Chapter 191
Peak
The city rebuilt itself slowly, the way any wound closes when the body underneath it is still healthy enough to do the work.
By the time the first winter after the siege had passed, the northern wall stood whole again, its new stonework paler than the weathered gray around it, a visible seam marking where the old city ended and the rebuilt city began. The scorched districts had been cleared, rebuilt, resettled. Shops reopened. Markets filled again with the ordinary noise of ordinary commerce. From a distance, Myriad Beast City looked, within a year, very much like the place it had been before the Beast Tide ever reached its gates.
But nothing about it felt quite the same, and Li Fan noticed the difference in a hundred small ways long before anyone spoke it aloud.
Formation commissions changed first.
Where Li Fan had once spent his days on modest, practical work — a concealment array for a merchant's warehouse, a minor defensive plate for a nervous household, small repairs to formations that had never needed to prove themselves against anything worse than an opportunistic thief — the requests coming through the guild now carried a different weight entirely.
"I want it strong enough to hold against something real," a client told him one afternoon, a modest shopkeeper who had lost half his inventory to the siege and clearly had no intention of losing the rest to whatever came next. "Not thieves. Something real."
Li Fan built what was asked of him, priced it fairly, and said nothing about what "something real" might actually mean. He'd heard the same request, in different words, from a dozen other clients over the preceding months. Nobody needed to explain what they were preparing for. Everyone in the city had stood beneath the same sky a year earlier and heard the same voice announce the same ten years.
Spirit stones grew scarcer, and their price crept upward by degrees small enough that no single week felt alarming, though the cumulative shift over months was impossible to miss. Certain herbs Li Fan had once bought without difficulty for his own quiet alchemical work began appearing less often on the market stalls, their absence explained by vague talk of sects "setting aside reserves" for purposes nobody named directly.
Travelers passing through the city asked more pointed questions than travelers usually asked. Not simply where the roads led, but which routes eventually approached Myriad Beast Valley, and how far a person might reasonably expect to travel before the terrain turned dangerous. Innkeepers grew accustomed to the questions and developed practiced, noncommittal answers that gave away nothing useful while still sounding helpful.
In the teahouses, rumors about the Sage grew more elaborate with each retelling. Li Fan overheard fragments of them without seeking them out — stories of a realm untouched by time, of treasures beyond counting, of an inheritance so vast that a single fragment of it could elevate an ordinary cultivator's entire bloodline for generations. He recognized the shape of the exaggeration even without knowing the underlying truth, the same way he'd recognized every inflated rumor he'd overheard across a decade of quiet listening in market crowds. Stories grew larger the farther they traveled from whoever had first witnessed the thing they described.
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The phrase itself arrived everywhere at once, the way a season arrives — not announced, simply present, woven into ordinary conversation until nobody remembered a time before it had been common.
"Ten years," a customer said one morning, haggling over the price of a formation plate meant to shield a family's modest savings. "Ten years isn't so long to prepare, when you think about what's coming."
Li Fan agreed with the man, finished the transaction, and went back to his bench.
He heard the phrase again that same week from Qin Mo, discussing which of the guild's older formation diagrams might need updating "before the ten years run out." He heard it from Mu Qinghe, weighing whether to take on more dangerous hunting contracts now, while the family still had ten years to recover whatever they lost. He heard it, eventually, so often that the words stopped registering as anything remarkable at all — background noise in a city slowly reorganizing its entire sense of time around a single distant date.
He mostly ignored it. There was formation work to do, and a family to check on in the evenings, and his own cultivation sitting exactly where it had sat since the night the boundary first held against the Beast Tide.
That, at least, he intended to change.
Late-Stage Core Condensation had carried him through the siege, but he'd felt, kneeling beneath the weight of seven Tribulation Ancestors and a Demon Sovereign, exactly how far short of meaningful strength that realm actually sat. He didn't need to chase power for its own sake. He'd never cultivated that way, and he had no intention of starting now. But the Secret Realm's opening had been given a fixed date, and whatever waited inside it would not measure its dangers against what a mid-grade formation master's cover identity could plausibly survive.
He began setting aside more of his time for deliberate cultivation, working it into the same patient, unhurried rhythm he'd always used — mornings at the guild, evenings with the Mu family, and the hours between given over, more and more often, to sitting quietly in his own courtyard and pressing against the boundary of his current realm.
The work was slow. He'd known it would be. Late-Stage Core Condensation was not a threshold he could simply push past through raw effort; it demanded refinement, the kind that came only from repeated, patient correction of every small flaw still lingering in a core that had already survived one real war.
He didn't rush it, and he didn't isolate himself entirely to chase it faster. He still opened the workshop most mornings. He still walked the market, listened to the accumulating rumors, watched the city slowly reshape itself around a countdown nobody could stop and everybody had started keeping.
Mu Wan noticed the shift in his habits before her parents did, the way she noticed most things about him now that she'd grown old enough to actually study the adults around her rather than simply exist alongside them.
"You're cultivating more," she said one evening, watching him return from a long stretch of quiet meditation in his own courtyard, robes still faintly damp with the effort of it.
"I am," Li Fan admitted.
"Because of the Secret Realm."
"Because of the Secret Realm," he agreed. "Ten years sounds like a long time. It isn't, not for what I still need to become."
She turned that over for a moment, sitting on the low wall between the two courtyards where she still spent most of her evenings, sword usually within reach even when there was nothing nearby to use it against. "Will you take me with you? When it opens?"
Li Fan considered the question honestly rather than answering it reflexively. "That's a decision for ten years from now. A great deal can change between here and there."
She accepted the answer without pressing further, the way she'd learned to accept most of his answers by now, and Li Fan went back to his own quiet work — a formation commission waiting on his bench, a core still refining itself one careful correction at a time, and a city slowly filling with the sound of a decade counting itself down.
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