Chapter 212 — The Formation-Marked Direwolf

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 212 — The Formation-Marked Direwolf

Something massive stepped out from behind a moss-covered pillar ahead of him—nearly twice the height of a man, its shoulders thick with matted slate-gray fur. What caught Li Fan's attention first was not its size, but the script burned directly into its hide. Faint dark-silver lines traced down its flanks and legs, pulsing in the same rhythm as the stone pillars scattered throughout the ravine.

The wolf's eyes, glowing pale blue, fixed upon him instantly despite the concealment layered over every inch of his body.

Li Fan stopped, his hand settling upon his sword hilt without drawing it. His divine sense swept across the beast in a single pass, and the result told him this would not be a battle he could leave easily. Peak Core Shattering. Two full minor realms above his own. Worse, the formation markings woven into its hide meant it was naturally attuned to the same currents he relied upon to move unseen. Every method that had carried him safely past weaker threats would lose its value here.

"I am only passing through," he said, his voice flat and even. "Our paths do not need to cross."

The wolf answered with a low snarl, its tail lashing out and shattering a nearby boulder into gravel. Whatever intelligence lay behind those pale eyes, it had no intention of yielding its territory to a foreign presence crossing its boundary.

It lunged.

Li Fan's footsteps blurred. The space around him cracked sharply as he prepared to reappear far beyond the charge. But the silver markings along the wolf's flanks flared the instant the disturbance formed, and the beast twisted its massive body in midair. One enormous paw swept backward in a preemptive arc and struck the exact place where Li Fan appeared.

He raised his sword in time, turning the incoming force into a defensive counter-cut rather than receiving it directly. The flat of the sword redirected much of the impact, yet the remaining force still drove him backward. His boots carved furrows through the earth before he regained his footing. His Returning Marrow bones groaned beneath the transferred force, dense enough to withstand a blow that would have shattered an ordinary cultivator's ribs, but the strength of the wolf still carried a price.

Before he could fully settle his stance, the wolf planted its forepaws and threw back its head.

The howl that followed was more than sound. It carried a vibration directly opposed to circulating qi. The instant it reached Li Fan, his internal circulation stuttered violently, and the strength available to his body dropped enough for him to feel the change immediately in the weight of his limbs.

The wolf seized the opening. It charged with its jaws wide, intending to end the battle with a single bite.

Li Fan understood within that brief instant that retreat was no longer useful. Whatever technique he used now had to answer overwhelming strength with precision rather than evasion.

He stepped into the charge instead of retreating, forcing his disrupted qi back into motion despite the resistance within his meridians. His sword became a continuous silver blur, each strike opening another wound across the wolf's chest and shoulders. The beast barely reacted. Its hide had hardened through centuries of absorbing the Realm's ancient formation energy, allowing it to withstand damage that would have crippled a lesser creature. It accepted the wounds without hesitation, using its immense body to drive Li Fan backward until his shoulders met the canyon wall.

Cold stone pressed against his spine. The wolf's jaws snapped shut only inches from his mask, its breath hot and metallic against the concealed surface.

Li Fan understood what the battle required. Not speed. Not another feint that the beast's formation sense would anticipate. He needed a strike that could not be determined beforehand because it relied on neither angle nor timing to succeed. Only absolute force.

With his left hand pinned against the stone by the wolf's chest, Li Fan gathered every measure of qi still available to him, the full reach of his divine sense, and the entirety of his Sword Intent into a single point at the tip of his sword. He stopped resisting the disorder left in his meridians by the howl and instead incorporated it into the strike, compressing the chaotic flow into greater density rather than attempting to restore it first.

The sword did not flash. It became absolute, drawing the pale light of the canyon toward its edge as Li Fan drove the point upward beneath the wolf's chin.

The beast sensed the danger through the formation markings upon its body and tried to throw its head backward, but Sword Intent moved faster than instinct at such close range. The sword pierced through fur and bone, entering through the roof of its mouth and reaching the skull. The impact traveled up through Li Fan's wrist.

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The wolf's body went rigid. The silver script along its flanks flared once more, faded into dull gray, and fell silent.

Its immense body collapsed forward, pinning Li Fan against the rock wall beneath its weight. He worked himself free from beneath the heavy fur and rose.

He stood alone in the silent canyon, breathing through the ache that still ran along his forearms. He raised a hand to confirm that his mask remained in place. With a single motion of his wrist, he cleared the dark blood from his sword. His internal circulation gradually returned to its normal rhythm as the final effects of the howl faded, though a faint soreness remained within his meridians. It would likely remain for most of the day regardless of how carefully he circulated his qi.

Li Fan looked down at the fallen wolf for a long moment. Formation script that had grown naturally into living hide was something he had never encountered in any manuscript he had studied. The hide itself, hardened through centuries of direct exposure to the Realm's ancient formation current, was too rare to abandon out of haste. He knelt beside the body and examined the markings more closely before cutting anything free.

The lines did not form a complete pattern. A true formation array closed each circuit upon itself, but these markings were broken in several places, interrupted by scar tissue and old healed wounds. The script had grown wherever the beast's hide permitted it rather than following a design established beforehand. It was a fragment, not a complete formation. Li Fan traced an unbroken section along the wolf's shoulder with two fingers and stopped.

A small cluster of characters near the base of the neck matched, stroke for stroke, a symbol he had copied from a brittle jade slip in the library three days earlier. He had no explanation for why the same mark appeared on the buried records of a dead sect and upon the hide of a living beast. He did not invent one while standing in a canyon with blood still cooling upon the ground. He recorded the detail in his mind and left it unresolved beside everything else the Realm had revealed without explanation.

He carefully cut away a section of the marked hide, using economical strokes before sealing it into a lead-lined compartment of his storage ring, separate from his other materials. Whatever purpose it eventually served, whether in formation work or something else, it was not a resource he expected to encounter a second time.

He rose, examined the ache in his forearms once more, and found it manageable enough that it would not hinder his movement. The formation current still ran westward, glowing faintly gold where it emerged from the ravine floor, undisturbed by the battle that had just taken place.

He stepped over the wolf's body and continued forward. The canyon opened ahead into harsher terrain—jagged rock faces rising higher than anything he had crossed before. The formation current now climbed rather than followed level ground, ascending toward a mountain pass whose end remained hidden from his sight.

The climb out of the wolf's canyon took nearly two weeks. The formation current continued steadily upward through terrain that became more treacherous with each passing day—loose scree shifting beneath his boots without warning, narrow ledges where a single misplaced step meant a fall of a hundred feet or more, and thin air that forced even his cultivated lungs to work harder than they had anywhere else in the Realm.

Li Fan climbed without haste. He had learned long ago that rushing through dangerous terrain often cost more time than it saved, and this pass offered no forgiveness to anyone careless enough to test it. He chose each foothold with the same patient attention he gave to examining a damaged formation node, testing every hold before placing his full weight upon it. His divine sense swept the rock ahead, searching for hollow pockets and unstable seams before he trusted a ledge beneath his feet.

The wildlife here had thinned greatly compared with the dense forest below. What remained had adapted to the high altitude and thin, cold air, revealing that the Realm's lifeforms extended far beyond its lowland forests. Pale, long-limbed creatures moved across sheer rock faces with ease. Birds with feathers that seemed to catch no light glided silently between distant outcroppings high above his head. Li Fan watched them from a distance and left them undisturbed. Nothing along this stretch of the journey required unnecessary risk.

The color of the rock changed as he climbed. Gray limestone gradually gave way to darker, streaked stone that retained the cold long after the false sun had passed over the peaks each morning. Frost remained within every crack turned away from the light, thick enough in places that his boots left clear impressions whenever he tested a new foothold. Since Returning Marrow had settled the excess heat within his body, his breath had rarely been visible, but here it emerged faintly, a thin gray mist that disappeared within a few feet.

On the ninth day of the climb, Li Fan rested within a shallow overhang, his back against cold stone, when he sensed a change in the air around him. It was neither wind nor temperature, but a pressure settling across the entire high pass, unrelated to the surrounding terrain.

He cautiously extended his divine sense, narrowing it rather than spreading it widely, and located the source several miles to the north. A vast and settled presence rested somewhere among the highest peaks visible from his position. He did not attempt to determine its exact nature. By now, he had learned enough about the deeper regions of the Realm to recognize when a presence was simply too powerful to approach out of curiosity.

He remained seated with that awareness for a long while, turning over the same question he had considered many times since entering the Secret Realm. Whatever rested among those peaks, whether beast, guardian, or something deliberately left behind by the Profound Beginning Dao Sect, its affairs were unrelated to his own unless it chose to involve him. He carefully withdrew his divine sense, folding it back to its usual range, and did not look toward the northern peaks again.