Chapter 189
The Ancestors
The demonic Tribulation cultivators moved to crush the city outright, and for a handful of terrible breaths, Li Fan believed they would succeed.
He felt their intent before he understood its shape — a gathering of force somewhere above the ruined northern wall, vast and cold, pressing down toward the districts still standing rather than toward any single point of resistance. Boundaries across his sensing range guttered and failed in rapid succession, formation masters unable to hold structures together against pressure that no longer cared whether a wall stood in its path.
His own circle wavered, the pale light along its edge thinning until he could see straight through it to the street beyond. He poured everything he had left into the four nodes, jaw locked, and held the boundary at the barest edge of collapse rather than let it fail entirely.
Then, an instant before the pressure would have broken every remaining defense in the district at once, something else arrived.
Li Fan felt it as a presence settling into the sky directly above the city, sudden and absolute, carrying a weight that made even the demonic force bearing down on the walls seem to hesitate. He didn't need anyone to tell him what it meant. He'd read enough, over years of quiet study, to recognize the signature of a true Ancestor descending in person — something the Seven Great Sects had held in reserve through the entire siege, finally committed now that the city's fall had become a real and immediate possibility.
The moment the first Ancestor's aura settled over Myriad Beast City, everything stopped.
Beasts mid-charge froze where they stood. A demonic cultivator who had been driving toward the eastern district went suddenly, unnaturally still, weapon still raised but motionless. Sect cultivators locked in combat only streets away stood with their blades caught mid-swing, unable or unwilling to complete a motion that had, in the space of a single breath, become entirely irrelevant to what was actually deciding the battle now.
The sky itself seemed to hold its breath.
More presences followed the first, arriving in a slow, deliberate procession that Li Fan felt more than watched, his own senses strained past anything he'd ever tested them against. Six more Ancestors, each one distinct in the particular flavor of pressure it carried — one cold and vast, one sharp enough to feel almost physically like a blade resting against his skin, one that pulsed with a slow, patient weight unlike anything else in the gathering sky.
The Seven Great Sects, assembled in full above the city they had sworn, generations ago, to help protect.
Opposite them, the demonic side answered in kind. The three sect leaders Li Fan had heard named in whispers for years rose to meet the orthodox Ancestors, their combined presence a cold, patient current that made his skin crawl even at this distance. And above them all, higher and heavier than anything else in the assembled sky, a final presence arrived that dwarfed every other signature combined.
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The Demon Sovereign.
The combined weight of that many Tribulation-tier beings gathered in one place proved more than Li Fan's body could bear standing upright.
His knees buckled without his permission, the pressure settling over the district like something with actual physical mass, forcing him down onto the packed earth beside his own northern node. Around him, every cultivator he could see was suffering the same fate. Mu Qinghe had gone to one knee, bow forgotten in his hand, face pale and sweating. Luo Yulan had fared no better, one hand braced against the ground to keep from collapsing entirely. Even Mu Wan, who lacked the cultivation to feel the pressure directly through her own reserves, had dropped to a crouch beside her mother, hands pressed over her ears as though the sheer scale of what filled the sky had become something audible as well as felt.
Somewhere in the district, Li Fan sensed cultivators losing consciousness outright — Qi Sea practitioners fainting where they stood, and, worse, faint traces of Body Refining cultivators simply failing beneath a weight their bodies had no capacity whatsoever to withstand. He didn't let himself dwell on what that meant. There was nothing he could do about it from where he knelt, and dwelling on it would cost him focus he needed for the four nodes still trembling under his own strained control.
Above the paralyzed city, the gathered powers did not attack.
Li Fan understood, even through the crushing weight pressing him toward the ground, that something had shifted the calculation for every being in that sky. Destroying one another now, with the Sage's Secret Realm believed to lie somewhere beneath the valley and its opening drawing inevitably closer with every passing year, would have been a catastrophic waste of strength that none of them could afford to spend on each other when a far greater prize sat waiting to be claimed.
Instead, their auras simply held, locked in a silent contest of presence rather than open combat, and from that held tension, shapes began to form in the sky itself. A vast, silent face took form above one section of the gathered Ancestors, ancient and unmoving. Elsewhere, the outline of an enormous sword hung suspended in the clouds, edge gleaming though no hand held it. A massive seal, its surface carved with characters too large and too old for Li Fan to read even with his sharpened eyesight, rotated slowly above a third point in the assembled powers.
And coiling through the clouds above it all, vast enough that its full length never seemed to resolve into a single visible shape, moved the Flood Dragon — the beast lord of Myriad Beast Valley, finally revealed in the fullness of what it actually was.
Nobody attacked. Nobody moved to strike first. The strongest beings in the entire Broken Heaven Region hung suspended above a city too devastated to do anything but kneel beneath them, and the silence stretched on, heavy and absolute, while every Core Shattering and lower cultivator in the district struggled simply to remain conscious under a pressure that had nothing personal in it at all.
Li Fan remained on his knees beside the northern node, both hands pressed flat against the cold stone, forcing what remained of his qi through the boundary in slow, careful measures rather than the desperate flood he'd spent through most of the siege. The formation held, barely, a thin, flickering thread of protection surrounding four people and a handful of strangers who had nowhere else in the world to be safer tonight than inside a circle built by a mid-grade formation master nobody above the clouds would ever think to notice.
He didn't look up again after the first shock of the pressure passed. There was nothing useful in looking. Whatever was being decided in that sky belonged to powers so far beyond his own understanding that watching it unfold would teach him nothing he could act on.
He kept his eyes on the stone beneath his palms, and his qi moving through the nodes, and the small, fragile shape of the boundary still holding around the people he'd sworn to protect — unnoticed, unremarkable, and, for tonight, exactly what he needed to be.
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