Chapter 210 — The Extinct Garden

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 210 — The Extinct Garden

"The garden is wide," Li Fan said, his voice flat behind the mask. "There are more plots further down the ridge. I have taken only what I need. There is enough for both of us. Step aside, and there is no reason for either of us to draw blood."

The man's grip tightened around the staff, and the green veins within the bark deepened to a sickly purple. "No. A single missing seed could ruin the recipe. Eighty years I have searched for this place. I will not share it with a masked thief."

He struck before Li Fan could answer.

The staff swept out in a wide arc. The living wood groaned as hundreds of hardened, needle-thin thorns tore free from the bark, filling every avenue of retreat. Each thorn carried a bead of glistening sap at its tip, intended to freeze the target's qi before it could circulate.

Li Fan did not retreat. His footing shifted, and his body sank into the rich earth beneath him. Spiritual power surged through his legs as he borrowed the earth's force to accelerate, while the storm of thorns tore through the space he had occupied a breath earlier. The projectiles buried themselves in the stone beds, their sap hissing faintly against the rock.

He emerged ten feet to the man's left, sword already leaving its sheath in one continuous motion, the edge aimed at the shoulder carrying the staff.

The alchemist remained composed. He drove the staff's base into the fertile soil beneath his feet, and a wave of absolute decay spread outward. Grass withered into black ash. Moisture vanished from the air. When Li Fan's sword crossed the edge of the decaying force, vitality began draining from the strike itself, and the gray current climbed along the steel toward his hand.

His internal circulation stuttered when the decay reached his palm. There was no sharp pain, only the sensation of something being drawn from his body before he could identify what it was.

Li Fan twisted his wrist and redirected the strike along the staff's surface rather than through it, sending the decaying force back toward its source. The alchemist wrenched the staff from the earth and leaped aside. The deflected blight struck an ancient stone pillar behind him, reducing it to fine, dry sand.

"Good reflexes, for an Early-Stage cultivator," the man said, chest heaving as he maintained his distance. "But you cannot outlast me here."

He planted the staff again and drew vitality from the unharvested roots beneath the garden. His depleted qi recovered rapidly. His free hand formed another sequence of signs, summoning a second wave of thorns to keep Li Fan at range.

Li Fan watched the earth replenish the man's cultivation and understood that patience would not win this exchange. A garden of this size could sustain the alchemist for a long time if the battle became a contest of endurance.

The air cracked as Li Fan's figure crossed the incoming thorns, his movement carrying him inside the staff's reach before the alchemist could react.

The man's eyes widened, but stubbornness drove him forward. He swept the staff toward Li Fan's ribs, purple decay surging along the living wood.

Li Fan did not evade. He caught the staff with his bare hand.

Decay entered his palm at once, graying the skin and deadening the nerves. It reached the iron density of his bone and stopped there, unable to penetrate farther.

"What—" the alchemist managed, pulling desperately at the staff and finding it immovable.

Li Fan raised his sword with his free hand. Qi gathered along the steel. His compressed divine sense converged upon the point of the sword, and his will followed it. The strike carried no sound or warning. It passed through the decaying aura, severed the living wood, and pierced the alchemist's chest in one motion.

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The man froze. The purple light in his eyes dimmed. He looked down at the ruined staff, then raised his gaze to the blank surface of Li Fan's mask.

"My lineage," he whispered.

His body settled into the gray soil of the garden he had spent eighty years searching for.

Li Fan stood over him for a moment. The color gradually returned to his left hand as blood circulation drove the remaining withering force from his skin. He felt no satisfaction. A man who could have taken half the garden had chosen to fight for all of it and lost everything.

He left the body untouched. Whatever notes the man carried and whatever remnants of the Lin family's old recipes remained in his robes served a purpose unrelated to Li Fan's own path. He had no need for another family's inheritance. Taking those things after the man's death would turn a dispute over the garden into deliberate theft. The broken staff remained where it had fallen as Li Fan moved to the next stone bed.

He worked through the remainder of the garden with the same measured care he had shown before the fight, gathering seed after seed into sealed jade vials without stripping any bed completely bare. The sun sank behind the false western ridge as he finished, and the sky entered its artificial dusk.

When the final vial was sealed, Li Fan turned his attention downward and settled his divine sense upon the formation current beneath the soil. During his work, the current had shifted slightly. It now angled toward a stretch of dense forest he had yet to cross, its pull steady beneath the earth.

He adjusted the weight of his storage ring, examined the healing skin of his left palm once more, and entered the trees.

The formation current remained within the unbroken forest for six days. Li Fan followed it through increasingly ancient terrain. Roots had broken apart stone paths that must once have been laid by hand, while moss covered the old roads so deeply that his boots sank a full hand's width before reaching firm ground.

On the seventh day, the trees thinned. Li Fan stood before a structure half-swallowed by the hillside. Cracked stone columns leaned beneath what remained of a roofed entrance. The formation current entered the darkness beyond them, stronger here than anywhere he had followed it before.

He stepped inside.

The air changed at once. It was dry, unlike the damp forest outside, and still enough to show that the place had remained undisturbed for a very long time. Dust hung within pale shafts of light descending through cracks in the ceiling. Each step disturbed small clouds that slowly settled behind him.

Shelves carved directly into the stone lined the chamber in orderly rows. Most had collapsed. Broken jade slips covered the floor, their surfaces dull and cracked, their records lost to age and dampness. Stone tablets leaned against fallen shelves, their carved characters worn smooth beneath centuries of dust.

Li Fan had expected techniques. The ruins scattered throughout the Realm were filled with cultivation methods, treasures, and remnants of ancient power, all drawing cultivators into bitter struggles. He searched the collapsed shelves carefully and found none of them. There were no cultivation methods, sword arts, or treasures.

Only records, and most of those had already perished.

Near the rear of the chamber, he crouched before a partially intact shelf and found a section that had escaped complete decay. About thirty jade slips remained, protected by a fallen support beam that had shielded them from the worst of the collapsing ceiling. Li Fan swept his divine sense across each slip, confirmed that no ward or trap remained, and began reading.

The characters were ancient, older than anything he had studied beneath Old Sun's roof or encountered in manuscript stalls across the provinces. It took nearly an hour to become accustomed to the script. After that, the meaning came steadily.

The records belonged to a sect called the Profound Beginning Dao Sect. Its name appeared repeatedly in the surviving slips, each time written in the same formal hand. Li Fan had never heard the name in any market, guild hall, or conversation during his years in Myriad Beast City. Whatever the sect had once been, no trace of it had reached any place he had known.

The surviving slips were fragments of a larger record. Names appeared without explanation. Places were mentioned without maps. Events occupied a few lines before the record shifted to another matter.

Li Fan slowly pieced together one account. In a distant age, several ancient powers had fought a war whose violence had disrupted something the records called the Dao of the continent itself. The slips gave no explanation of how it happened. They named only some of the factions and recorded that most of those powers had vanished from the world by names recognized by modern cultivators.

One surviving line stated that being forgotten did not mean being destroyed. Some remnants might still exist in places whose ancient names had long since changed.

Li Fan read that line twice.

He thought of Ancestor's Peak, sealed behind its ancient wards above the ruins of Myriad Craft City, and of the dragon-marked organization that had remained at the edges of his life since the first weeks after Blue Star. He set both matters aside. Without evidence, speculation had little value.

He continued reading.

Near the bottom of the surviving collection, among records concerning sect administration and territory disputes, he found a short section concerning something the records called continental travel.