Chapter 192
Nine Years
Li Fan sealed himself into the underground chamber for the first extended stretch since the siege sometime after the second anniversary of the Beast Tide, and did not emerge again for the better part of four months.
The work inside was exactly as unglamorous as every serious cultivation stretch had ever been — long hours of circulation, careful attention paid to the smallest inconsistencies in his core's density, correction after correction applied to flaws too subtle to have mattered at any lesser realm but which, at the edge of Late-Stage Core Condensation, made the difference between advancing cleanly and advancing with a foundation he'd regret later. He didn't force anything. Forcing a breakthrough on an unready foundation was the kind of mistake that killed careless cultivators, and he had no intention of joining them over simple impatience.
The boundary gave, eventually, the pressure inside finally matching what the shell could no longer contain. No flare of light. No dramatic surge. Simply a settling, a core grown complete rather than larger, and Li Fan understood without needing to test it that he'd reached the absolute peak of what Core Condensation could offer him.
He tested his divine sense once his breathing had settled, extending it outward through the sealed chamber's own walls to gauge the new distance. It reached just over one thousand and fifty kilometers before the signal thinned past anything he trusted as reliable perception — a clean, measurable gain over the eight hundred kilometers he'd carried through the entire Beast Tide siege and the years since.
He stayed in the chamber another several days after that, stabilizing, before climbing back into a city that had kept moving without him.
The change in the market struck him almost immediately.
He'd left a city where formation commissions had grown more serious but remained, for the most part, ordinary requests dressed in slightly more anxious language. He returned to find the requests themselves had shifted in kind. "My son turns sixteen next spring," a woman told him, laying out payment for a formation meant to shield her family's modest storehouse. "He's already talking about entering when the Realm opens. I want everything we have protected before he leaves, in case—" She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
Another client wanted a storage formation built into a plain wooden case, small enough to carry unnoticed, large enough to hold several years' worth of provisions compressed down to a fraction of their true bulk. A third wanted a concealment array keyed specifically to hide a cultivator's presence from divine sense at short range — the kind of request Li Fan recognized immediately as preparation for exactly the sort of quiet, careful movement he'd spent his own life perfecting.
He built what was asked of him and said nothing about how familiar the requests felt.
"Nine years," had replaced "ten years" as the city's common shorthand sometime while he'd been sealed underground, the number ticking downward with the same quiet inevitability as everything else about the countdown. Li Fan heard it from Qin Mo within his first hour back at the guild hall, folded casually into a conversation about which older formation diagrams still needed updating before demand outstripped the guild's capacity to fill it. He heard it from a tea seller haggling over the price of leaves that had, apparently, become harder to source now that certain sects had begun buying up entire harvests for reasons nobody stated plainly. He heard it, later that same week, from a stranger passing through the market who asked, with the particular bluntness of someone who'd clearly asked the same question in a dozen other cities already, whether Li Fan knew anyone selling maps of the valley's interior.
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Li Fan didn't. He said so honestly, and watched the stranger move on to the next stall without any real disappointment, the kind of practiced resignation that suggested he'd already been told no more times than he could count.
The rumors had grown more elaborate too, each retelling adding weight the last one hadn't carried. Li Fan overheard, within a single afternoon at the teahouse near the guild hall, three entirely different and mutually contradictory descriptions of what the Sage's Secret Realm supposedly contained. One claimed an inheritance capable of elevating an ordinary cultivator's bloodline for generations. Another insisted the realm was a carefully disguised death trap, built specifically to thin the ranks of anyone foolish enough to enter uninvited. A third, delivered with total conviction by an old man who claimed a cousin's cousin had once glimpsed a fragment of the truth, described an entire cultivation world sealed inside the mountain, complete and self-sustaining, waiting for someone worthy enough to inherit it.
Li Fan listened without correcting any of it. None of the three claims struck him as more credible than the others, and correcting strangers' rumors had never once, in his experience, produced anything worth the trouble it invited.
Not everything the countdown produced was harmless exaggeration. A merchant approached him directly one afternoon, unrolling a weathered scrap of parchment across his workbench with the careful reverence of a man presenting something priceless.
"An ancient formation diagram," the merchant said. "Recovered from the ruins near the valley's edge. Supposedly drawn by the Sage himself, or one of his direct disciples. I'm told a formation master of your skill could authenticate it properly."
Li Fan studied the diagram for perhaps three breaths before setting it back down.
"This isn't formation language from any era close enough to the Sage's," he said. "The node structure is modern. Someone drew this within the last century, at most."
The merchant's face fell only slightly, the practiced disappointment of a man who'd clearly heard some version of this verdict before and had simply hoped, this time, for a different answer. "You're certain?"
"I'm certain."
The merchant thanked him anyway, paid the modest fee Li Fan charged for the consultation, and left to find some other formation master more willing to gamble on a maybe. Li Fan watched him go and returned to his own bench without further thought on the matter. Fake maps, fake diagrams, fake claims of ancient inheritance — all of it would only grow more common as the countdown shortened further, and none of it was worth chasing down or correcting beyond the narrow scope of whatever someone actually paid him to examine.
He found Mu Wan taller when he finally made his way to the Mu courtyard that evening, an observation so small it startled him slightly for how much time it implied had actually passed while he sat sealed underground chasing a single stubborn boundary in his own cultivation.
She'd changed in other ways too, subtler than height. Her stance, when she rose to greet him, carried none of the raw uncertainty he remembered from the night of the Beast Tide. Her sword sat at her hip now rather than propped against a wall within easy reach, something she no longer needed to think about consciously.
"You were gone longer this time," she said.
"Peak Core Condensation," Li Fan told her, since there was no particular reason to hide it from her anymore. "It took what it took."
She considered that, something calculating behind her eyes that hadn't been there a few years earlier. "How much further until you're strong enough for the Secret Realm?"
"Further than I'd like," he admitted. "Nine years isn't as long as it sounds, not for the distance I still need to close."
She nodded slowly, filing the answer away the same careful way she'd started filing away most things he told her these days, and Li Fan sat down beside her at the low wall between their two courtyards, watching the evening settle over a city that had spent four months growing older and more anxious without waiting for him to notice.
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