Chapter 178
The Hidden Hands
The dim patches spread faster than Li Fan expected.
By the second week of siege, he wasn't the only one who'd noticed. A node in the eastern quarter lost stability entirely on the ninth night, its carved spiral flickering dark for the span of several breaths before formation masters wrestled it back into alignment. Two nights later, a different node in the same quarter began drawing spiritual energy at nearly triple its normal rate, the cultivators feeding it left gray-faced and shaking by the end of their shift, unable to explain why their contribution had cost so much more than it should have.
Word of both incidents reached the guild hall within a day. Li Fan heard it secondhand, standing near the notice board while two formation masters argued in low voices a few paces away.
"It's not strain," one of them said. "I've inspected that node three times myself. There's no wear pattern that explains what's happening to it."
"Then what does explain it?"
The first man didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice had dropped low enough that Li Fan had to strain to catch it. "Interference. Something's feeding false signals into the array. Deliberately."
The word spread through the guild hall over the following days, quiet at first, then less quiet. Interference meant someone was doing this on purpose, and someone doing this on purpose inside a besieged city meant only one thing worth saying out loud: spies. Cultivators wearing the city's own colors, moving freely through its streets, sabotaging the very formation everyone else was bleeding themselves dry to maintain.
Qin Mo called a meeting of every registered formation master in the inner district two days later, held in the guild hall's largest chamber with the doors sealed and a privacy formation raised around the walls. Li Fan attended along with perhaps forty others, standing near the back where a mid-grade master belonged.
Qin Mo didn't waste time on preamble. "Six nodes across three districts have shown irregularities in the past ten days. Three of you have reported instability you couldn't attribute to strain. This isn't wear. Something is interfering with the array from within the city itself."
A murmur ran through the room. Someone near the front asked the obvious question. "Do we know who?"
"No." Qin Mo's expression didn't change, but something in his voice tightened. "We don't know who, we don't know how many, and we don't know how they're concealing themselves well enough to pass inspection at the gates. What we do know is that every irregularity so far has occurred during an active assault on the wall, when every formation master with real seniority is occupied elsewhere."
Li Fan filed that piece away with particular care. He'd suspected as much from his own scrap of paper, the pattern of timing he'd been quietly tracking for over a week. Hearing Qin Mo confirm it aloud, in front of forty other formation masters, meant the suspicion had moved from something only he'd noticed to something the guild itself now treated as fact.
"Every registered master is to report any irregularity immediately, no matter how small," Qin Mo continued. "Every node is to be inspected twice daily rather than once. And every one of you is to pay attention to who's near a node when something goes wrong, and who conveniently isn't."
Li Fan left the meeting with the rest of the crowd, saying nothing, drawing no attention, and went straight to his own scrap of paper that evening to add what he'd learned. Six nodes. Three districts. Every incident timed to an assault.
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He didn't share his own record with anyone. Producing it would have required explaining how long he'd been keeping it, and how carefully, and a mid-grade formation master with that kind of quiet diligence was exactly the kind of thing someone searching for a hidden pattern might start noticing for the wrong reasons. He kept his observations to himself and let the guild's own investigation run its course in parallel, watching from the edges rather than stepping into the middle of it.
The attacks continued that night, heavier than the night before. Li Fan knelt at his own node through the worst of it, feeding his steady, unremarkable share into the array while the ground shook with impacts he couldn't see and the sky above the northern district lit orange twice in the space of an hour.
Partway through his shift, a runner burst into the plaza calling for immediate reinforcement at a node three streets over. Li Fan didn't move — his post was here, and abandoning it to chase a crisis elsewhere would only draw the kind of notice he'd spent years avoiding. But he turned his divine sense in that direction as far as he dared, and caught the tail end of what was happening: a section of the defensive array thinning rapidly, spiritual energy draining out of it faster than the cultivators stationed there could replace it, the wall above that section trembling under an assault that should have been well within the formation's capacity to absorb.
Formation masters converged on the failing section within minutes, pouring their own reserves directly into the weakened node, and the thinning slowed, then stopped, then reversed. The wall held. But it had come closer to breaking in that one section than anywhere else so far, and Li Fan understood, kneeling at his own post with his palm pressed flat against cold stone, that the timing hadn't been an accident.
The following morning, the guild posted new orders at every district notice board. Patrols would move through the streets during every assault from now on, checking registered cultivators against their assigned posts, watching for anyone absent from where they should have been. Anyone found near a compromised node without explanation would be questioned.
Li Fan read the notice on his way to the market and kept walking. The orders changed nothing about how he'd already been conducting himself — he'd never once left his post during an assault, and he had no intention of starting now. But he understood what the orders actually meant underneath their stated purpose. The guild was hunting, and a hunt inside a besieged city, conducted by frightened people who couldn't identify their target, had a way of catching more than just the guilty. He would need to be more careful than usual, not because he had anything to hide from the spies, but because a formation master who spent his afternoons quietly walking past every node in three districts might start looking, to the wrong set of eyes, exactly like what everyone was searching for.
He folded his scrap of paper back into his sleeve and adjusted his plans accordingly. He would keep watching. He would keep his record. But he would do it from further back, with longer gaps between each pass, and he would stop lingering anywhere near a node long enough for a patrol to wonder why.
That evening, sitting in the Mu courtyard while Luo Yulan worked a whetstone over her blade and Mu Qinghe checked his bowstring by lamplight, Li Fan turned the day's events over without speaking them aloud. Someone inside Myriad Beast City was sabotaging the Grand Formation, and timing every act of sabotage to land during an assault, when the wall's defenders had the least attention left to spare for anything else. The guild had confirmed it. Six nodes. Three districts. A pattern too consistent to be coincidence.
What nobody had answered yet, guild included, was the harder question underneath it. Not merely who was doing this, but what they were building toward. Sabotage timed this carefully, sustained this long, wasn't the work of someone hoping to weaken the city a little at a time. It was the work of someone waiting for a single moment when the damage would matter more than all the smaller ones combined.
Mu Wan looked up from where she sat cleaning her sword, catching something in his expression he hadn't meant to show. "What is it?"
"Nothing," he said, and meant it as far as anything she needed to know. "Just thinking."
She studied him a moment longer, the way she'd taken to studying most things lately, then let it go and went back to her blade. Li Fan kept thinking. The spies were waiting for something. He didn't yet know what. But he intended to be watching when it finally came.
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