Chapter 199
One Year
The two years between three and one passed quietly for Li Fan and loudly for everyone around him.
He spent most of that stretch consolidating his Core Shattering foundation, refining the Ten Directional Sword Formation in small, careful increments whenever his own reserves allowed, and watching the city's transformation accelerate past anything even the market's earlier frenzy had suggested. The number of outsiders passing through Myriad Beast City's gates doubled, then doubled again. Inns that had once struggled to fill half their rooms now turned away travelers nightly. The guild's commission board stayed permanently overflowing, formation masters working double shifts to keep pace with demand that showed no sign of slowing before the countdown finally reached its end.
By the time the phrase "one year" replaced every earlier number in the city's common vocabulary, Myriad Beast City had become something Li Fan barely recognized from the quiet, rebuilding place he'd walked through a decade earlier.
Sect disciples moved through every district now, not the occasional patrol he remembered from the years just after the siege, but a constant, visible presence — young cultivators in the colors of all seven sects, mingling with independent wanderers and demonic infiltrators who had grown, over the preceding years, increasingly difficult to distinguish from anyone else in the crowd. Li Fan's own trained eye still caught the occasional cold thread of demonic qi beneath a stranger's ordinary bearing, but even he found himself working harder for that certainty than he once had, the sheer density of unfamiliar faces making any single thread of suspicion harder to isolate from the general noise.
The guild issued no formal warning about it, and neither did the sects. Everyone understood, without needing it stated, that a year this close to the opening meant every faction with a stake in the Secret Realm's contents had representatives moving quietly through the city, watching, gathering information, waiting for whatever advantage the final months might still offer.
The market itself had shifted again, the earlier wave of scams and fabricated treasures giving way to something more practical and considerably more expensive.
Healing pills, once a modest purchase for anyone with a minor injury to treat, now sold at prices that would have seemed absurd a decade earlier, entire stockpiles bought up within hours of a new batch reaching the shelves. Defensive treasures — plates, talismans, minor artifacts capable of absorbing a single serious blow — moved just as quickly, their sellers barely needing to advertise before a line of buyers formed outside their stalls. Storage treasures grew scarcer by the month, every cultivator planning to enter the Secret Realm apparently determined to carry as many supplies as their compressed spatial capacity would allow. Escape talismans, the kind Li Fan himself had built and used more than once over the years, became so sought after that even competent formation masters struggled to keep pace with demand.
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Li Fan overheard a woman haggling loudly over the price of a beast-repelling charm one afternoon, her voice carrying an edge that had nothing to do with the modest sum actually in dispute.
"Fifty spirit stones for a charm that used to cost ten," she said, exasperated. "This is robbery."
The merchant shrugged, entirely unbothered. "Everything costs more because of that damned Secret Realm. Take it or leave it. Someone else will pay it if you don't."
The woman paid it. Li Fan watched her walk away clutching the charm with both hands, and understood, without needing to ask, exactly what calculation had made fifty spirit stones suddenly seem reasonable for something that had cost a fraction of that a year earlier.
What use are spirit stones if I'm dead. He heard some version of that sentiment repeated so often over the following months that it stopped registering as a complaint and started sounding like something closer to the city's actual operating principle. People who would never have spent ten spirit stones without careful deliberation a decade earlier now spent fifty without visible hesitation, the accumulated wealth of years suddenly worth less than whatever margin of survival it might purchase in the months ahead.
Li Fan found himself, more than once, turning down commissions simply because the demand outpaced anything he could reasonably deliver in the time remaining. He prioritized what he considered genuinely useful over what merely sold well, building defensive and concealment work for clients whose plans seemed grounded in something more substantial than panic, and declining, as politely as the situation allowed, the increasingly desperate requests for treasures he suspected would matter less than their buyers hoped.
The Mu family made its decision that year as well. Mu Qinghe and Luo Yulan talked it over between themselves for weeks, weighed what they had and what the realm might ask of it, and decided against entering. All three of them would stay outside when the doors opened.
They told Li Fan plainly, without much explanation attached. They'd chosen not to risk it.
One year remained, and Myriad Beast City had become, in every visible respect, a place holding its breath before something it couldn't fully see coming. Merchants sold what they could while buyers still had spirit stones worth spending. Exploration groups finalized plans they'd spent years assembling. Sect disciples and demonic infiltrators moved through the same crowded streets, each watching the other without either side breaking the fragile peace that had held since the siege's aftermath.
Li Fan returned to his own courtyard each evening throughout that final stretch, checked his formations, refined his cultivation, and watched the city around him prepare for an ending none of them could yet properly imagine.
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