Chapter 203
The Road to the Valley
He walked rather than flew, the same decision he'd made every time distance and secrecy both mattered more than speed.
The road toward Myriad Beast Valley had changed considerably since the last time he'd traveled it with any real attention to the journey itself. Where the route had once carried the ordinary, sparse traffic of merchants and wandering cultivators, it now moved with a density Li Fan hadn't seen since the days just before the Beast Tide's siege — travelers in every direction, most of them cultivators, most of them heading the same way he was, toward a destination none of them could see yet but all of them understood was close.
He kept the mask and robe on for the entire journey, one traveler among the growing crowd rather than a recognizable face from any city along the way. Nobody looked at him twice. That had always been the point.
He noticed the wilderness changing three days before he reached the valley's outer edge.
At first it was subtle enough that he questioned his own perception — a stretch of forest that should have carried the ordinary background noise of birds and insects instead sitting unusually still, a river crossing where he expected to see fish moving beneath the surface and found only clear, empty water instead. He noted it and kept walking, unwilling to draw conclusions from evidence too thin to support them yet.
By the second day, the pattern had grown impossible to dismiss as coincidence. The road itself remained crowded with travelers, but the wilderness pressing in on either side of it had gone entirely, unnaturally silent. No birdsong. No distant howls or roars, the kind of ambient wildlife noise that had followed every stretch of his life spent near open country. No rustling in the undergrowth that wasn't caused by another traveler's footsteps.
He extended his divine sense cautiously into the trees on either side of the road, his current range reaching the better part of thirteen hundred kilometers when he pushed it to its full extent, and found nothing living within that entire span worth noticing — no beasts, no birds, nothing beyond the crowd of cultivators sharing the same road he walked.
Other travelers had begun noticing it too, judging by the fragments of conversation drifting past him as he walked. "Too quiet," a woman murmured to her companion a short distance ahead, glancing at the tree line with the particular unease of someone who trusted her own instincts more than she trusted an explanation she couldn't yet articulate. "Even for a well-traveled road, this is too quiet."
Her companion offered the same tired reassurance the sects had been repeating for a decade. "Beasts avoid crowds. Nothing more to it."
Neither of them sounded fully convinced.
Li Fan kept his own thoughts to himself, the same way he'd kept every private observation to himself for a decade now, but he understood, walking through a wilderness that had gone entirely silent in the days before a door a century in the making was finally set to open, that the timing was too precise to belong to ordinary migration. Something had cleared this ground deliberately, or something had made every living creature within it decide, on its own, that staying was no longer worth the risk.
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He thought of the Flood Dragon, and of the years of scattered reports he'd filed away without ever chasing down their meaning. He didn't chase this one down either. There was nothing to be done about it from where he walked, and the valley itself would answer the question soon enough regardless of what he speculated about it now.
He reached the valley's outer boundary on the ninth day of walking, and found the landscape beyond it transformed into something closer to a staging ground than a wilderness.
Camps stretched across the open ground in every direction, sect banners marking territory beside independent groups who'd claimed whatever space remained between them. The Seven Great Sects had established clearly defined perimeters, their disciples moving through organized rotations of watch and rest with the discipline of forces preparing for something they took seriously. Independent cultivators and smaller groups filled the gaps between the larger camps, some well-provisioned, others carrying little more than what they could shoulder themselves, all of them waiting for the same date.
Li Fan didn't approach any of the camps directly. He found a low ridge overlooking the gathering ground, far enough from any single group to avoid drawing notice, close enough to watch the assembly continue over the following days without needing to involve himself in it. He settled into the same patient stillness that had carried him through every dangerous waiting period of his life, and watched.
The numbers grew daily. By the fourth day of his own vigil, the staging ground had swelled well past anything he'd expected even after a decade of watching the countdown build inside Myriad Beast City itself. Thousands of cultivators, by his own rough count, spread across a landscape that had, within living memory, held nothing but wilderness and the occasional wandering beast.
He caught fragments of familiar spiritual signatures among the crowd, faces and presences he half-recognized from years of quiet observation back in the city — the sword cultivator whose forms he'd watched sharpen across a decade, the formation apprentice who'd built her own following, other faces from a private accounting he'd kept without ever intending it to matter this directly. He didn't approach any of them. He simply noted their presence, the same careful cataloguing habit he'd maintained for years, and returned his attention to the wider gathering.
Demonic cultivators moved through the crowd as well, harder to distinguish now than they'd ever been in the city itself, their numbers apparently significant enough that the orthodox sects had stopped pretending otherwise. No open conflict broke out between the two sides, not yet. Everyone present understood, without needing it stated, that whatever grievances existed between them would matter far less once the doors actually opened than whatever advantage could be gained by staying disciplined until they did.
On the seventh day of his vigil, the pressure he'd been half expecting finally arrived. Seven distinct presences settled into the sky above the valley's center, each one carrying the same unmistakable weight he remembered from a decade earlier, standing beneath a very different sky above a very different city. The Seven Great Sect Ancestors, arriving in full, their combined presence enough to still every conversation across the entire staging ground in the same instant.
A second gathering of presences followed within the hour, colder and more patient in character, settling opposite the first. Li Fan didn't need confirmation to know who they belonged to.
He remained on his ridge, unmoving, watching the strongest beings in the Broken Heaven Region gather above a wilderness gone entirely silent in anticipation of what they were about to do. He didn't expect an answer waiting behind whatever door they opened. Ten years of careful thought hadn't given him any real reason to expect one. But this was the first place in all those years that had actually given him a reason to look, and after a decade of patient preparation, he was finally close enough to find out whether looking would tell him anything at all.
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