Chapter 180
The City Falls Into War
The streets between the plaza and the Mu courtyard had never felt long before. Li Fan had walked them hundreds of times, an unhurried ten minutes on an ordinary evening, familiar enough that he could have made the trip with his eyes closed.
Tonight they felt endless.
He ran past a collapsed awning still smoking where something had torn through it. Past a merchant's stall overturned in the road, baskets of dried goods scattered and trampled. Past a knot of cultivators locked in combat with something low and fast that moved between their legs before any of them could land a clean strike — he didn't slow to see what it was, didn't spare the fight more attention than a single sweep of divine sense could give it. None of it was his fight. His fight was three streets ahead.
The sky above the rooftops had turned a deep, angry orange, smoke rising thick against the light that hadn't been there an hour earlier. Somewhere behind him, back toward the ruined northern wall, a sound rolled through the city that didn't belong to any single throat — dozens of voices, some human, some not, layered together into something that pressed against his chest even at this distance.
He reached the mouth of the Mu family's street and stopped.
The street itself had become a battlefield. Three low, wolf-shaped beasts with dark gray hides circled the courtyard's gate, snarling and lunging in short bursts, testing whatever defense stood between them and the people inside. A fourth lay dead already, its throat opened cleanly, blood pooling black in the lamplight. Mu Qinghe stood at the gate's threshold with his bow drawn, an arrow already loosed and a second nocked before the first had finished its flight. Luo Yulan fought beside him with her blade, cutting down anything that came close enough to reach.
And beside her, sword raised in the stance her father had drilled into her over a winter of patient practice, stood Mu Wan.
She wasn't hiding. She wasn't cowering behind the gate. She stood her ground at her mother's shoulder, blade held correctly, and when one of the wolf-beasts broke from the circle and lunged toward the gap at her side, she moved to meet it rather than away from it.
Something cold dropped through Li Fan's chest, sharper than anything he'd felt in years.
She was Body Refining. A wolf-beast bred and sharpened by whatever force had gathered the Beast Tide together was more than enough to kill a Body Refining cultivator in a single clean strike, no matter how correctly she held her blade. Her parents were Core Condensation, fast enough and strong enough to intervene if they saw the danger coming in time. But Mu Qinghe's attention was fixed on the two beasts pressing him from the front, and Luo Yulan had just turned to meet a fifth beast emerging from the alley behind them. Neither of them had noticed the sixth.
It came low along the courtyard wall, keeping to the shadow the lamplight didn't reach, angling toward the gap where Mu Wan stood with her sword raised toward the wrong target entirely.
Li Fan was already moving.
He crossed the distance in four strides, faster than an ordinary eye could track cleanly but not so fast that it read as anything beyond a capable cultivator closing ground in an emergency. The wolf-beast broke from the shadow the instant Mu Wan's guard shifted the wrong direction, launching itself low and flat toward the gap at her side.
Li Fan's sword was already clear of its sheath.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He didn't aim for the head or the throat — a killing blow there would land too cleanly, draw too many questions about how a mid-grade formation master had managed it. He caught the beast mid-leap across the shoulder and drove the blade down and through in a single motion, letting the creature's own momentum carry the strike rather than forcing it through with raw strength. Bone gave way under the edge with a wet crack. The beast's body twisted sideways in the air, already dead before it struck the ground, and skidded to a stop in the dirt an arm's length from where Mu Wan stood frozen, sword still raised toward the wrong target.
Blood spattered dark across the packed earth, and the smell of it — copper, wet fur, churned soil — cut through the smoke drifting down from the northern district.
Mu Wan spun toward him, chest heaving, sword still gripped in both hands. For a moment she said nothing, staring first at the dead beast, then at him, then back at the beast, her mind visibly still catching up to how close the shape at her feet had come to being something else entirely.
Mu Qinghe put down his last beast a heartbeat later, an arrow through its eye at close range, and Luo Yulan finished the fifth with a clean stroke across its neck almost in the same instant. For a moment the street held four dead beasts and four cultivators breathing hard in the smoke and lamplight, and nothing else moved.
Luo Yulan was the first to see the sixth beast's body. Her eyes moved from it to her daughter, then to the gap at Mu Wan's side where the creature had been aiming, and her face went pale — the particular pallor of understanding a danger only after it had already passed.
"I didn't see it," Mu Qinghe said. His voice was low, rough with something between fury and fear. "I didn't see it at all."
"None of us did." Li Fan wiped his blade clean against the dead beast's hide before sheathing it, keeping his voice level, keeping his breathing slower than the effort had actually cost him. "It came in low along the wall shadow. Easy to miss when attention's already split three ways."
Mu Wan hadn't moved. She was still staring at the beast, her knuckles pale around her sword's grip. Li Fan crossed to her and closed his hand gently over the blade, lowering it until the point touched the ground.
"You're not hurt," he said. Not a question, but gentle enough that she understood it as a check rather than a dismissal.
"No." Her voice came out smaller than he'd heard it in a long time. "I didn't even see it coming."
"That's why you had people watching your flank." He nodded toward her parents, both of them already closing the distance, Luo Yulan's hand finding her daughter's shoulder the instant she was within reach. "Tonight it worked. It won't always."
More sound rolled through the district from every direction — beasts, voices, somewhere farther off a concussive crack that shook loose dust from the eaves above them. The street they stood in had gone quiet for the moment, but the quiet had the feel of something borrowed rather than earned, a gap between one wave and the next rather than an ending.
Li Fan looked past the Mu family, down the length of the street toward the wider avenue beyond, and understood with total clarity that this single fight had been the smallest piece of what the night still held. Four beasts at one gate. How many more gates, across how many streets, with how many families standing behind them with nothing but a bow and two blades between themselves and whatever came next.
The Mu family had survived this wave because he'd happened to be close enough, fast enough, and paying enough attention to catch what their own eyes had missed. That wasn't a defense. It was luck, arriving on time and wearing the shape of one.
He thought of Mu Wan's blade lowered to the ground, of the pale, stricken look on Luo Yulan's face when she'd understood what had almost happened, of how many more times tonight the same gap might open somewhere his divine sense didn't happen to be pointed.
A defense that depended on him standing in exactly the right spot at exactly the right moment wasn't a defense at all. It was a single point of failure with his name on it.
"Inside," he said, already turning toward the courtyard gate, his mind already moving past the fight and into the shape of something else entirely. "All of you. I need room to work."
Mu Qinghe frowned, still catching his breath. "Work on what?"
Li Fan didn't answer right away. He was already crouching at the threshold, fingers pressed into the packed dirt just inside the gate, tracing the lines a formation would need to follow if it were going to hold this stretch of ground against anything the night still had left to throw at it.
"Something that doesn't need me standing in the right place to work," he said finally. "Give me a few minutes."
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