable amount to chance, that if it went wrong in a particular way it could put him in the same net he was trying to close around someone else. He weighed all of that against doing nothing, and doing nothing lost.
A beast broke from the tree line eighty paces ahead — a boar-shaped thing twice the size of any boar, tusks blackened as though scorched, Peak Core Condensation by the weight of its qi signature. It came in low and fast toward the column's flank, exactly where the nearest of the three wrong signatures happened to be running.
Li Fan moved.
He closed the gap in four strides, sword already drawn, and met the boar's charge at an angle rather than head-on — his blade catching one tusk and turning the beast's whole line of momentum a hand's width off true. Not enough to stop it. Enough to redirect it.
His own footing gave, on purpose, at exactly the wrong moment.
He let the impact carry him sideways instead of bracing against it, let his balance fail the way a tired man's balance actually fails, and crashed shoulder-first into the cultivator running two paces to his right. Both of them went down hard, elbows and knees striking packed dirt, the stranger's breath driven out of him in a single sharp grunt.
The boar didn't stop for either of them. It corrected its own charge and came around again, tusks lowered, dust boiling up under its trotters.
Li Fan grabbed the stranger's wrist before he could scramble clear. "Help me!"
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
The man tried to wrench free. Li Fan held on, using exactly enough strength to make it look like panic rather than intent — a drowning grip, not a controlling one. The boar closed the last of the distance in under two heartbeats, and the stranger had no time left to argue with anything except the animal now bearing down on both of them.
His concealment broke the way ice breaks under sudden weight — not gradually, but all at once, in a single visible line.
Mid Core Condensation qi flooded outward from him, and beneath its ordinary spiritual coloring, for less than the length of a breath, a thread of something colder surfaced and was gone again — pulled back under, smothered, but not fast enough. The man's technique took the boar's charge nearly head-on, a lash of dark-edged force meeting bone and tusk with a crack that sent the animal tumbling sideways into the dirt, already dying.
Li Fan didn't look toward the city walls. He didn't dare.
You saw that, didn't you.
He thought it without moving his lips, without changing his breathing, without giving the man beside him — already back on his feet, already glaring at Li Fan with the particular fury of someone who suspected he'd been used and couldn't prove it — anything at all to notice. Li Fan offered a short, apologetic bow, muttered something about clumsy footing, and let the crowd's forward motion carry him away before the man could decide whether to press the matter.
He didn't know if the Infant Formation cultivator had caught the leak. He had no way to check without exposing himself in exactly the manner he was trying to avoid. He simply had to let the uncertainty stand, and keep moving.
Half a mile on, he found the second one — a woman near the column's middle, her robes plainer than the others', her pace steady in a way that read, to anyone not looking closely, as simple endurance rather than control.
He waited for the next beast.
It came from a shallow ravine beside the road this time, a pack of Qi Sea jackals moving low and fast, six of them fanning out to take the column from two sides at once. Li Fan let three of them close on his own position before he engaged, cutting down the first with a clean stroke across the throat and turning the second aside with the flat of his blade rather than the edge — a deliberate mistake, a beat too slow, enough to let the third jackal's charge carry it past him and straight toward the woman.
She had no room left to dodge. Her hands came up on instinct, qi flaring to meet the jackal's leap.
The concealment cracked again — briefer this time, tighter, whoever had built it clearly better trained than the first man's — but a thread still surfaced under the strain, cold and unmistakable to anyone already listening for it, before the jackal's body hit the ground in two pieces and the woman's spiritual signature folded neatly back into its ordinary shape.
She didn't look at Li Fan afterward. She didn't seem to connect the jackal's angle of attack to anything but bad luck.
Li Fan kept moving, expressionless beneath the mask, cataloguing what he'd learned. Two exposures now, both brief, both plausibly accidental if no one was looking for a pattern. He still didn't know whether anyone was.
He found the third not long after — a young man near the rear of the column, robes torn at one shoulder, walking with a slight, deliberate limp that struck Li Fan as one detail too calculated to be real. Real exhaustion showed in the shoulders and the breath, not the gait. This man's shoulders were fine. Only his leg dragged, evenly, on every third step, like something rehearsed rather than suffered.
Li Fan matched his own pace to the man's from thirty paces back and let himself fall into the same rhythm as everyone else around him — head down, breath ragged, one more exhausted survivor putting one foot in front of the other. Underneath the mask, his attention stayed fixed on the limping man's spiritual signature, waiting for the same cold current he'd caught twice already.
It was there. Fainter than the others, better hidden, but there — a discipline in the concealment that told him this one had trained longer, or been warier, or simply had more to lose if he was caught.
The sun had dropped low enough now that the column's shadows stretched long and thin across the road, and the light coming through the haze of dust ahead had turned the color of weak tea. Somewhere behind them, still, the tide's roar rolled on, fainter with every mile but never gone. Li Fan's legs had gone past aching into a kind of steady numbness that no longer registered as pain, only as distance covered.
He scanned the tree line on both sides of the road, patient, waiting for whatever the valley would send next — a beast large enough to force a real reaction, close enough to the limping man to make the collision look like nothing more than chance.
It didn't take long.
A shape broke from the brush on the column's near side, low to the ground and moving fast, dust kicking up behind it in a long pale wake. Li Fan felt its qi resolve into shape a heartbeat before his eyes confirmed it — mid Core Condensation, hungry, already committed to its line of attack.
He began closing the distance, unhurried on the surface, already counting the steps it would take to put himself and the limping man in exactly the same place at exactly the same time.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter