Chapter 200
Blue Star
The thought had been sitting somewhere beneath everything else for years, and Li Fan finally let himself look at it directly on an evening eleven months before the doors were due to open.
He'd been reviewing his own notes on the Secret Realm — fragments gathered from a decade of overheard rumors, guild reports, and the occasional genuine piece of information that had surfaced amid all the noise — when the shape of the question finally settled into words he could no longer avoid.
He still didn't understand where he'd actually come from.
The spatial rift that had swallowed him on Blue Star had deposited him, without warning or explanation, into Myriad Beast Valley — the same valley that had sat, for countless years before he ever arrived, holding a Sage's Secret Realm sealed somewhere beneath its surface. He'd spent a decade treating that fact as coincidence, or at least as something too large and unprovable to spend real thought on. But sitting with his notes spread across the workbench, the coincidence no longer felt as easy to dismiss as it once had.
A Sage, by every account he'd ever gathered, existed at a tier of power capable of shaping entire pocket realms from raw will and understanding. If a being of that magnitude could seal an entire world inside a mountain, the question of what else that same power might have been capable of no longer seemed unreasonable to ask. Could a Sage open a passage between worlds? Between his own world and this one? Was it possible — however small the likelihood — that the rift which had ended his old life and begun this one traced back, however indirectly, to something connected to the very realm about to open a short distance from where he now sat?
He turned the question over for a long while, testing it the same careful way he tested everything, refusing to let hope build faster than the evidence actually justified.
He had no real reason to believe it. He understood that plainly enough even as the thought took hold of him. Ten years of quiet inquiry had produced nothing that directly connected the Secret Realm to Blue Star, no fragment of rumor, no scrap of ancient text, nothing beyond the simple geographic accident of both things existing in the same valley.
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But he'd learned, across a long life built on careful observation, that even a small possibility deserved investigation when the alternative was never knowing at all. He'd spent a decade building strength, wealth, and a quiet, stable life in this world without ever once forgetting the parents and the woman he'd left behind on the other side of a rift he still didn't understand. If there was even the faintest chance that the realm about to open held some fragment of an answer — however unlikely, however small — he owed it to that unresolved thread to look.
He didn't share the thought with anyone. It wasn't the kind of thing he told people — not the Mu family, not Qin Mo, not anyone else whose orbit he'd settled into over the years. This particular thought felt too fragile, too easily mocked by anyone who hadn't lived through the specific, singular experience of falling through a tear in the world and waking up somewhere else entirely. He'd carry it alone, as he carried most of the things that mattered most to him.
What the thought did settle, with a clarity nothing else about the coming Secret Realm had managed to provide, was his own resolve. He was entering. Not for treasure, not for status, not because every other cultivator in the city seemed determined to go and he felt some obligation to match them. He was entering because a door was about to open onto something built by a power vast enough that its true limits remained genuinely unknown, and because the smallest possible chance that it held any thread connecting back to Blue Star was a chance he could not walk away from unexamined.
He understood, even as he settled on the decision, that the answer waiting for him was far more likely to be disappointment than revelation. The Secret Realm almost certainly had nothing to do with Blue Star at all. But almost certainly wasn't certainly, and after ten years of careful, patient preparation, he finally had the strength to go and find out for himself rather than simply wonder from a safe distance for the rest of whatever life this world still had in store for him.
Eleven months remained. Li Fan set his notes aside, extinguished the lamp on his workbench, and sat for a long while in the dark, turning the decision over one final time to be certain it would hold.
It held.
Tomorrow there would be preparations to make — real ones now, no longer the abstract, patient accumulation of strength he'd spent a decade pursuing, but concrete work aimed at a specific door with a specific date. Equipment to forge. Affairs to settle. A city and a family to leave behind, carefully enough that neither would think to look for him while he was gone.
Tonight, he simply sat with the decision, and let it settle the same way every real resolution in his life had settled — quietly, without ceremony, and without any certainty at all about what waited on the other side of it.
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