The third beast came from directly ahead, which made the work harder.
A wolf-shaped thing, larger than any of the ones Li Fan had killed earlier, black-furred and running low with its spine bowed the way a drawn bow bows before release. Mid Core Condensation, qi already gathering along its jaw in a visible haze the color of old iron. It wasn't hunting the column at random. It had picked a target, and the target happened to be three paces ahead of the limping man Li Fan had been trailing since the last mile marker.
Good enough.
Li Fan closed the distance at a dead sprint, angling to intercept, and let his own footing fail him at the last possible instant — a stumble too well-timed to be real, though nothing in his face or his breathing gave that away. He went down across the limping man's path, one arm flung out as if to catch himself, and took the other man down with him in a tangle of limbs and dust exactly as the wolf's jaws snapped shut on empty air where they'd both been standing.
The man swore, tried to shove clear. Li Fan's hand closed around his wrist and didn't let go.
The wolf recovered faster than the boar had, faster than the jackals. It turned in place, low to the ground, and came again with its qi already spent forward into its jaw — a bite meant to do more than tear flesh.
The limping man had no room left to run. Li Fan made certain of that, positioning his own body just enough to close the gap the man might have used, forcing the choice down to exactly one option.
The man's concealment shattered.
It went all at once this time, no gradual fraying at the edges the way it had with the other two — a full release, qi flooding outward in a column thick enough that Li Fan felt the pressure of it against his own skin even from an arm's length away. Beneath the ordinary spiritual coloring, the current underneath surfaced fully for the length of two full breaths before the man clawed it back under control, cold and unmistakable, carrying a weight that read nothing like the faint traces from before. This one wasn't hiding an affinity. He was hiding a cultivation base that outmatched what his disguise had been built to show.
The wolf met the technique head-on and came apart before it finished closing the distance, black fur and bone scattering across the road in a spray that spattered both men's robes and left the smell of scorched hair hanging heavy in the dust.
Li Fan didn't move for a moment. Long enough to look shaken. Long enough to be one more terrified survivor staring at a dead beast, nothing more.
The man was on his feet already, glaring down at him with something sharper than the suspicion the first two had shown — a calculation running visibly behind his eyes, the look of someone doing the same arithmetic Li Fan had done a hundred times over the last hour, working out whether three accidents in a row could really still be accidents. He didn't say anything. He turned and pushed back into the crowd instead, faster now, putting distance between himself and the masked cultivator who kept turning up beside him.
Li Fan let him go. He had what he needed.
He didn't look toward the city walls. He didn't need to, and he still didn't dare.
At the city's high wall, an Infant Formation cultivator in sect grey stood with his hands folded behind his back, gaze fixed on the column of survivors still streaming toward the gate. Something in his posture had shifted in the last few minutes. A stillness that hadn't been there before — the stillness of a man who has stopped simply watching and started looking for something specific. He said nothing to the disciples flanking him. He didn't move from the wall. What had drawn his attention, and how much of it he'd actually pieced together, was nothing Li Fan could see from half a mile out with his back to the gate.
What he felt instead was smaller and harder to name — a change in the texture of the air near the wall, the faintest possible tightening, the kind of thing a man only notices after years of paying attention to things other people don't bother to. It might have meant nothing. It was, on its own, not proof of anything at all.
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It was enough.
He didn't wait to find out whether he was right. He peeled away from the column's edge without breaking stride, cut toward a stand of broken rock beside the road, and by the time anyone might have thought to look for him there was nothing left to find.
His body dropped straight down through the packed earth as though the ground itself had opened beneath his feet, silent, the disturbance at the surface barely more than a settling of dust. Underground, in full dark, he pushed his concealment past anything he'd used before — cultivation folded down to nothing a stray sense could catch, breath slowed until it barely moved air at all, footsteps that left no vibration behind them in the soil. He didn't move toward the city. He moved east first, then north, then doubled back on a line that crossed his own path twice, laying down a trail with no honest shape to it at all.
He surfaced nearly two hours later, far south of the road, in a stand of pine with no view of the valley or the walls at all.
The mask came off first. He crushed it, folded the pieces into ash between two fingers with a thread of Scarlet Flame, and let the wind take what was left. A second mask went on in its place, plainer, a different cut around the eyes. His outer robe followed the same way — folded away into the storage bag, replaced with a merchant traveler's coat he'd carried unused for exactly this purpose, dust already worked into the fabric so it wouldn't look new. When he checked his own reflection in a puddle left from an old rain, the man looking back at him bore no resemblance at all to the masked cultivator who had walked beside three demon spies an hour before.
He entered the city an hour after dark, through a side gate crowded with the last stragglers of the day, and no one gave him a second look.
The courtyard was dark when he reached it. He unlatched the gate quietly, expecting silence, and found instead a small shape already moving toward him across the yard before the gate had finished swinging open.
Mu Wan didn't say anything at first. She simply stopped in front of him, chin trembling, arms wrapped around herself, and then she wasn't controlling it anymore — she pressed her face against his sleeve and cried, quiet, exhausted crying that had clearly been held back for longer than a child her age should have had to hold anything back.
Li Fan didn't say much. He put a hand on her shoulder, let her cry until it ran its course on its own, and told her only that they were safe, that they were coming home.
They arrived two hours later. Mu Qinghe still moved stiffly from wounds not fully healed, one arm bound close to his side, but he was upright, and Luo Yulan walked beside him without needing his support. Mu Wan reached them before either adult had crossed the threshold, and for a while nobody in the courtyard said anything useful at all.
When the moment settled, Mu Qinghe turned to Li Fan and bowed — properly, from the waist, not the shallow nod of casual gratitude.
"The plates you gave us," he said. "The escape talisman. We wouldn't have made it out of that ravine without them." His voice was steady, but it cost him something to keep it that way. "You looked after our daughter with nothing asked in return. We won't forget either debt."
Luo Yulan said less, but what she said carried the same weight. "Whatever you need, in the future — ask it. We mean that."
Li Fan told them there was nothing to repay, that any neighbor would have done the same, and didn't argue further when they clearly didn't believe him. He watched them cross back into their own courtyard a short while later, Mu Wan between them, the gate closing softly behind the three of them.
He stood alone in his own yard for a long time after that.
The valley had shown him a city that could still be caught unprepared by something it hadn't seen coming — a Beast Tide unlike anything in the old records, demon cultivators walking openly into the crowd behind it, and now, somewhere at the wall, a powerhouse who might already be turning over the shape of a masked stranger he couldn't place. None of the threads he'd been tracking for years had closed. If anything, they'd all pulled tighter at once.
He thought about what leaving would look like, if it ever came to that — which routes stayed clear longest, which of his prepared talismans would move him fastest and farthest, how much warning he could realistically expect before the choice stopped being his to make. He didn't like the answers. He filed them away regardless, the way he filed away everything that mattered, and let the thought settle rather than chase it further that night.
What he decided, standing there with the courtyard gone quiet and the last of the city's noise fading beyond his walls, was simpler than any of it.
He needed to be stronger before the next thing found him.
Mid-Stage Core Condensation had carried him through the valley. It would not carry him through whatever came next. He turned toward the underground chamber beneath the training room, already running the shape of the coming seclusion through his mind — how long it might take, what he'd need to seal behind him, what excuse Lin Fan the formation master would give the neighborhood for vanishing from his own workshop for however many months it required.
He didn't plan to stop until he reached Late-Stage Core Condensation.
He latched the gate, crossed the yard, and went inside to begin.
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