Chapter 194
The first report of strange beast movement reached Li Fan secondhand, the way most things reached him now — through a customer's idle conversation while he worked, rather than through any deliberate seeking out.
"A whole valley gone quiet," the man said, a trapper who occasionally sold Li Fan minor materials for formation work. "Not empty of beasts. Emptied of them. Like something swept the whole basin clean and moved on. My cousin's crew turned back before they figured out why."
Li Fan kept working, only half his attention on the conversation. "Where?"
"Two days east of the valley's main road. Nowhere near here." The trapper shrugged, the particular shrug of a man who'd already decided the story wasn't his problem to solve. "Sects are saying it's just migration. Seasonal thing."
"Is it the season for it?"
The trapper considered that, and didn't have a ready answer.
Similar stories accumulated over the following months, arriving in fragments the way rumors always did — a caravan reporting unusually large predators spotted far outside their normal territory, a group of hunters describing beasts that seemed to move with more coordination than instinct alone should explain, a Core Shattering-tier creature glimpsed closer to a border settlement than anyone remembered one straying in living memory.
None of it amounted to anything the Seven Great Sects treated as urgent. The official explanation, repeated consistently enough that Li Fan suspected it had been agreed upon somewhere above the level of ordinary patrol captains, remained the same each time: seasonal migration, nothing more, nothing the city's own defenses needed to concern themselves with.
Li Fan didn't believe it, and he suspected most of the people repeating the explanation didn't fully believe it either. But disbelief wasn't the same as evidence, and he had no intention of chasing down a mystery that carried no immediate cost to anything he actually cared about protecting.
He turned his attention instead toward the work that mattered more directly — the long, careful study required before he could safely attempt Core Shattering. He'd read enough, over the preceding years, to understand the shape of the danger waiting on the other side of Peak Core Condensation. The realm demanded something no earlier breakthrough had required of him: the deliberate destruction of the very core he'd spent years perfecting, followed by a desperate scramble to reabsorb its scattered essence into his own body before it dispersed beyond recovery. Cultivators who mistimed the process, or whose bodies couldn't withstand the sudden influx of raw essence flooding every meridian at once, didn't survive it. Those who survived poorly executed attempts sometimes lived with permanent damage that no amount of later cultivation could fully repair.
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Li Fan approached the preparation the same methodical way he approached everything. He studied every text on the process he could locate, cross-referencing accounts from different sects where their descriptions overlapped and noting carefully where they diverged. He brewed and stockpiled medicines meant to stabilize a body under extreme strain, testing weaker variants on himself in small, controlled doses to understand exactly how his own physiology responded before he'd need to trust a stronger version during the breakthrough itself. He reinforced the underground chamber further still, adding formation layers specifically designed to contain a catastrophic failure rather than merely conceal his presence.
"You're being careful about this one," Mu Wan observed one evening, watching him grind a measure of stabilizing herb into fine powder at his workbench.
"More careful than usual," Li Fan admitted. "Core Shattering isn't like the breakthroughs before it. There's no version of this one where a mistake corrects itself quietly."
"What happens if it goes wrong?"
He considered how much of the honest answer she actually needed. "The core disperses without reforming. Depending on how badly, that either weakens a cultivator permanently or kills them outright." He set the grinding stone down and looked at her directly. "That's why I'm spending a year preparing for something that'll take perhaps a single night to attempt."
She absorbed that without flinching, though something behind her eyes tightened slightly. "Will you tell me before you go in? So I know."
"I'll tell you," Li Fan said. "You and your parents both. Someone should know when to start worrying if I don't come back up on schedule."
The strange beast movements continued their slow accumulation through that same stretch of preparation, never escalating into anything the city treated as genuine crisis, never fully disappearing either. A merchant caravan failed to return along a route that passed near the valley's edge, its fate never conclusively determined — bandits, beasts, or something else entirely, depending on which version of the story a person chose to believe. A patrol reported, then quietly retracted, a sighting of beasts gathering in numbers too organized to explain through ordinary migration alone. Li Fan noted each report as it reached him and set it aside. He had a clear sense, without needing anyone to confirm it, that whatever was stirring in the deeper reaches of Myriad Beast Valley had nothing to do with him directly, at least not yet. The valley had always held things beyond easy understanding. The Flood Dragon alone was proof enough of that. Whatever else moved beneath its surface could remain exactly as mysterious as it already was, right up until the moment it became a problem he couldn't avoid.
That moment, he suspected, still lay years away. For now, there was a core to prepare, a family to reassure, and a countdown that continued, indifferent to any of it, ticking steadily downward toward a date none of them could delay.
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