Chapter 205 Crossing the Fracture

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 205

Crossing the Fracture

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The fracture hung sixty meters above the valley floor, a jagged seam that did not sit still. Dark red light leaked from its edges in slow pulses, and each pulse threw a scatter of sparks down onto the rock below. Where the sparks landed, stone turned to gray dust. Li Fan watched three such impacts from his position at the tree line, counting the interval between them — near enough to four breaths each time, steady enough to set a rhythm by.

The main forces had gone in three days earlier. Their passage had left the ground churned for a mile in every direction, deep ruts from the transport vessels' landing struts, broken brush, a wide black scorch where something had misfired during the crossing. Li Fan had waited out those three days on the ridge, watching the guard rotations settle, watching the tension between the gathered powers hold without breaking. Now the entrance sat quiet. A scattering of sentries remained posted around its base, spaced evenly, watching outward rather than in.

He moved down from the ridge under cover of the tree line, keeping his pace unhurried. His concealment held the same shape it always did — breath folded back into something indistinct from ordinary air, spiritual signature smoothed until it read as background rather than presence. None of the sentries turned their heads as he passed within a hundred paces of the nearest post.

The narrow fissure at the base of the rock wall was exactly where the maps traded in Myriad Beast City's black corners had said it would be, three feet wide at its mouth and narrowing further before it opened again. He turned sideways, pressed his shoulders through the gap, and let his boots find the unpaved slope on the other side by feel more than sight.

The air changed before his eyes adjusted. It carried a weight he had not felt since his earliest days on this world, thick enough that each breath pulled something more substantial than ordinary air into his chest. He smelled wet stone and old iron, and beneath both, something sweeter he could not immediately place. His internal circulation quickened on its own, adjusting to a pressure his body had not been built to expect.

He stood at the bottom of the slope and looked up.

The sky above him was a heavy silver-blue, vaulted rather than open, and it pressed down with the particular stillness of a roof rather than a horizon. Trees rose out of the gloom ahead of him — not merely tall, but wrong in their scale, trunks wide enough that a dozen men could not have linked hands around the base of even the smallest. Black vines the thickness of a grown man's leg crawled between the roots, their surface pulsing faintly with a slow green current. Small red herbs grew in clusters at the base of the nearest trunk, giving off a thin warmth that reached his ankles even through his boots.

Li Fan did not move for several minutes. He stood in the cold shadow of the first tree and let the details settle into place one at a time, the way Old Sun had once taught him to read a patient before speaking a single word of diagnosis. Two parallel veins ran the length of every leaf within his sight, rather than the branching network he had studied for years in Wei Baishan's old texts. The gravity beneath his feet sat heavier than what he was used to, enough that his first several steps had carried a fraction more weight than intended. The moss on the stones nearby grew in a spiral pattern he had never once seen replicated on any plant from any province he had crossed.

He allowed himself, for the length of a single held breath, to hope.

He had carried the thought for years without saying it aloud to anyone — that the fracture which had swallowed him from the excavation site on Blue Star and the fracture that had opened into this Secret Realm might share some common thread. That an ancient Sage capable of building a world inside a formation might also be capable of tearing a hole between one world and another entirely different one. That somewhere past the tree line, if he only walked far enough, he might find broken concrete, a length of rusted rebar, the shape of a road built for wheels rather than hooves.

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He extended his divine sense outward, sweeping it low across the forest floor and high into the canopy, searching without fully admitting to himself what he was searching for.

He found ancient trees. He found spirit plants with structures unlike anything catalogued in any manual he had ever bought. He found the distant, slow movement of something large through the deeper brush, its presence heavy enough to register even at a mile's distance. He did not find asphalt. He did not find steel girders or shattered glass or the particular hum of anything built by human hands rather than grown by the earth.

The hope did not collapse all at once. It simply thinned, the way morning mist thinned under direct sun, until there was nothing left to call it by that name.

This was not Blue Star.

The trees were wrong. The plants were wrong. The air itself carried a weight and a taste that belonged to no forest he had ever walked through in his old life. Whatever this Secret Realm was, whatever ancient hand had shaped it, it had not been built from any fragment of the world he had left behind at the bottom of a collapsing excavation pit.

Li Fan stood beneath the first great tree and let the fact settle into him without resistance. He did not clench his jaw. He did not let his breathing change. He had learned, across more years than he cared to count, that grief handled loudly cost more than grief handled quietly, and that neither version changed the shape of what had actually happened.

One day, perhaps, he would find his way back. The thought had kept him moving through worse places than this one. It would keep moving him now.

He was already here. That fact alone was worth something.

He turned from the direction the main forces had taken — toward the wide, trampled track leading deeper into the valley's center, where thousands of cultivators were already converging on whatever the Secret Realm's central regions held — and instead angled left, toward a stretch of unbroken wilderness where no boot had yet left a print.

The forest floor here was carpeted in five inches of rotting leaf mold, dark and sweet-smelling underfoot, giving slightly with each step like packed snow. Li Fan kept his divine sense drawn in tight, no more than twenty paces in any direction, wary of the resting auras he could feel higher on the ridges — territorial, patient, the kind of presence that reacted badly to careless intrusion. He passed a moss-covered stone half-buried in a cedar's root system, its surface cold under his palm when he paused to touch it, and did not linger.

Near a dry creek bed strewn with smooth river stone, he found the picked-clean skeleton of some low-tier beast wedged between two boulders, its hide dried stiff by whatever passed for weather in this bound and constructed sky. He worked two curved tusks free from the jaw with his knife, wiped the bone dust from the blade against his robe, and sealed them into a pouch without much thought. Small things. Useful things, perhaps, later. He had learned long ago not to walk past a resource simply because it hadn't been the resource he'd gone looking for.

The light began to change as he climbed toward higher ground — not dimming gradually the way true daylight would fade, but sliding through its stages with a precision that felt rehearsed rather than natural. Li Fan stopped at the crest of a low ridge and watched the great red disc sink toward the western peaks. He counted the time it took to fully vanish. Twelve minutes exactly. He counted again when the pale moon rose to take its place, tracking its climb against a fixed point on the ridge opposite him. The arc it traced was perfectly linear, without the faint curve any true orbit should have carried.

He sat down on a flat stone, drew his robe tighter against the sudden chill of true dark, and looked up at the sun-that-was-not-a-sun for a long moment, unblinking. No ordinary star should have permitted that. His eyes, even sharpened as they were by his cultivation, should have carried some residual ache from the exposure. They carried none.

Whatever this Secret Realm actually was, Li Fan understood, sitting alone on a cold ridge four days into a world that was not his own, it had not simply appeared. Someone had built it. And whoever that someone had been, they had left signatures behind large enough for a patient man to eventually trace back to their source.

He did not move to follow the crowd toward the valley's center that night, nor the following morning. He sat with his back against the stone, listened to the insects clicking somewhere in the dry grass below, and began, without any particular urgency, to think about where a person might start looking for the seams in a sky built to hide them.