Chapter 213 — The High Pass

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 213 — The High Pass

The formation current, when he checked it against his path the following morning, ran clear of that direction entirely, angling instead along a lower ridge that skirted the presence's territory by a comfortable margin. He allowed himself a small measure of relief at that. The Realm, vast and largely indifferent to his presence, had not yet forced him to choose between following the current and approaching something he had no business testing himself against.

The days blurred together after that, one careful ascent following another. His supplies dwindled slowly enough that he supplemented them with what the high terrain offered—sparse, hardy spirit plants growing within cracks in exposed rock, their roots drawing directly from the thin, mineral-rich currents flowing through the stone itself. He harvested what he found without excess, taking only enough to serve his needs and leaving the remainder to continue growing undisturbed.

During the long, quiet stretches of climbing, he thought about the fragment of formation script he had found woven into the direwolf's hide and the matching mark buried within the library's oldest surviving slips. He examined the coincidence from every direction his patience allowed and reached no conclusion he was willing to accept. It was possible the mark meant nothing beyond a convention used throughout the Profound Beginning Dao Sect's formations, appearing wherever their formations touched the world regardless of what carried it. It was possible it meant something far greater. From where he stood, he had no means of distinguishing between the two.

He placed the question beside the others he had gathered since entering this world—the true purpose of the dragon-marked organization, the sealed weight above Myriad Craft City's Ancestor's Peak, the fate of the storage pouch he had once carried unopened for years—and continued climbing.

The pass finally began its descent on the sixteenth day. The terrain eased from sheer rock faces into a long, gradual slope that carried him toward a wide plateau enclosed by the mountains he had just crossed. The air grew thicker and warmer, carrying the mineral scent of standing water somewhere ahead. As his divine sense swept across the plateau, it caught something enormous beneath the earth—not another formation current, but a body of spiritual energy so dense that it nearly registered as a second horizon, pressing upward from somewhere far below.

He stopped at the final overlook and studied the plateau spread beneath him. The formation current he had followed for weeks now ran directly toward whatever lay at its center.

Whatever waited below was larger than anything he had encountered since entering the Realm, larger even than the direwolf's territory or the buried library. Li Fan did not rush toward it. He merely recorded its presence, adjusted his descent to account for the terrain, and began working his way toward the plateau floor with the same measured patience that had carried him this far.

The descent onto the plateau took another eleven days. The slope eased gradually enough that Li Fan crossed it without needing the careful footwork demanded by the high pass. By the time the ground leveled beneath him, the sixteenth week since he had entered the Secret Realm had already passed, and he found himself, not for the first time, faintly surprised by how much distance a person could cover simply by continuing forward.

The plateau stretched farther than his eyes could fully encompass from ground level. Mountains surrounded it on every side, while its floor was covered by pale grass and still pools of water that reflected the artificial sky in flat sheets of silver. The air carried a mineral heaviness unlike anything he had breathed since entering the Realm, thick with wet stone and a faint metallic scent that briefly reminded him of Old Sun's medicine hall on a rainy morning.

He walked along the plateau's edge for most of the day before the formation current beneath his feet led him toward the largest of the standing pools. The lake was broad enough that its far shore disappeared into faint haze even beneath his sharpened vision. He crouched beside the water and extended his divine sense beneath the surface, expecting only water and stone.

What he found instead was a settlement.

Rooftops, submerged and partially collapsed, stretched in orderly rows beneath the still surface. The outlines of streets remained faintly visible between them. Li Fan extended his divine sense farther, tracing the shape of the sunken village beneath the water. There were modest homes, a larger structure near the center that might once have served as a hall or shrine, and the collapsed remains of what appeared to have been a low perimeter wall.

He sat back on his heels and studied the reflection of the false sky upon the water for a long while.

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Whoever had lived here had not built on the scale of the Profound Beginning Dao Sect's ruined library or possessed whatever authority had raised the ancient palace two weeks behind him. This place had been ordinary. A village rather than a sect stronghold, its homes built for people who rose each morning to tend fields or mend nets rather than cultivate toward Tribulation. It was the kind of settlement that existed throughout the world he had known before, before whatever calamity had swallowed this one beneath still water and left it untouched for longer than he could measure.

The formation current ran directly through the center of the submerged village, thick and steady beneath the lakebed, continuing toward whatever lay beyond the plateau. Li Fan did not immediately enter the water. He remained crouched at the shore, considering the same question that had followed him through every ruin since entering the Realm—not what had built these places, but what had ended them, and whether the ending had come slowly enough for anyone here to understand what was happening.

He thought briefly of the fragments he had read in the library. An ancient war catastrophic enough to disrupt the Dao of the continent itself. He had no means of knowing whether this drowned village belonged to that distant catastrophe or some smaller tragedy—a flood, a broken dam, or a failed formation with nothing greater behind it. He would not assume a connection merely because the timing was convenient. He had abandoned that habit long before leaving Blue Star behind.

He eventually entered the shallows. Cold water rose past his boots and climbed toward his knees as the lakebed descended beneath him. Once the water covered his head, his cultivation allowed him to breathe without difficulty. His qi circulated through his body, preventing the cold from settling too deeply into his bones as he moved slowly between the submerged rooftops.

The homes held little of interest. Time and water had reduced most of their belongings to unrecognizable sediment. Wooden furniture had rotted away, while cloth and paper had dissolved entirely. In one collapsed doorway, however, he found several small clay vessels that remained intact, their glaze having prevented the water from fully entering. He collected them without opening them beneath the water and placed them carefully into his storage ring for examination on dry ground.

The larger structure at the village center held more. Stone steps descended into what he judged from its layout to have been a communal hall. It was wide enough for gatherings, and its far wall still carried faint carved reliefs, though centuries of water damage had worn them too smooth to read. He traced the carvings with his fingers and found only fragments of shape rather than meaning. A figure, perhaps. A tree, or something intended to represent one. Whatever story the wall had once told had eroded beyond what he could recover without tools he did not possess.

He paused at the center of the hall, where his divine sense told him the formation current beneath the lakebed was strongest. It did not merely pass near the structure. It ran directly beneath the foundation stones, thick and unbroken, precisely where the builders would have needed to dig in order to lay those stones. A village would not place its gathering hall over an ancient spiritual current by accident while every other structure remained scattered without a clear pattern. Someone here had known the current existed and had deliberately built upon it.

He crouched and pressed his palm against the submerged stone. The current's pulse rose faintly through the rock and entered his skin. Whatever this village had been, ordinary was no longer a word he was willing to accept without further evidence.

He surfaced sometime later, water streaming from his robe as he climbed onto the grassy edge of the plateau. The pale sky above him was already moving toward its artificial dusk. He sat for a while, allowing his robe to dry in the thin wind, and turned the small clay vessels over in his hands without breaking their seals.

Whatever this place had been, it was gone now, and had been gone longer than any living memory could account for. He felt no particular grief at the realization, only the same quiet weight he had carried since his earliest years in Myriad Beast City, watching faces disappear from the markets one by one without ceremony. The world absorbed its losses. It always had, in every corner of it he had walked, on either side of the spatial fracture.

He rose once his robe had dried enough for comfortable movement. He checked the formation current beneath the lakebed and found it running steadily toward the far side of the plateau, deeper into whatever waited beyond the drowned village. He settled the weight of his storage ring against his hip, cast one final glance across the still water, and continued onward.

Li Fan left the sunken village at first light. The formation current pulled him east across the plateau toward a low ridge that broke the flat grassland. He walked slowly, the clay vessels from the village still sealed within his storage ring, his thoughts returning at intervals to the placement of the central hall directly above the current rather than beside it.

He found the first stone two days later, standing alone at the crest of the ridge.

It was not large, only waist-high and roughly hewn, weathered enough that it could have been mistaken at a glance for an ordinary outcropping rather than something shaped by hand. Yet the current beneath the plateau ran directly past its base. When Li Fan crouched to examine the stone, he found a single character carved into its face, worn shallow by centuries of wind but still legible beneath his fingertips.

He did not recognize the character from any manuscript he had studied beneath Old Sun's roof, nor from any formation text he had purchased across the provinces. But he recognized its shape. It bore the same angular, deliberate style he had traced from the brittle jade slips in the library and the same broken fragment he had found woven into the direwolf's hide three weeks earlier.