Chapter 187
Infant Formation
The pressure kept building, and it didn't stop.
Li Fan had felt Core Condensation cultivators before, Peak-tier ones close enough to press against his senses like a held weight, and he'd felt the vast, distant strain of Tribulation ancestors clashing above a battlefield years ago from a hidden crevice, more felt than understood. What rose now, somewhere north of the ruined wall, sat squarely between those two extremes — heavier than anything born of Core Condensation, lighter than the crushing totality of a true Ancestor, but rising fast, and rising close.
He didn't need a runner to tell him what it meant. He'd studied enough to recognize the shape of the pressure even without seeing its source.
Infant Formation.
The first beast of that tier crested the district's northern edge within the hour, and Li Fan felt the entire network shudder the instant it engaged the outermost boundary.
The pale wall that had held against a full night of ordinary Tide beasts flared bright, strained, and folded inward under a single blow — not shattered outright, but pushed back several paces before the formation master anchoring it managed to stabilize the collapse. Cultivators who had spent the night fighting confidently against wolf-beasts and low predators scattered from the boundary's edge as the creature pressed through the weakened section, its presence alone enough to send lesser beasts fleeing from its path rather than toward the city they'd been driving toward all night.
Li Fan watched it through his divine sense at the very edge of his range — a shape too large and too fast to fully resolve at that distance, moving with a controlled violence that marked it as something far beyond the tide it had arrived alongside.
A runner reached his boundary within minutes, breathless in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion this time.
"Infant Formation beasts," the runner said. "Two of them so far, maybe more coming behind. The guild's pulling every Infant Formation cultivator in the district toward the northern breach. They're saying—" He hesitated, glancing toward the north himself before continuing. "They're saying the demons have shown themselves too. Not hiding anymore. Full cultivators, not just the spies we've been hunting."
Li Fan felt something in his chest go tight and still, the same stillness that had settled over him the moment the pressure first rose. He'd suspected, from the moment the sabotage pattern first revealed itself weeks earlier, that whatever was coordinating the Beast Tide's assault carried intent behind it that no ordinary beast could supply on its own. Hearing it confirmed changed nothing about what he needed to do next, but it settled the shape of the danger into something concrete rather than merely suspected.
"What does the guild need from formation masters like me?" he asked.
"Hold what you're holding," the runner said. "That's it. Don't try to reach the breach — that's for people who can actually stand against what's coming through it. Just hold the ground you've already got and don't let it collapse."
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The order made sense the moment Li Fan considered it honestly. A network built from mid-grade formation masters and Core Condensation cultivators had no business engaging an Infant Formation beast directly, let alone whatever demonic cultivators had finally revealed themselves alongside it. The network's value lay in exactly what it had already proven overnight — absorbing the ordinary tide, funneling it, containing it — not in confronting a threat several realms beyond what any single boundary could resist.
He fed fresh qi into all four of his nodes, reinforcing the boundary as thoroughly as his remaining reserves allowed, and watched the pressure to the north continue climbing.
A second Infant Formation beast joined the first within the hour, and the fighting near the breach intensified into something Li Fan could feel even without direct line of sight — flares of elemental force bright enough to catch at the edge of his divine sense, tremors through the ground sharper and more frequent than anything the night's earlier waves had produced. The demonic cultivators, when they finally revealed themselves fully, carried a signature unlike anything he'd felt from the Beast Tide's ordinary creatures — a cold, deliberate current running beneath their spiritual pressure, the same current he'd learned to recognize years ago from the three infiltrators he'd exposed at the city gate before the siege ever began.
The network began losing ground for the first time since the Grand Formation's collapse.
Li Fan felt three separate boundaries fail within his sensing range over the following hour — not overrun by ordinary beasts, but deliberately targeted, their formation masters singled out and struck down or driven off by demonic cultivators who understood exactly what the network was and exactly how to unravel it. A boundary without its anchor collapsed within moments, no matter how well it had held the night before.
"They're hunting the formation masters," Mu Qinghe said grimly, watching a distant flare mark another collapse somewhere to the east. "Not the boundaries. The people holding them."
Li Fan understood the tactic immediately, and understood, with the same cold clarity, that it meant his own position had just become considerably more dangerous than a night spent fighting Qi Sea wolf-beasts had ever suggested it would be. A demonic cultivator capable of killing an Infant Formation-adjacent target wouldn't need more than a single serious strike to end a mid-grade formation master's boundary along with everyone sheltered inside it.
He didn't panic. He didn't abandon his post. But he began watching his own perimeter with an attention sharper than anything he'd spared it in hours, dividing his focus between the ordinary beasts still testing his boundary and the wider pressure building to the north, waiting to see whether whatever was hunting formation masters would eventually turn its attention toward his own small piece of the district.
Mu Wan had gone quiet beside him, sword gripped tight, watching the northern sky where the pressure continued to build without any sign of easing. She'd fought through an entire night of ordinary beasts with growing confidence. This was different, and she seemed to understand that without needing to be told.
"Can you fight something like that?" she asked quietly. "If it comes here?"
Li Fan considered the honest answer and gave her a version of it that wouldn't help her more by frightening her than by informing her. "Not directly. Not without cost I'm not willing to spend unless there's no other choice." He glanced toward the boundary's edge, toward the pale light still holding steady despite everything pressing against it. "This is what I have to fight with. It's already proven itself once. It'll have to be enough again."
She didn't ask anything further. She simply reset her stance, sword steady in both hands, and watched the north alongside him while the pressure continued to climb, and the network he'd helped build began, piece by piece, to strain under a weight it had never been built to carry.
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