Chapter 198
An Industry Built on a Door
Three years remained when the market finally stopped pretending it was selling anything else.
Li Fan had watched Myriad Beast City change gradually across the preceding years, each shift small enough on its own to pass without much notice. What greeted him now, walking the outer district's main thoroughfare on an ordinary afternoon, was no longer gradual. Entire rows of stalls that had once sold ordinary goods — cloth, tools, foodstuffs — had been replaced or repurposed, their new owners hawking wares that existed for exactly one purpose.
"Genuine maps of the valley's interior!" a merchant called from behind a table crowded with rolled parchment, each one tied with a different colored cord to suggest some meaningful distinction between them. "Recovered from a cultivator who scouted the entrance region before the last siege! Guaranteed accurate!"
Li Fan didn't stop to examine the claim. He'd heard enough variations of it by now to recognize the shape of the lie without needing to see the product itself. Nobody had scouted the entrance region in any meaningful sense — the Ancestors themselves had opened the fracture through raw spiritual force a decade earlier, and whatever lay beyond it remained, as far as anyone honest would admit, entirely unmapped by mortal hands.
Two stalls down, a different vendor sold what he called "authenticated Sage-era formation guides," bundles of parchment covered in diagrams dense enough to look impressive to anyone who couldn't actually read formation language. A third offered "proven survival techniques for the realm's interior," a slim booklet that, judging by the small crowd gathered around the seller, was moving briskly despite containing, as far as Li Fan could tell from a glance over someone's shoulder, nothing more than generic wilderness advice dressed up in mysterious language.
The scale of it struck him more than any single scam did. An entire district's economy had reorganized itself around a door that hadn't opened yet and wouldn't for three more years, built almost entirely on speculation, fear, and the desperate hope that someone, somewhere, actually possessed real information worth paying for.
Formation commissions kept him busy enough that he rarely had time to browse the new market stalls at length, but he couldn't avoid noticing the pattern in what people asked him to build. Storage formations grew more elaborate, designed to compress more supplies into smaller, more easily carried spaces. Concealment work became a near-constant request, everyone suddenly convinced that hiding their cultivation from rivals inside the Secret Realm would matter more than any weapon they carried. A surprising number of clients wanted formations specifically designed to mark a location and allow the wearer to find their way back to it — the practical worry of someone who understood, correctly, that a realm this size could swallow a person's sense of direction along with everything else.
Exploration groups had begun forming in earnest, small clusters of cultivators pooling resources and skills in anticipation of entering together rather than alone. Li Fan overheard fragments of their planning in teahouses and market corners — arguments over how many members a group should carry, debates about whether independent cultivators stood a better chance banding together or staying invisible among the larger crowds of sect disciples, calculations about how much of their combined wealth should go toward supplies versus weapons versus whatever information, real or fabricated, they could still afford to buy.
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He recognized some of the faces among these groups — the young sword cultivator who'd practiced forms in the plaza for years, now moving with a confidence that suggested real strength behind the polish. The formation apprentice he'd asked Qin Mo about once, now apparently competent enough to have attracted her own small following of would-be explorers. The wandering physician, passing through the city for what Li Fan suspected might be the last time before the countdown finally ran out, deep in conversation with a cluster of cultivators clearly trying to recruit her medical skill for whatever group they were assembling.
None of them approached him. He remained exactly what he'd always been to the city's population at large — a competent, unremarkable formation master, useful for commissions and nothing more. He preferred it that way, and he suspected, watching the groups form and reform around him, that whatever came of their preparation had very little to do with anyone paying him for a formation plate.
A particular customer found his way to Li Fan's workbench late one afternoon, unrolling a formation diagram with the same careful reverence Li Fan had seen from a dozen other hopeful sellers over the preceding years.
"An ancient formation array," the man said. "Said to be part of the Sage's own personal defenses, recovered from a ruin two provinces east. I need someone with real skill to confirm it before I invest further in the seller's other pieces."
Li Fan studied the diagram for the same three breaths he generally allotted these consultations, tracing the node structure, checking the character forms against what little he actually knew of formation language from eras genuinely old enough to matter.
"This is competent modern work," he said. "Whoever drew it understands formations reasonably well. It isn't ancient, and it certainly isn't the Sage's."
The man's face fell, the same practiced disappointment Li Fan had witnessed enough times now to predict almost exactly how it would settle across a stranger's features. "You're certain? The seller was very convincing."
"Sellers usually are," Li Fan said. "That's the whole of their skill."
He mentioned the encounter to Mu Wan that evening, more out of idle observation than any real desire to discuss it at length.
"You must get tired of telling people their treasures are fake," she said, sharpening her own blade beside him with the easy competence of someone who'd been doing it for years now.
"Not particularly. It's honest work, and it pays." He set his own tools down for a moment, considering the wider pattern rather than the single transaction. "What tires me is watching how much of the city's actual wealth is pouring into things that will matter for exactly nothing once the doors finally open. People are spending years of savings on maps drawn by liars, on techniques copied from books anyone could buy legally for a tenth the price, on promises nobody selling them has any way to actually keep."
"Why do people buy it, then? If it's so obviously fake?"
Li Fan considered the question with more care than its simplicity suggested it deserved. "Because three years feels like nothing anymore, and doing something — even something foolish — feels better than sitting still and waiting for a door neither of us can see yet."
She turned that over, blade resting across her knees. "Is that why you keep training? Because sitting still feels worse than working?"
"Partly," Li Fan admitted. "Mostly because training is the one thing I've bought that's never once turned out to be fake."
Three years remained, and the city around him had become, in every visible way, an economy built entirely on anticipation — merchants selling futures nobody could verify, exploration groups rehearsing plans against a realm none of them had ever seen, an entire generation of young cultivators pouring their ambition into a door that would not open for another three years regardless of how much anyone spent preparing for it.
Li Fan returned to his own bench once the evening's conversation wound down, and to the quiet, patient work of a cultivation that had never once needed a fake map to justify its cost.
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