Chapter 185
The Network
The offer came from a formation master Li Fan had never met, shouted across the gap between two boundaries a little after full dawn.
"Formation Master Lin! Your circle — can you feel mine?"
Li Fan turned toward the voice and found a woman kneeling at the edge of a second boundary, this one anchoring the intersection two streets east, its pale light nearly touching the outer curve of his own where the two circles came closest together. He extended his divine sense toward her nodes and found them exactly where he expected — four points, the same basic pattern, humming with a rhythm not far off from his own.
"I can feel it," he called back. "What are you asking?"
"Someone in the guild figured out the boundaries can share strength if they're close enough and the formation masters agree to it. Reinforcement, not just proximity. I've got six people and a wounded man who needs it more than I can spare right now."
Li Fan didn't answer immediately. Sharing strength meant opening a channel between two formations built independently, by two different hands, with no guarantee the underlying structures were compatible enough to connect cleanly. A poorly matched link could destabilize both boundaries rather than strengthen either one. But he understood the principle well enough to test it safely, and the woman's boundary looked steady enough on inspection that the risk seemed worth taking.
"Send me the connection point," he called back. "I'll match it from my end."
She traced a new line at the edge of her own circle, extending it toward his, and Li Fan felt the intent behind it clearly enough to build the matching line on his side without needing further instruction. The two lines met in the gap between the boundaries, and for a moment nothing happened — a held breath, both formations testing whether the other would accept the link.
Then the connection took. A thin thread of pale light bridged the gap between the two circles, and Li Fan felt a portion of his own reserves begin flowing outward through it, matched by a corresponding trickle flowing back from her side. Not a merger. Two separate structures, still independent, simply lending each other strength through a channel neither could have opened alone.
Word of the linking method spread faster than the boundaries themselves had. Within the hour, Li Fan felt three more connection attempts reaching toward his own circle from different directions — one from a small boundary to the south, thin and struggling, clearly built by someone with far less formation training than the woman to the east; one from a larger circle to the west that offered strength rather than asking for it; and one, briefly, from something aerial, a thread of pressure dropping down from a Formation Sphere passing nearly overhead before withdrawing when the sphere moved on to somewhere the need was greater.
He accepted each connection carefully, testing the structure on the other end before letting the link fully open, refusing nothing that seemed stable and refusing outright anything that felt built poorly enough to risk his own boundary's integrity. By midmorning his circle sat at the center of four separate threads, drawing and lending strength in a slow, constant rhythm that had nothing to do with any single fight and everything to do with keeping the larger structure standing.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
"It's not just walls anymore," Mu Qinghe said, watching one of the threads flicker as strength passed through it toward the struggling boundary to the south. "It's a — I don't know what to call it."
"A network," Li Fan said. The word felt right the moment he said it, though he couldn't have told anyone where it had come from.
The real value of the connections showed itself an hour later, when a pack of beasts larger than anything Li Fan's own circle had faced overnight broke through the thin southern boundary entirely, scattering the few cultivators sheltered there and threatening to overrun the street beyond.
Li Fan felt the collapse the instant it happened, a sharp absence where the connection thread had been steady a moment earlier. He didn't hesitate. He redirected qi through the link toward the failing point, and felt two other formations along the same network do the same in the same breath — the woman to the east, and a stronger circle somewhere farther south that he'd never directly connected to but which fed strength into the chain regardless, passed along node to node until it reached the place that needed it most.
The beasts that had broken through the collapsed boundary found themselves, within moments, caught inside a hastily reconstructed edge — not the original formation master's work alone, but a patchwork stitched together from three separate sources acting in concert without a single voice directing any of it.
One beast, faster than the rest, slipped through a gap in the reconstruction and charged directly toward a cluster of fleeing cultivators. It didn't reach them. A pale wall rose directly in its path, thin but solid, borrowed strength from Li Fan's own reserves arriving at the exact point of need a half-breath before the beast would have crossed it.
The creature rebounded hard, and a cultivator from the reforming boundary finished it before it could recover.
Li Fan felt the drain of that single exchange more sharply than he wanted to admit. Lending strength across a network cost more than maintaining his own boundary alone, and his reserves — already thinned by hours of continuous work — had begun to feel genuinely finite in a way they hadn't a few hours earlier.
He didn't withdraw from the network. There wasn't a version of that choice he could have made and still called himself the kind of person willing to build a boundary for strangers in the first place. He simply paced himself more carefully, lending what he could without emptying himself past the point of being useful to the twenty people still sheltered inside his own circle.
Mu Wan watched the whole exchange with the same careful attention she'd given everything else that night, her sword lowered now that the immediate threat had passed. "You helped people you've never met," she said. "People three streets away."
"They'd have done the same for us," Li Fan said. "Someone already has, twice, without my asking."
She considered that, glancing toward the pale threads still connecting his boundary to the others around it. "It doesn't feel like one fight anymore. It feels like the whole city's holding onto itself."
By the time the sun climbed fully clear of the eastern rooftops, Li Fan could feel dozens of connections threading through the district within his sensing range alone — ground boundaries linked to ground boundaries, aerial spheres dipping down to reinforce failing circles before rising again, strength moving through the whole loose structure the way water found its way through a landscape it hadn't been given permission to shape in advance.
Nobody had designed it. Nobody could have designed it in a single night, starting from nothing, with every formation master working from instinct and desperation rather than any plan handed down from above. But it held, in its patchwork, imperfect way, and it had already saved more lives in the last hour than any single boundary could have managed working alone.
Li Fan knelt at his own northern node, feeling the network pulse faintly through the connection threads still open on every side of his circle, and understood that whatever else the night still held, the city was no longer fighting it in scattered pieces.
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