Chapter 214 — The Waystone

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 214 — The Waystone

He sat back on his heels and studied the stone for a long while, turning the coincidence over with the same careful patience he gave to anything that refused to resolve cleanly. A shared symbol had now appeared for the third time in three entirely different contexts: the buried records of a dead sect, a living beast that had spent centuries beside the Realm's current, and now a stone marker standing alone at the edge of a ridge with no structure or ruin nearby to explain its presence.

He rose and continued along the ridge, extending his divine sense farther than usual. He was no longer content to follow the current beneath his feet without examining the surrounding ground.

The second stone stood four miles farther on, planted at a junction where the current divided briefly into two threads before joining again a short distance away. The same character marked its face. Its orientation indicated the thread that continued onward rather than the one that curved back and ended, something he had already confirmed through two days of patient tracking.

It was not a formation node. He detected no active spiritual charge within it and found no function beyond the mark carved into its surface. Slowly, he understood that it was something closer to a signpost. Someone had left the marker after walking this exact path, following this exact current, and had wanted whoever came afterward to know which branch should be followed.

He stood before the second stone for a long time, the plateau's thin wind pulling at his robe, and allowed a thought to settle into place. He had been circling it without naming it since discovering the sunken village.

From the moment he had first pressed his divine sense against the false moon and felt the structure of a formation respond, he had assumed that he was tracing something ancient whose survival was largely accidental. It was a system built long ago and left running after its creators had died or departed. The path he followed, he had assumed, was simply the shape the formation had taken, waiting for someone patient enough to discover it.

The waystones told him otherwise. Someone had walked this route deliberately after the Realm's builders were long gone, and that person had taken the trouble to mark the path for whoever came afterward. This was not merely a formation left operating on its own. It was a path someone had intended to be followed.

He thought of the library and its silence concerning who had last visited its shelves before dust settled over them undisturbed. He thought of the sunken village's central hall, built directly over a current that ran nowhere near the rest of the settlement's irregular layout. He thought of the wolf, marked with a fragment of the same script, living evidence that something within this Realm had reached into a creature that should never have carried formation work within its hide.

None of these things, considered alone, proved anything beyond coincidence. Taken together across three weeks and three separate discoveries, they no longer appeared to be coincidence.

Li Fan did not allow himself to leap toward a conclusion he had no means of testing. He had broken that habit long before this Realm had ever existed for him, back in a hermit's cave where a dead man's gift had nearly cost him everything. But standing before the second waystone with the plateau wind moving steadily around him, he permitted himself to acknowledge that the question itself had changed.

He was no longer simply following the remnant current of an ancient formation toward whatever central hub had once regulated it.

He was following a path someone had established for a purpose he did not yet understand, marked by a hand that had known exactly what these stones needed to convey and had chosen to convey as little as possible.

He touched the carved character once more, committing its shape to memory so that he could reproduce it later, then turned toward the branch indicated by the stone. The land ahead sloped gradually downward, and thick mist gathered across a stretch of dense forest he had not yet crossed. Beneath it all, patient and steady, the current continued onward exactly as it had since he first discovered it beneath a slate ledge outside the Realm's entrance.

He adjusted the weight of his storage ring against his hip and walked on, watching not only the ground beneath his feet now, but every stone the path placed before him.

The forest beyond the waystone swallowed the trail completely. Ancient trees grew close overhead, their crowns blocking the false sky and leaving the valley floor beneath them in permanent green half-light. Li Fan followed the current's pulse as it ran beside a row of weathered stone pillars, each worn beyond recognition yet still faintly bearing the same form he had learned to notice since reaching the ridge.

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Near midday, the trail opened into a broad circular clearing. At its center stood a towering figure carved from the same gray stone as the waystones. Its left arm was fused permanently around a heavy quarterstaff resting against the earth. Centuries of moss covered its shoulders and chest, leaving it motionless and, at first glance, indistinguishable from an unusually shaped boulder.

Li Fan slowed his approach. Curiosity outweighed caution only until his divine sense brushed against the moss-covered stone.

A deep, resonant click sounded through the clearing.

Moss cracked and fell away in sheets as the construct tore itself from centuries of stillness. Its eyes did not open. Instead, two burning runes ignited within the empty sockets, ancient formation script rendered in raw light. A wave of pressure swept outward from the clearing's center, crushing and absolute, carrying the unmistakable pressure of Early-to-Mid Infant Formation.

It was a full major realm above him. This was not a minor-stage advantage that Li Fan could overcome through skill. His cultivation could not close such a gap. Even the air seemed to thicken beneath the pressure, resisting his breath.

Every instinct built through years of careful survival gave him the same command. He did not draw his sword. He pivoted instead, lowering his body as he turned toward the treeline he had just crossed.

The construct moved before he had taken three steps. Its enormous frame concealed none of the speed within it. It drove its stone staff into the earth, and the current beneath the forest floor surged violently in response. Jagged rock erupted directly beneath Li Fan's retreating feet.

He twisted in mid-stride, forcing his qi downward in an attempt to sink through the earth and bypass the barrier. The instant his qi touched the ground, the script carved into the construct's staff flared. The soil beneath him hardened and rejected his technique, throwing his body backward into the air.

The stone fist was already swinging when he landed. Its horizontal arc covered nearly the entire clearing. Li Fan crossed his arms, forcing every measure of his Returning Marrow strength into his bones, and raised a hurried defensive formation with a sweep of his sleeve.

The formation shattered upon contact. It offered no meaningful resistance. The following blow struck his forearms directly.

Even bones hardened to the density of forged iron could not absorb an Infant Formation-level strike without consequence. His left forearm fractured, and the impact hurled him through three ancient trunks before he struck the ground hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs. Dark, iron-tasting blood filled his mouth behind the mask.

The fracture was not the worst of it. A fragment of formation script had entered his body upon contact. His internal pathways seized around it, and his circulation stuttered until his qi became nearly useless.

The construct advanced, staff raised for another strike. Its stone features carried no anger or urgency. It simply continued forward with the fixed certainty of something obeying a protocol it had followed countless times before Li Fan ever entered the clearing.

Li Fan wiped the blood from the edge of his mask, his teeth clenched against the pain in his arm and the suffocating obstruction in his meridians. A second strike would kill him. He understood that clearly. He also understood that confronting the construct directly offered no path to survival.

The staff descended, producing a low whistle through the air. Li Fan forced a single spark of qi from his stuttering core, enough to blur his movement and vanish from the crater a heartbeat before the strike landed. The earth and stone beneath him exploded outward, and the resulting shockwave still reached him eighty paces away.

He landed at the edge of the clearing, his left arm hanging uselessly and his breathing ragged. When he looked back, the construct had stopped. It stood precisely at the clearing's boundary, its rune-eyes sweeping the treeline. Its stone legs would not carry it another step.

It was bound to its ground. It would not pursue him beyond whatever boundary marked its territory.

Li Fan did not wait to test that limit. He turned and pushed deeper into the forest, ignoring the pain tearing through his damaged meridians with every step. He continued for nearly an hour before his legs finally began to fail.

He found a hollow beneath the roots of a dying primordial oak. It was narrow and choked with dead leaves, hidden behind briars thick enough to conceal the entrance from anything that was not already searching for it. He crawled inside with his good hand, holding his broken arm against his chest, then pressed a concealment talisman against the root above him with the last of his coordination before his body finally gave way.

He remained still in the darkness for a long while, allowing his breathing to settle before turning his attention inward toward the fracture in his forearm.

The bone had not merely cracked. Through the dulled awareness allowed by his pain, he could feel that the break ran clean through the radius, leaving the two halves slightly misaligned beneath the damaged flesh. He slowly guided his qi toward the fracture, directing his Returning Marrow vitality along the broken edge as Old Sun had once taught him to guide a patient's recovery rather than simply forcing energy into an injury and hoping for the proper result. The bone did not mend quickly. It mended correctly. Over the following hours, bone and flesh gradually returned to their proper alignment rather than being forced together before they were ready. His body's density, the same quality that had protected him and cost him during the battle, aided the recovery now. The process was slow, but when it ended, nothing remained half-healed or brittle.

The obstruction in his meridians took longer to clear than the fracture. The fragment of script driven into him by the construct's strike resisted his qi at every passage. Li Fan spent nearly two days removing it strand by strand, working patiently in the darkness with the same care he had used on every stubborn formation node he had repaired.

On the third day, lying within the hollow with his arm whole again and his circulation flowing cleanly, he finally examined the battle properly.