Chapter 207 — Following the Lines

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 207 — Following the Lines

The formation line beneath the soil curved through the earth.

Li Fan discovered this during the first two days of following it. By the fifth day, he had adjusted his expectations and began reading its movement according to the terrain.

He crossed a dry riverbed before the current descended beneath the stone. His divine sense followed it until the limestone beneath him weakened the trace and the line disappeared entirely.

Li Fan stopped.

He stood beside the dry riverbed and examined the surrounding ground. The soil was hard beneath his boots. Small stones filled the old river channel. The banks were covered by sparse grass and thorny shrubs.

The formation current had vanished.

He waited, then followed the terrain north.

Half a mile away, the stone changed.

Granite emerged from beneath the soil in broad gray shelves. The current returned beneath it.

Li Fan crouched and pressed his palm against the cold stone.

A pulse traveled through the rock.

Steady.

Stronger than before.

He memorized the location and continued.

During the first week, two branches ended in dead formations.

The first branch carried him through dense brush and broken hills for nearly two days. It finally terminated in a shallow basin.

The formation current spread through the basin and dispersed into ordinary earth.

Li Fan sat beside the basin for an afternoon.

His divine sense passed through the exposed stone, the soil beneath the roots, and the surrounding slopes. He searched for the formation structure that had once held the branch in place.

He found fragments.

The original anchor had collapsed long ago.

Without the anchor, the formation current had nowhere to gather. It had gradually dispersed into the surrounding earth.

Li Fan recorded the location in his small bound book.

He marked the branch as dead and returned to the main line.

The second branch ended beneath a stand of iron-scaled trees.

The trees stood close together, their dark trunks covered by overlapping scales of hardened bark. Their roots broke through the soil in thick ridges.

The formation current entered the roots and stopped.

Li Fan examined the largest root.

Buried beneath the outer layer was a formation node.

A crack ran through it.

The damage had accumulated over many years. The stone had not been shattered by a single attack. Repeated pressure had slowly weakened the structure until the node could no longer maintain its original pattern.

Li Fan repaired it.

He spent most of the day cutting away damaged portions, replacing the broken sections, and adjusting the formation channels around the node.

He could have left it alone.

The Secret Realm would continue without the formation.

He repaired it because working on an ancient formation with his own hands revealed details that written records could not provide.

The stone resisted his qi at first.

Li Fan adjusted the circulation.

He changed the direction of the current, corrected the pressure within the damaged channel, and slowly brought the formation back into alignment.

The crack closed.

A faint vibration passed through the earth.

The formation current beyond the node strengthened.

Li Fan rested his palm against the stone and examined the change.

The structure was stable.

He continued north.

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Each night, he made camp wherever the day's tracking ended.

He gathered food when necessary and preserved what could be carried. He used no fire. The Secret Realm provided enough warmth through its spiritual atmosphere, and a flame would only make his position easier to notice.

He spent long periods beneath trees, beside rocks, or within shallow hollows.

The darkness of the Secret Realm carried sound across great distances.

His enhanced hearing caught the low call of a massive beast somewhere east of his position. Smaller creatures moved through the upper branches. Leaves shifted beneath their feet.

On one night, the ring of steel reached him from far away.

One strike.

Then another.

The sound carried through the forest before fading into silence.

Li Fan remained where he was.

The battle belonged to whoever had started it.

The Secret Realm continued to move around him.

In its central region, a group of loose cultivators discovered an ancient medicinal lake. They believed the water contained ordinary spiritual properties.

They disturbed the lake.

Something beneath the water awakened.

The fighting that followed spread across the lake's shore. The survivors eventually fled with fragments of an ancient object whose origin none of them understood.

Elsewhere, a chosen disciple of one of the Seven Great Sects entered a sealed tomb.

An ancient guardian had remained inside for countless years.

The disciple defeated the guardian and took an ancient bronze mirror from its grasp.

Before the day ended, a rival vanguard ambushed him outside the tomb.

The mirror changed hands.

It would change hands twice more before nightfall.

Li Fan knew nothing about any of this.

The events had their own causes, their own participants, and their own consequences.

By the second week, the formation line had grown stronger.

Li Fan could sense it as soon as he woke.

The current pulled northward and slightly downward.

It was descending deeper into the bedrock.

The surrounding spiritual energy had also become denser.

Each breath carried more spiritual energy than the regions near the Secret Realm's entrance.

Li Fan adjusted his circulation and continued.

On the eleventh night, he rested inside the hollow of a fallen tree.

Wet bark pressed against his back.

The smell of old wood and decay filled the hollow. Moisture gathered along the inner surface of the trunk, and insects moved beneath the bark.

Li Fan examined what the journey had yielded.

Two groups of spirit herbs.

Neither belonged to his existing collection.

He also carried two curved tusks suitable for refining into talisman ink after proper grinding.

The repaired formation node had provided another gain.

Its structure had revealed details of ancient formation construction that would have required months of study in the Myriad Beast City's guild hall.

Li Fan closed the small book.

He allowed his divine sense to expand again.

The narrow awareness he had used while tracing the formation line withdrew, replaced by his ordinary range.

He rested for several hours.

Before dawn, the forest began to stir.

The formation line continued north.

Li Fan followed.

Higher ground appeared beneath his feet.

The formation current strengthened further.

The change in the land brought another change in the spiritual atmosphere.

Beyond a ridge of broken granite, white mist covered the ground.

Li Fan stopped.

The mist filled the space ahead.

It was dense enough to cling to his clothing and skin. When he raised one hand, the mist separated around his fingers and closed again.

He drew a slow breath.

The spiritual energy entered his body with the breath itself.

It was dense.

Raw.

Unrefined.

His meridians tightened beneath the sudden pressure.

Li Fan immediately changed his circulation.

He drew the incoming spiritual energy through a cyclical purification pattern and expelled the excess before it could accumulate inside his pathways.

Only then did he proceed.

The black-market maps of Myriad Beast City had left this region unnamed.

Li Fan considered the terrain and the spiritual pressure.

The Primordial Spiritual Ridge suited it.

His divine sense extended into the mist.

His ordinary range reached roughly thirteen hundred kilometers under normal conditions.

Here, that range collapsed.

The mist scattered his perception into countless fragments. A single sweep produced numerous overlapping echoes. Positions became uncertain. Distances became difficult to judge.

Li Fan narrowed his divine sense.

His eyes and ears became more important.

A hundred paces ahead, something pulsed within the mist.

Violet light appeared through the white haze.

The pulse repeated at regular intervals.

Li Fan moved toward it.

He stayed near the edge of a broken stone outcrop until the source became visible.

A Nine-Leaf Purple Ginseng stood in the center of a small clearing.

Nine violet leaves spread above the earth.

The spiritual pressure surrounding the plant was concentrated and pure.

Li Fan examined the leaves.

Ten thousand years.

His estimate came from the leaf density and the characteristics recorded in the alchemical texts he had studied beneath Old Sun's shelves.

The ginseng had grown here for an extremely long period.

Li Fan remained in the shadows.

A scraping sound came from the mist.

His gaze shifted.

The sound approached.

Li Fan lowered his breathing and waited.

A beast emerged from the white haze.

It was lean and low.

Silver-gray fur covered its body. The fur scattered the surrounding light, making its outline difficult to distinguish within the mist.

A leopard.

Li Fan released a thread of divine sense.

The spiritual fluctuation reached the peak of the Core Shattering realm.

The beast was strong enough to threaten him.

He observed it.

The leopard maintained a fixed distance from the Nine-Leaf Purple Ginseng.

Its breathing remained steady.

Each movement disturbed the mist around its body.

Li Fan watched its weight shift between its limbs.

He studied its movement for a long time.

The beast remained within the range of his strength.

Li Fan stepped out from behind the broken outcrop.

The leopard growled.

The sound came from several directions.

The mist surged.

Three leopards emerged from the white haze.

They appeared simultaneously.

Their bodies matched.

Their movements matched.

Their spiritual fluctuations matched.

Li Fan swept his divine sense across all three.

Peak Core Shattering.

Three separate spiritual signatures.

Each one was complete.

The mist was woven into their qi so thoroughly that his divine sense could not immediately determine which body was genuine.

Li Fan's hand closed around the hilt of his primary sword.

The Ten Directional Swords remained arranged within his storage ring.

The three leopards attacked.

The left leopard rushed first.

Its claws carried a faint green vapor.

The toxin spread through the mist.

The right leopard curved around his flank.

Its jaws opened toward his throat.

The central leopard lowered its body and drove toward his abdomen.

Li Fan focused.

Spiritual fluctuations could be copied.

They could be layered.

They could be concealed.

A heartbeat could not.

He pushed his divine sense through the overlapping spiritual noise.

One rhythm remained.

Heavy.

Steady.

Real.

It came from the leopard attacking from his right.

The other two carried spiritual fluctuations without the corresponding heartbeat.

Li Fan's fingers tightened around the sword hilt.

Origin Drawing.