Chapter 183
The Strategy Spreads
The first sign that word had traveled came from the rooftops.
Li Fan felt it before he saw it — a flare of unfamiliar spiritual pressure rising two streets to the east, distinct from anything the beasts carried, distinct from anything he'd felt from Feng's group or the disciples who'd joined the boundary earlier that night. He turned his divine sense toward it and found a formation master he didn't recognize kneeling in the middle of an intersection, tracing lines into the stone with quick, economical strokes, four nodes already glowing at the cardinal points of a circle roughly the same size as his own.
He hadn't sent word to anyone. He hadn't so much as spoken to a stranger about what he'd built. But someone had seen it, or heard about it from someone who had, and the shape of the idea had already begun replicating itself through the district on its own.
By the deepest hour of the night, Li Fan counted at least six other boundaries rising within range of his senses, each one a rough echo of what he'd built — a circle, four nodes, cultivators sheltered inside while a formation master worked the edges. Some were smaller, holding only two or three people. One, farther south, had grown even larger than his own, a formation master there apparently willing to stretch the boundary as wide as her reserves allowed to take in an entire street's worth of fleeing residents.
None of it had been planned. None of it had come down from the guild hall or the sect's own command structure, as far as Li Fan could tell. It had simply happened — one formation master seeing what worked, or hearing a secondhand account of it shouted between running neighbors, and reaching for the same basic principle out of the same basic desperation that had driven Li Fan to it in the first place.
A ground formation that could choose what crossed its boundary was worth more, tonight, than a dozen individual cultivators fighting in the open. That understanding didn't need to be taught. It only needed one example, visible long enough for others to notice.
Inside his own boundary, the fighting had settled into a grinding, sustainable rhythm. Beasts still came in waves, though less frequently now that the immediate area had been thoroughly picked over by the earlier assaults. Mu Qinghe's arrows had thinned to a more careful pace, conserving what remained of his supply. Luo Yulan and the guild woman had fallen into an easy coordination at the southern arc, each covering the other's angle without needing to speak. Mu Wan hadn't made a second mistake.
Li Fan used the relative quiet to check the strain on his own reserves, and didn't like what he found. Hours of continuous output — first at the Grand Formation's own posts, then here, expanding and adjusting a boundary that had grown far beyond what he'd first drawn — had worn him down further than he wanted to admit in front of twenty people depending on him to keep standing.
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He didn't say anything about it. There wasn't a version of that conversation that would have helped anyone inside the circle, and panic spread faster than any beast could run.
A runner reached the boundary's edge sometime past the deepest hour, a young cultivator in guild colors, breathless and wide-eyed, calling out before he'd even fully arrived.
"Formation Master Lin! The guild wants word — how many of these are yours? How many boundaries are holding?"
Li Fan let the eastern gap widen just enough to pull the runner inside before answering. "Mine's the one you're standing in. I don't know how many others there are. I've felt at least six from here, but that's only what's within my own range."
The runner nodded, already turning to look at the pale light of the boundary around him with something between relief and disbelief. "Qin Mo's been trying to organize a count. Nobody expected this — formation masters just started doing it on their own, all across the district. He wants to know if it's working."
Li Fan glanced toward the northern arc, where a beast had just rebounded off the solid section of the boundary and been cut down a moment later by one of the young disciples who'd joined earlier. "Tell him it's working. Tell him it's not going to last forever on its own, though. Reserves matter. Someone needs to think about how to relieve formation masters who've been holding a boundary for hours without rest."
The runner absorbed that, nodded again, and turned to leave, pausing only long enough for Li Fan to widen the eastern gap and let him back out into the street.
Word continued to spread through the district over the following hour, carried by runners and by the simple, visible fact of pale light holding steady against the dark wherever a formation master had planted their nodes. Li Fan watched two more boundaries rise within his sensing range, one clearly built by someone with far less formation training than the others — its lines uneven, its nodes spaced without any real precision — and yet it held, however roughly, because even an imperfect boundary still gave a beast something it had to think about before charging through.
He didn't feel any particular pride in having been first. The idea itself was simple enough that it would likely have occurred to someone else within the hour regardless of what he'd built at the Mu family's gate. What mattered wasn't that he'd thought of it. What mattered was that it worked, and that it was spreading fast enough to matter before the night ran out.
Mu Wan found a moment to crouch beside him near the northern node, watching him feed a slow, careful stream of qi into the stone to keep the light from flickering. "You look tired," she said quietly.
"I am tired," he admitted, because there wasn't much point lying to her about it now. "It'll hold. I just need to be careful how I spend what's left."
She studied the boundary a moment longer, then looked past it, out toward the dark street where two more pale circles glowed faintly in the distance. "Other people are doing what you did."
"Good," Li Fan said. "The city needs more of these tonight than I can build alone."
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