Chapter 197
Seasonal Migration
Four years remained when the caravan disappeared.
It had left Myriad Beast City well provisioned, a modest trading party bound for a settlement two weeks past the valley's northern edge, its route chosen specifically to avoid the deeper wilderness where sensible travelers already knew to expect trouble. It never arrived. A search party found the wagons eleven days later, abandoned rather than destroyed, cargo untouched, no bodies, no obvious struggle. Whatever had happened to the people who'd driven them left no clear evidence behind at all.
Li Fan heard the story from three different sources within the same week, each version embellished slightly more than the last, and set it alongside everything else he'd been quietly accumulating about the valley's deepening strangeness.
A second report followed within the month, this one carrying more weight because it came from a source Li Fan trusted directly.
"Found something dead near the southern trapping grounds," Mu Qinghe said, dropping into the low chair across from Li Fan's workbench with the particular heaviness of a man who'd walked a long way to deliver a piece of news he clearly hadn't enjoyed carrying. "A beast. Not one of the ordinary predators that live out there. Something bigger. Something that had no business being that far south of the valley's deep territory in the first place."
"What killed it?"
"Nobody could say for certain. No wound we could identify. Just dead, lying in a clearing like it had simply stopped." Mu Qinghe shook his head. "The hunters who found it wouldn't go near the body for longer than it took to confirm it was actually dead. Something about it unsettled them past the ordinary discomfort of finding a corpse."
The pattern continued accumulating through the following months, each individual report small enough to dismiss on its own but collectively impossible to ignore. A group of independent cultivators who'd ventured into the valley's outer reaches returned early, badly shaken, describing beasts gathered in numbers and formations too deliberate to explain through ordinary instinct. A Core Shattering-tier predator was spotted, briefly, within sight of one of the city's own outlying watchtowers — closer to human territory than any creature of its tier had strayed in longer than the current garrison's collective memory.
The Seven Great Sects responded the way they'd responded to every strange development since the siege's end: quietly, without fanfare, increasing patrols along the city's outer perimeter while issuing no public statement beyond the same worn explanation that had covered every earlier report.
"Seasonal migration," the posted notice read, when Li Fan finally saw one nailed to the guild hall's public board. "Residents are advised there is no cause for alarm."
Nobody believed it. Li Fan certainly didn't, and judging by the flat, disbelieving expressions on the faces of everyone else reading the same notice, he wasn't alone in that assessment. But disbelief accomplished nothing on its own, and the notice's real purpose had never been persuasion. It existed to give the city an official position to repeat when travelers or merchants asked pointed questions, nothing more.
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Li Fan didn't investigate. He'd known, from the first fragmentary rumor years earlier, that whatever stirred beneath Myriad Beast Valley's surface belonged to a scale of danger that had nothing to do with a mid-grade formation master's ordinary business, and nothing about the accumulating reports changed that calculation. The valley had always held things beyond easy understanding. The Flood Dragon remained proof enough of that on its own, without needing further confirmation from a dead beast in a southern clearing or a caravan that had simply stopped existing partway along its route. He filed each report away as it reached him, the same careful private accounting he'd maintained for years now, and returned to the work that actually demanded his attention.
That work had grown steadily more demanding as the countdown shortened. Formation commissions arrived faster than the guild could comfortably process them, each one carrying the same unspoken urgency that had defined every request for the preceding several years. Li Fan built what was asked of him, refined his own private cultivation in the hours between, and watched the city continue its slow transformation into something increasingly organized around a single distant date.
The city itself had changed in ways Li Fan noticed more sharply now than he had in the earlier years, the accumulated weight of small differences finally visible against the memory of what the place had looked like before the siege. A bakery he'd frequented for years near the guild hall had passed to a new owner, the elderly baker who'd run it retiring quietly sometime during Li Fan's last extended seclusion without any particular ceremony marking the change. A formation master he'd known casually, someone who'd built one of the earliest ground boundaries alongside his own during the Beast Tide, had died the previous winter — not in battle, not from any dramatic cause, simply old age catching up with a body that had spent decades in demanding work.
Li Fan attended the funeral out of a quiet sense of shared history rather than close friendship, standing near the back of a modest gathering, and found himself thinking, not for the first time, about how many people around him were quietly running out of years before the Secret Realm ever opened at all. The countdown measured time toward a single event. It measured nothing about the ordinary attrition that continued regardless, claiming people through age, illness, and simple bad luck long before any door beneath the valley finally cracked open.
"Do you ever think about not making it that far?" Mu Wan asked him one evening, watching him work through the last of a formation commission by lamplight. She'd grown into the habit, over the preceding years, of asking questions that cut more directly to the point than most adults would have risked.
"I think about it," Li Fan admitted. "Not often. It's not a productive thing to dwell on."
"But you do think about it."
"A formation master I knew died last winter. Old age, nothing more dramatic than that." He set his tools down and looked at her directly. "He spent thirty years building toward strength he never got to use for anything except surviving one very bad night. I don't intend to end up the same way, but I understand now that intention alone doesn't guarantee anything."
She absorbed that quietly, turning it over the same careful way she turned over most of what he told her these days. "So what do you do about it?"
"The only thing there is to do," Li Fan said. "Keep working. Keep preparing. And try not to waste whatever years I actually get."
Four years remained, and somewhere beyond the city's rebuilt walls, the valley continued its slow, unexplained transformation into something increasingly wrong. Li Fan let it remain someone else's problem for now, and turned his attention back to the formation on his workbench, and the family waiting for him a short walk away, and the steady, patient accumulation of strength that still needed years more before it would be enough for whatever finally waited on the other side of the countdown.
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