Chapter 184
Into the Air
The light appeared over the eastern rooftops without warning, a pale dome hanging in open air where nothing had held a shape a moment before.
Li Fan felt it before he understood what he was feeling — a pulse of spiritual pressure far heavier than anything the ground boundaries around him carried, rising from somewhere near the district's central avenue and expanding outward until it filled a section of sky the size of a small courtyard. He turned his attention toward it without abandoning his own nodes, dividing his focus carefully between the beasts still testing his boundary and whatever had just taken shape above the rooftops.
A sphere. Not a circle drawn flat across the ground, but a complete shell of pale light hanging in the air, its lower edge nearly brushing the tallest rooftops beneath it, its upper curve rising high enough that Li Fan had to tilt his head back to find where it closed.
Inside it, he could make out shapes moving — cultivators in flight, several of them, arranged in a loose formation of their own within the sphere's protection. A flying beast the size of a small boat struck the shell's outer surface and rebounded hard, shrieking, wings beating uselessly against a boundary it couldn't penetrate. Two of the cultivators inside broke from their positions and struck at it through the shell itself, their attacks passing outward cleanly even as the beast's own claws found nothing but resistance on the return.
Li Fan understood the principle immediately, even without seeing the formation master who'd built it. If a ground boundary could choose what crossed its edge, there was no reason the same principle couldn't be lifted entirely off the ground and shaped into something that moved through open air instead — protecting cultivators who needed to fight where the beasts themselves were flying, rather than leaving them exposed above a city that had nothing else to offer them.
A second sphere rose an hour later, farther to the south, smaller than the first but built with the same essential shape. A third followed before dawn, hovering near what Li Fan guessed was a section of the outer wall still under heavy assault, its light flickering with the strain of holding against something far larger than anything troubling his own ground boundary.
He learned more of it secondhand, through a runner who passed his boundary sometime near dawn with fresher news than the last one had carried.
"Core Shattering formation masters," the runner said, catching his breath at the edge of Li Fan's circle before continuing on. "A few Infant Formation cultivators too. They're building them wherever the fighting's worst — anywhere flying beasts are causing trouble the ground boundaries can't reach. The guild's calling them Formation Spheres. Whoever named it first, it stuck."
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"Are they holding?" Li Fan asked.
"Mostly. One collapsed near the eastern gate a while back — the formation master inside it took a wound bad enough he couldn't keep feeding it. But the others are still up." The runner glanced upward, toward the nearest sphere still glowing faintly through the smoke. "It's strange to watch. An hour ago the sky belonged entirely to whatever was flying through it. Now there's places up there that don't."
Li Fan turned his attention back to his own boundary, but the sight of the spheres stayed with him through the following hours, a quiet undercurrent to the more immediate work of managing his own nodes and the twenty people sheltered inside them.
What struck him most wasn't the raw power on display — he'd seen enough of the district's stronger cultivators over the years to know that a Core Shattering or Infant Formation master could produce effects well beyond anything a mid-grade formation master might manage. What struck him was how directly the idea had traveled. He hadn't taught anyone how to build a Formation Island. He hadn't explained the principle to a single soul beyond the Mu family and the strangers who'd since sheltered inside it. And yet somewhere in the district, a cultivator with vastly greater resources than his own had looked at what a handful of ground boundaries were doing and taken the same basic logic somewhere Li Fan himself had never considered — off the ground entirely, into the open sky where the beasts had otherwise moved unopposed.
He'd built something out of necessity, in the space of a few desperate minutes, using nothing more than the tools already in his hands. Someone stronger had seen it, or heard of it, and improved on it within a single night.
He'd expected that to sting, somehow, and it didn't. If anything, it settled something in him that had been tight since the Grand Formation first fell. The city wasn't relying on him alone. It never had been. He was one small piece of something larger now assembling itself in real time, formation master answering formation master across the district without any single hand directing the whole of it.
By full dawn, the sky over Myriad Beast City had changed as thoroughly as the ground had. Pale domes hung at intervals across the district, some small and flickering, others vast and steady, cultivators moving between them and the ground boundaries below in a rhythm that had begun, in the space of a single night, to look almost coordinated — though Li Fan understood it had emerged from nothing more organized than shared desperation and a good idea traveling fast.
Mu Qinghe lowered his bow as the light strengthened, looking up at the nearest sphere with an expression somewhere between exhaustion and something closer to hope. "The whole city's learning the same lesson at once."
Li Fan didn't correct the phrasing. He simply nodded, kneeling at the northern node to feed it what remained of his own strength, and watched the light hold steady above the rooftops while the beasts below continued, for now, to find fewer and fewer places left willing to let them through.
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