Chapter 224 — Shared Ordnance

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 224 — Shared Ordnance

The three bolts detonated together, turning the center of the camp into a crater of white fire and flying iron fragments. The blast destroyed what remained of the ballista frames and scattered charred ironwood and molten bronze gears across the valley. The shockwave struck the two remaining Azure Cloud disciples in midair and hurled them into the silt, their robes blackened, their weapons lost beneath the mud.

Only the youth remained upright, hovering thirty feet above the wreckage, breath ragged, robes torn to strips, his sword long gone. He looked down at the smoking crater where the Myriad Craft camp had stood. Two disciples lay unconscious, another groaned amid the wreckage, and Meng had become only a fading streak of yellow smoke a mile away, stripped of every construct he had brought into the Realm.

At the center of the ruin stood Li Fan, his robe untouched by soot or silt. His mask was raised toward the youth, its empty eyeholes reflecting the final embers of the burning camp.

He raised his right hand, still holding the notched, dulled steel sword its owner had carried without distinction. A faint snap sounded from its edge. The sword fractured into three pieces, which fell into the mud between his boots. Li Fan did not look down. He simply withdrew his empty hands into his sleeves.

"Do you wish to continue?" he asked, his voice calm and steady.

The youth stared down at him for three long breaths, his throat working against the bitter taste in his mouth. He was a genius in his own right, proud of the wind path he had followed since childhood, but he was not a fool. The man below had used neither a famed treasured artifact nor a forbidden art. He had taken their own hounds, their own metal, their own bolts and talismans, then turned a seven-man Core Shattering group into wreckage in less than two minutes without suffering a single visible wound.

"What kind of monster are you?" the youth whispered, unable to keep the tremor from his voice.

Li Fan gave no answer. His footing blurred, his figure entering the shadow of a nearby petrified root. By the time the youth's eyes adjusted to the shifting firelight, the black-robed figure had vanished from his divine sense. Only the smell of lightning qi and scorched wood remained, together with the slow dripping of muddy water returning to the ruined basin.

The youth sank to the ground once his trembling legs regained their strength. His boots settled into the cold silt. He stared first at his unconscious companions, then at the smoking crater where the Myriad Craft camp had stood.

"The regional tracking formation," he murmured, his voice hollow beneath the weight of what had happened. "It did not find a rogue cultivator. It found a calamity."

Three miles away, deep within the narrow canyons leading from the basin, Li Fan stepped out from the shadow of a gray stone wall. His boots settled silently onto dry pebbles. He checked his inner belt and found the three tracked pouches gone exactly as intended. The resonance that had drawn the hounds toward him had disappeared together with the metal that carried it.

He adjusted his mask, making certain it rested firmly against his skin, then continued deeper into the canyon's shadow without looking toward the basin behind him. His pace returned to the same quiet, unhurried rhythm that had carried him across every mile of the Realm.

The report reached the Lingering Cloud Sect's outpost at the Realm's northern staging ground in the careful hand of a scribe who had rewritten it twice before deciding it was fit to be sent onward. Elder Guanshan read it standing, as he read all important reports, unwilling to let comfort delay information that might matter.

The tent around him contained the plain furnishings of a field posting rather than a permanent residence: a low table, a single brazier, and a stack of earlier reports bound and placed in a corner. Wind pressed steadily against the canvas walls, carrying the faint smell of the northern staging ground's cooking fires through the sealed entrance.

The Nine Rivers Sect had lost seven cultivators in a single clearing to the west, including two Mid-Stage geniuses. The Falling Star Sword Sect had lost two disciples and nearly lost a third, Jian Suyao himself, who had been forced to retreat from an engagement he had expected to win. A Netherworld Demon Sect reconnaissance patrol had vanished entirely. No survivor had returned, no distress signal had arrived, and nothing remained beyond silence where its report should have been. Now, only days old, came news of a joint Myriad Craft and Azure Cloud expedition destroyed in a western basin. Its Iron-Forge Hounds had been turned against their own masters, its ballistae had fired into its own camp, and one senior disciple had fled after losing every construct he had brought with him.

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Guanshan placed the report upon the low table and remained standing for a while, turning the pattern through his thoughts with the same patience he gave any matter worth understanding properly.

He had held his position at the northern staging ground for nearly two years, long enough to witness dozens of minor disputes and territorial clashes pass through his hands in written reports. None of them had drawn his personal attention. This one had done so from the first reading.

A single cultivator moving alone, without a sect banner, had appeared in four separate encounters spread across several weeks and a considerable distance. That alone warranted attention. What made the matter worthy of his personal time was the detail repeated throughout every report without resolution: no one could determine the man's true cultivation realm.

The Nine Rivers account placed him between Early-Stage and Mid-Stage Core Shattering. The Falling Star account, filtered through Jian Suyao's own judgment after the battle, placed him closer to Peak Stage. The surviving Myriad Craft disciple offered no useful estimate at all, merely insisting that the man had dismantled seven cultivators without suffering a visible wound.

Guanshan read through the accumulated reports a second time. He did not conclude that the masked stranger possessed extraordinary strength. Strength alone, however impressive, rarely produced this kind of uncertainty. The uncertainty came from the inconsistency between the accounts. The man had fought at the level of an Early-Stage cultivator in one report and displayed strength approaching Peak Stage in another, yet had survived encounters that should have ended his life at least once across four separate confrontations.

"Someone is moving through this Realm with a cultivation that no one has properly measured," he said to the empty tent. "That alone is worth understanding, regardless of the strength he eventually proves to possess."

He did not send a subordinate to investigate. A patrol capable of threatening an ordinary Core Shattering cultivator had already failed twice within a month. Guanshan had no intention of sending a third group into the same pattern without first understanding what had caused those failures.

He gathered what little was known: a rough description repeated across every account, a black mask, dark green robes, no sect affiliation, and a last confirmed position somewhere along the western edge of the basin. He then began preparing for a personal search. He carried no urgency into the preparations. An Early-Stage Infant Formation cultivator had little reason to rush toward a Core Shattering wanderer, however unusual the surrounding reports had become.

The preparation took nearly three days. He replenished his stores and settled minor sect matters he did not wish left unattended during an absence of uncertain length. He told no one more than necessary, stating only that he intended to investigate the matter personally rather than delegate it again.

He intended to find the man and determine with his own eyes, rather than through four separate reports, exactly whom he was dealing with.

Three days later, Elder Guanshan left the northern staging ground alone. His robes clearly displayed the mark of the Lingering Cloud Sect, with no attempt at concealment, as he turned toward the basin where the trail had last been confirmed.

Li Fan felt the presence long before he understood what he was sensing.

His divine sense spread across the western terrain as he worked his way away from the basin. Near the outer limit of his perception, almost thirteen hundred kilometers away, it touched something that caused him to pause. The distance was great enough that he nearly dismissed the sensation as a distortion. He did not. He held the thread steady and narrowed his attention until the presence became unmistakable.

It carried immense weight and moved with deliberate patience. There was none of the urgency found in a hunting beast or an angry sect cultivator. The presence simply moved along a slow, deliberate path that happened to lead roughly toward Li Fan's position.

He stopped walking.

The ground beneath his boots was level and ordinary, packed earth threaded with pale roots. Nothing in the surrounding terrain explained the sudden stillness that had taken hold of him. Returning Marrow kept his breathing quiet, giving no outward sign of the change in his attention.

He had sensed such weight only once before, at the crest of the high pass months earlier, when something vast had rested among the northern peaks and he had immediately chosen to travel around it rather than investigate. This presence was heavier still. Its cultivation had crossed a threshold Li Fan himself had yet to reach.

He examined the sensation with the same patience he gave every dangerous fact the Realm presented to him and understood what he was facing.

Infant Formation.

The realization did not produce panic. A colder caution settled within him. This was not a battle he could afford to lose through a moment of poor judgment. It was not an encounter he could survive through preparation and careful technique, as he had done in the marsh, on the ridge, and within the ruined basin. If this presence caught him and turned its full attention toward killing him, there would be no weakness for him to exploit. The gap between Core Shattering and Infant Formation was a complete realm, and his current strength could not bridge it.

He began moving before the thought had fully settled, angling his path away from the approaching presence. His pace remained steady. Panic would only disturb the judgment that had kept him alive.

The presence shifted.

There was no sudden burst of speed or obvious display of hostility. It merely altered its path to follow his new direction. The adjustment was close enough that Li Fan immediately understood the truth: he had already been noticed. Any possibility of passing unseen had ended the moment his divine sense touched the edge of that presence.

A voice reached him a moment later. Nothing carried it through the air. The words entered the surrounding space through a method of transmission he had never encountered before, calm and entirely unhurried.

"You sensed me before I expected to be sensed."