Chapter 211 — The Ancient Library

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 211 — The Ancient Library

It was not a map. It was not an explanation. It was a list—names of formations, most accompanied by a single line recording their status. Several were marked destroyed, the characters carved with a finality that showed the sect scribe had known the truth rather than merely suspected it. A few bore no status at all, their fate left unrecorded. And one or two, near the very end of the list, carried only a short phrase that Li Fan read three times before he was certain he had understood it correctly.

He sat back on his heels in the dust and remained motionless for a long while.

The slips gave him nothing beyond that single line. No description of what these formations actually were, beyond names he had never encountered elsewhere. No indication of where they might now stand, or whether centuries of neglect since the library's final living scribe had left them functional or reduced them to ruins no better than the shelves collapsing around him. No promise of what waited beyond whatever distance they crossed—no description of other continents, no account of cultivation there, no certainty that the Dao itself operated in the same manner beyond wherever these formations led. Only the fact that they had existed. Someone, in an age long past, had built something capable of reaching beyond the boundary of a single continent.

He thought of every rumor he had half-listened to and dismissed during his years of travel—drunken talk in roadside inns about lands beyond known maps, old sailors' tales traded for a bowl of wine in port towns he had passed through without lingering. He had always treated such words as stories told to fill silence. Now, sitting in the dust of a library whose builders had vanished before the Seven Great Sects had risen, he understood that some portion of those idle tales might have begun with something real.

For every other cultivator searching through the ruins of this Secret Realm, a technique or treasured artifact would have been a discovery worth remembering. Li Fan understood without needing to deliberate that a single sentence concerning a formation whose fate had never been confirmed was worth more to him than anything else this library could have offered.

He did not know where these formations stood, if any still remained. He did not know what waited beyond whatever distance they crossed. Sitting within this ruined chamber, he had no means of turning a fragment of an ancient record into an actual path forward.

But he understood something now that he had not understood an hour earlier. The Broken Heaven Region was not necessarily the furthest extent of what existed. It was not where his path had to end simply because it was where his path had begun.

He copied the surviving records as carefully as his patience allowed, transcribing names and fragments onto blank paper from his own supplies rather than risk carrying the brittle originals through the remainder of his journey. When he finished, he sealed the copies into his storage ring beside everything else the Realm had already given him and rose from the dust.

He did not know, as he left the library and stepped into the forest's damp evening air, that his passage through the chamber had already left a trace behind—a disturbance in ancient wards so old that even a Sage-level formation elsewhere in the Realm would have registered his presence had anyone been watching closely enough to notice.

He knew only that the formation current, when he reached down to find it again, had shifted once more, angling toward higher ground in the northeast. He settled his mask against his face, checked the weight of his storage ring one final time, and continued onward.

The trace climbed steadily for three days before leading Li Fan to the ruins. He smelled the place before seeing it—old stone and cold ash, a scent lingering across the higher ground. When the trees finally parted, he looked down into a shallow valley where the remains of a palace sprawled across the hillside, its foundations still visible beneath centuries of collapsed roofing and fallen pillars.

He approached slowly, sweeping his divine sense across the ruins in a wide, careful arc. Four presences registered before he had covered half the distance down the slope, gathered near what had once been the palace's main hall. He slowed further, allowing himself to be seen rather than risk an ambush caused by someone's startled reaction.

The four turned as he crossed the broken stone marking the hall's former entrance. Two he immediately identified as Peak Core Condensation cultivators. One carried a plain but well-forged longsword, his hands bearing the calluses of someone trained with the sword from a young age, while faint falling-star markings appeared upon his robes—the insignia of the Falling Star Sword Sect. The other was slighter and quieter, two short blades sheathed at his hips, his robes bearing the coiled green-mist sigil of the Green Mist Sect. An unusual pairing despite the difference in sect philosophy. Li Fan understood the practicality of it easily enough. The Realm produced stranger alliances every day.

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The other two possessed an entirely different weight. Both were Core Shattering cultivators, their auras settling over the ruined hall with the dense pressure Li Fan had grown accustomed to sensing within himself. Neither wore a banner he immediately recognized. They were likely loose cultivators or wandering cultivators from minor sects who had reached the same ruin by separate paths.

For a long moment, nobody moved.

Li Fan allowed his own presence to settle without concealment, no longer bothering to soften what four years of cultivation had forged within him. He watched the four measure his strength in turn. The swordsman's grip tightened slightly around his hilt before relaxing again. The Green Mist disciple's eyes flicked toward the two Core Shattering cultivators, judging their reactions before deciding his own course.

The taller of the two Core Shattering cultivators, a broad-shouldered man wearing a plain iron bracer on each forearm, spoke first. His voice carried no challenge, only a practical assessment of the situation. "Five of us. Whatever lies beneath this hall, there is likely enough that fighting over the division would cost more than it earns. You've been following something through these ruins as well, I'd wager, judging from how carefully you're walking."

Li Fan remained silent for a moment, making his own calculation. Four opponents, two at his realm, within confined ruins where fallen stone restricted movement in every direction. Even with his advantages, a battle here would not be as clean or contained as his recent encounters. The man was not wrong. Ruins of this size rarely yielded a single treasure worth killing four strangers over.

"I've followed a trace here," Li Fan said at last, his voice flat behind the mask. "Not treasure. Whatever lies beneath this place, I have no fixed claim upon it."

The second Core Shattering cultivator, a woman with a short, unadorned sword strapped across her back, studied him for another moment before slowly nodding. "Then there is no quarrel here worth having. We divide whatever the ruins yield evenly among the five of us, then go our separate ways. No one owes another an explanation for what they truly seek."

The Falling Star disciple's jaw tightened. Some instinct toward decisive action visibly warred with the practicality of the proposal, but he said nothing. The Green Mist disciple merely shrugged and returned his attention to the excavation the four had begun before Li Fan arrived.

Li Fan considered the offer for a single breath. It cost him little to agree, and nothing prevented him from leaving afterward as quietly as he had arrived. "Agreed."

The work that followed carried an unusual quiet. Five strangers moved through the same collapsed hall, speaking only when necessary, each aware of how quickly the arrangement could collapse if one person decided the division was no longer worth honoring. Li Fan divided his attention between the physical excavation and the formation current beneath the foundation stones, following its threads while clearing rubble from a half-buried storage chamber near the rear wall of the hall.

The chamber yielded its contents slowly. There was a scattering of ancient spiritual weapons, corroded beyond practical use but still valuable as refining materials. A handful of broken formation plates remained, their inscriptions worn smooth by time but not beyond recovery for a sufficiently patient formation master. An incomplete cultivation manual lay among the debris, its final third entirely gone, whatever technique it had once contained lost with the missing pages. A scattering of ancient jade also remained, unworked, its spiritual density suggesting it had once been intended for refining into something far greater than raw stone.

They divided the spoils without argument once the excavation ended. The broad-shouldered man handled the division with the same practical fairness he had shown from the beginning, giving Li Fan no reason to doubt the arrangement. Li Fan accepted his portion without close inspection and sealed it into his storage ring beside everything else the Realm had already yielded.

"You're not sect-marked," the woman with the short sword observed, watching him seal the final piece away. It was not quite a question.

"No," Li Fan replied. He offered nothing more. She did not press him, apparently deciding that whatever answer lay behind the mask was not worth pursuing.

The five parted at the broken entrance without ceremony. The two Core Shattering cultivators headed east along the ridge, while the mismatched pair from the Falling Star Sword Sect and Green Mist Sect turned south toward whatever destination they had agreed upon between themselves. No one offered a name. No one asked for one.

Li Fan remained alone at the threshold for a moment after they departed, allowing his divine sense to settle through the ruined foundation and locate the formation current once more. It had shifted while he worked. The pull now ran westward, deeper into terrain his divine sense told him grew rougher and more dangerous with every step.

He adjusted the weight of his storage ring, checked the angle of the sun through the broken roof above him, and set off after it.

The deep valleys of the western ridge changed the moment Li Fan entered them. Elsewhere in the Realm, ancient formation traces remained buried, threading quietly beneath soil and stone. Here they broke entirely through the surface, jagged veins of pale light running along the canyon walls, exposed by years of erosion. They hummed with unstable spiritual power that reached through the soles of his boots.

He moved through the ravine with careful, silent steps, his Heaven-Concealing Mask and Robe concealing his presence among the dense brush lining the canyon floor. The formation current ran directly west, thick and faintly golden where it emerged from the stone, stronger here than anywhere he had followed it before.

A sudden, heavy pressure descended upon the canyon without warning, and loose pebbles at his feet began to tremble against the packed earth.