Chapter 202
Leaving the City
The last few months before the opening passed quietly and deliberately, spent finishing work rather than starting anything new.
He closed his commission board at the guild two months before the date, informing Qin Mo directly rather than letting the news filter through secondhand.
"Long-term seclusion," Li Fan told him. "I don't know how long."
Qin Mo studied him for a moment, the same flat, unbothered attention he'd given every version of this request over the years. "Formation research?"
"Yes."
"You've said that before."
"It's still true," Li Fan said, which was, in its own careful way, not a lie at all.
Qin Mo accepted the explanation without pressing further and returned to his own reports without any particular ceremony. Nothing about the exchange differed from a dozen earlier ones exactly like it. That was the entire point.
He settled his remaining commissions over the following weeks, finishing every piece of work he'd already accepted payment for rather than leaving anything unresolved. He closed his workshop's accounts, paid what he owed to the merchants who'd supplied his materials over the years, and quietly transferred a portion of his accumulated wealth into a sealed formation beneath his own courtyard floor.
He told the Mu family the same thing he told everyone else.
"Seclusion," he said, when Mu Qinghe asked how long he'd be shut away this time. "Formation work. I don't have a fixed date for coming back up."
Nobody questioned it. He'd disappeared behind his own sealed doors often enough over the preceding decade that the announcement barely registered as news anymore. Luo Yulan nodded and went back to whatever she'd been doing. Mu Wan asked, out of habit more than real concern, whether he wanted anything looked after while he was gone, and Li Fan told her no, the same answer he always gave.
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He said nothing about the Secret Realm. He said nothing about leaving the city at all. As far as any of them would know, once the doors closed behind him, Lin Fan had simply gone back underground to study formations, exactly as he had a dozen times before.
On his final evening in the courtyard, he reinforced every formation guarding it far beyond what an ordinary seclusion required — the Spirit Gathering array, the concealment layer, the defensive plates buried at each corner, the killing formation held in reserve beneath the training room floor. He checked each node twice, the same standing rule he'd followed since the earliest years of building this life, and left nothing to chance that his own attention could still correct.
He sealed the underground chamber's entrance behind a concealment thick enough to hold for years without maintenance, and set the courtyard's outer gate exactly as it always looked when he withdrew for genuine seclusion — closed, quiet, unremarkable, a formation master's home holding its breath the same way it had a dozen times before while its owner worked undisturbed beneath the floor.
Anyone who came looking, in the weeks or months ahead, would find precisely what they expected to find. A sealed courtyard. A closed workshop. A formation master who had, once again, disappeared into long study and would surface again when he surfaced, on no schedule anyone else could predict.
He left that same night, once the courtyard sat dark and silent behind him.
He put on the mask and robe in the shadow of his own training room, testing the concealment fully for the first time outside the controlled conditions of a private trial. It held exactly as well as it had in every test he'd run against himself. He gathered the case holding the ten swords, settled his storage space over one shoulder, and slipped out through a gap in his own courtyard wall he'd built years earlier for exactly this kind of quiet departure.
He didn't use the main gate. He'd never used the main gate for anything that actually mattered, not since Myriad Craft City, not since he'd first understood how much attention a person could avoid simply by refusing the obvious path. He crossed the city's outer wall an hour later, unseen by any patrol and unremarked by any formation, moving through the dark with the particular care of someone who had spent a decade learning exactly how far a city's attention actually reached and exactly where it didn't.
Lin Fan remained behind him in every way that mattered — sealed inside a courtyard that would sit exactly as expected for as long as anyone bothered to check on it. What crossed the wall that night was simply a masked traveler, unaffiliated, carrying ten swords and a decade of careful preparation toward a door that would open, one way or another, within the month.
He didn't look back at the city as he left it. There would be time enough later to know whether he'd see it again.
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