Chapter 193
The next several years passed the way Li Fan had learned, long ago, that real cultivation years always passed — not in a straight line, but in an uneven rhythm of long quiet stretches broken by small, ordinary events that only seemed insignificant while they were happening.
He divided his time between the guild, his workshop, the Mu courtyard, and increasingly long stretches sealed beneath his own floor, working toward Core Shattering the same patient way he'd worked toward every threshold before it — through accumulated understanding rather than force, refining what he already had until the next step revealed itself as inevitable rather than forced.
The city, meanwhile, kept moving without waiting for him to finish.
He noticed the shift in the young cultivators first, the way a person notices any change that happens gradually enough to become obvious only in hindsight.
Where children in the market had once talked about which sect they hoped to join, or which craft they wanted to apprentice into, Li Fan began hearing a different kind of ambition entirely. A boy no older than twelve, trailing behind his mother at a formation stall, announced with total confidence that he intended to enter the Secret Realm the moment it opened and bring back something that would make his family's name known across the entire continent. His mother laughed, indulgent and a little worried, the particular laugh of a parent who didn't quite know how to argue with a dream that large.
Li Fan heard variations of the same ambition from a dozen other children over the following years — some earnest, some clearly repeating something they'd overheard from an older sibling, all of them treating the Secret Realm as less a distant historical event and more a genuine, personal opportunity waiting somewhere just past the edge of their own adolescence.
Some of the young cultivators who passed through his orbit during those years became familiar faces even without Li Fan ever learning their names properly.
A young sword cultivator, perhaps sixteen when Li Fan first noticed him practicing forms in the plaza near the guild hall, returned to that same plaza every few months for years afterward, his stance visibly sharper each time, his blade work shedding its early stiffness the way any dedicated practice eventually shed the marks of a beginner. Li Fan never spoke to him beyond the occasional nod exchanged between two people who recognized each other from a shared corner of the city.
A formation apprentice, younger and quieter, began appearing at the guild hall's public boards, studying the posted diagrams with an intensity that reminded Li Fan faintly of his own early years of self-taught study. He asked Qin Mo about her once, in passing, and learned only that she'd shown unusual aptitude for someone without formal sect training — the same description, more or less, that had followed Li Fan's own registered identity for years.
A wandering physician passed through twice, years apart, each time a little more weathered, a little more capable, carrying the particular calm competence Li Fan recognized from his own years under Old Sun. And once, memorably, a young beast tamer walked through the market leading a half-grown mountain cat on a woven leash, drawing stares from every direction, the animal's temperament clearly the product of patient, careful work rather than any coercive technique.
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None of them became anything more than familiar faces glimpsed at a distance. But Li Fan found himself, without quite deciding to, keeping a private accounting of them regardless — watching them grow the same slow way he watched Mu Wan grow, understanding without needing it explained that some of these faces would matter again, years from now, standing somewhere near the entrance to a realm none of them yet understood.
The Seven Great Sects tightened their recruitment standards sometime during those same years, a change Li Fan learned about secondhand from Qin Mo rather than through any announcement posted publicly.
"They're only taking the genuinely talented now," Qin Mo said one afternoon, reviewing a stack of guild reports with the same flat efficiency he brought to everything. "No more filling quotas with mediocre disciples just to keep the numbers up. Every sect wants their strongest possible showing when the Realm opens."
"Makes sense," Li Fan said. "More competition inside means fewer resources to waste on people who won't survive the first hour."
Qin Mo glanced up at that, something faintly approving in his expression. "You've been thinking about it."
"Everyone's been thinking about it," Li Fan said. "I'm just one more person doing the same math as everyone else."
Mu Wan's own progress marked the years as clearly as anything else in the city.
She'd reached Qi Sea sometime during Li Fan's second long seclusion, a milestone her parents celebrated quietly with a small dinner Li Fan attended once he'd emerged and heard the news. By the time he returned from his third extended stretch underground, she'd begun asking him increasingly specific questions about formation work whenever she found him at his bench — not idle curiosity anymore, but the deliberate, pointed questions of someone building toward a genuine skill rather than simply passing time.
"Why do you angle the nodes that way instead of straight?" she asked him once, watching him trace a defensive array into a fresh formation plate. "Straight lines carry qi faster," Li Fan said. "Angled ones carry it more efficiently. Depends what the formation needs more — speed or economy."
She considered that, filing it away the same careful way she filed away most things he told her now. "Could you teach me? Properly, I mean. Not just answering questions when I ask."
Li Fan set down his tools and looked at her for a long moment before answering. "I can teach you what I know about formations. That's different from taking an apprentice, and I want you to understand the difference before you ask again."
"What's the difference?"
"An apprentice belongs to their master's path," he said. "I'm not interested in shaping anyone into a smaller version of myself. But knowledge freely given costs nothing either of us shouldn't be willing to spend."
She accepted that distinction more easily than he'd expected, and from that afternoon on, a portion of Li Fan's evenings at the Mu courtyard began quietly reshaping themselves around formation lessons neither of them called lessons out loud.
By the time the countdown had shortened to seven years, Li Fan could look back across the preceding stretch and recognize, with the same clarity he applied to everything else, how much had actually changed while he'd been mostly looking inward. The city had grown busier. The young cultivators he'd once glimpsed as unfinished sketches of people had begun resolving into something closer to their eventual shapes. Mu Wan had become, in slow, unhurried increments, someone he no longer thought of as a child sheltering behind her parents' skill.
And somewhere beneath his own courtyard, a core that had once sat comfortably at Late-Stage Core Condensation continued its slow, deliberate climb toward a threshold he could feel approaching but had not yet reached.
Seven years remained. It would have to be enough.
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