Chapter 226 — Forty-Five Days

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 226 — Forty-Five Days

By the thirty-eighth day, Li Fan's qi reserves had thinned enough for every technique to reveal its cost. Each use of the Five Elements Escape consumed more qi than it had at the beginning of the pursuit, while his Returning Marrow body carried a constant ache from the prolonged strain that never fully eased, even during the brief periods of rest he allowed himself.

Guanshan's voice reached him again on the fortieth day. It remained unhurried, though something in its tone had shifted from curiosity toward genuine consideration.

"You understand this ground better than I do," the Elder observed. "That is rarer than raw strength, in my experience. Most cultivators who reach my realm cease troubling themselves with the details of a place. Why would they? Very little here can threaten them directly. You have studied precisely the knowledge a cultivator of your realm cannot afford to ignore."

Li Fan did not answer. By now, he understood that Guanshan's observations carried no immediate threat, but he also knew that answering accomplished nothing except confirming how much attention he was willing to give a conversation he could not afford to entertain.

By the forty-fifth day, the pursuit had settled into a steady pattern. Li Fan chose ground he understood. Guanshan followed, tested his choices, and adjusted a half-step behind him. Each side gained narrow advantages through patience rather than a decisive exchange. Li Fan had not been caught. He had also failed to gain a single lasting mile of distance since the earliest days.

That night, he sat within a shallow crevice barely wide enough to shelter his body. His supplies had thinned, his qi recovered more slowly than before, and he understood with the same clear judgment he applied to every difficult fact the Realm presented that the pursuit had not yet reached its true limit.

He closed his eyes and circulated the qi he could safely spare toward recovery. He prepared himself for however many more days this particular problem demanded.

On the forty-eighth day, Elder Guanshan stopped following the terrain Li Fan chose and began destroying it instead.

Li Fan understood the change immediately. He had guided the pursuit toward a dense ancient forest that had served him well twice already. Low branches and thick undergrowth forced any pursuer to slow or risk being hindered by the hardened wood. Guanshan did not slow. He raised one hand, and a hundred-yard stretch of forest before Li Fan shattered beneath an immense pressure. Ancient trunks broke into splinters, branches collapsed, and the ground became exposed beneath the sudden destruction. No technique Li Fan recognized announced the attack. One moment the forest stood before him. The next, it had been reduced to broken timber.

Splinters continued falling across the churned ground for several breaths. Some struck his shoulders and the back of his neck hard enough to sting through his robe. Li Fan did not stop to examine himself. Any injury there mattered less than the ground closing behind him.

He changed direction before the debris had finished settling, turning sharply toward a ravine he had mapped weeks earlier as a possible retreat route. As he entered it, he understood that the pursuit had entered another stage.

Guanshan no longer followed through the terrain Li Fan selected. He was forcing Li Fan into terrain of his own choosing, destroying paths behind him, removing cover, and narrowing his options one deliberate strike at a time. The terrain itself had become part of the pursuit.

"I have given this enough patience," Guanshan's voice reached him on the fiftieth day, still calm, though the calm now carried an edge Li Fan had not heard before. "I can understand you just as easily after you stop moving."

Li Fan did not answer. He pressed forward instead, drawing upon reserves he had carefully rationed since the beginning of the pursuit. For the first time since the chase began, genuine fear settled within him rather than simple caution.

The days that followed wore him down in ways the earlier weeks had not. His Returning Marrow body was dense and resilient, but even it could not sustain such prolonged strain without consequence. Technique followed technique, retreat followed retreat, and true rest remained impossible. His qi reserves, once carefully managed, now remained perpetually low, recovering only partially before another demand consumed them. His supplies dwindled toward genuine concern. Meals became whatever he could gather while moving, and water came from streams he had no time to examine carefully.

His hands began to show the strain as well. Small tremors appeared during the brief moments when he allowed himself to sit still. Li Fan observed the change without alarm and recorded it alongside every other cost the pursuit had extracted from him.

On the fifty-ninth day, Guanshan brought down an entire ridge behind him with a single open-handed gesture. Falling stone crashed across the highland, and the resulting force nearly caught Li Fan's trailing leg. He cleared the collapsing edge by a margin so narrow that even he could not judge it precisely.

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On the sixty-fourth day, an unfamiliar technique tore through the earth beneath his feet in a line too precise to be accidental. Li Fan was forced into the Five Elements Escape despite the cost. His qi fell so low afterward that he spent the following hour merely restoring his circulation to stability.

Through all of this, the thought that might have ended a less disciplined cultivator's patience never fully formed in Li Fan's mind. He did not consider stopping to fight. He did not consider whether survival might eventually cost more than one decisive exchange. He understood with the same clarity that had guided every dangerous choice since Blue Star had swallowed him that direct combat against an Infant Formation cultivator offered no path to survival.

There is no reward for killing an enemy I cannot kill, he reminded himself around the sixty-eighth day, exhaustion fraying the edges of thoughts that ordinarily came cleanly. Survival is enough.

He held to that conclusion through the worst of the pursuit, through nights when he slept in brief fragments with one hand resting upon his sword from habit rather than intention, through days when his qi felt thinner than it had during his earliest and most desperate months of cultivation. He did not fight. He ran, adapted, and ran again, using every piece of terrain knowledge and every preparation eight months of exploration had given him, refusing to let exhaustion reduce his judgment to the single choice that would guarantee his death.

By the seventy-fifth day, camped beneath the shelter of a shattered boulder field that Guanshan had destroyed two days earlier, Li Fan understood that he could not continue indefinitely. His physical strength and qi reserves both had limits, and each day of pursuit brought him closer to them.

Somewhere ahead, he needed more than another clever route or another narrow escape.

He needed an ending.

Li Fan found it on the seventy-ninth day and immediately understood that it was the only remaining path worth attempting.

His divine sense swept across terrain he had never fully explored and caught something that did not follow the natural structure of the land. A broad, roughly circular stretch of wilderness perhaps two miles across carried no visible wall, gate, or boundary, yet beneath its soil flowed a current unlike anything he had encountered during eight months of study. It was ancient. Its age surpassed even the guardian's territory and the waystone trail by a considerable margin. Dense restriction inscriptions lay beneath the ground, and merely brushing the outer edge with his divine sense sent a faint, cold warning through his perception.

The trees at the edge of the marked region were stunted compared with those beyond it. Their bark was pale and cracked despite the fertile soil. No birds called from within the boundary. The silence carried a quality different from the ordinary quiet of deserted wilderness, recalling the stillness Li Fan had once encountered at the edge of the buried library.

He did not know what the restriction actually did. With an Infant Formation cultivator approaching from behind, he had no opportunity to test the boundary safely or investigate its purpose. He knew only that it was ancient and dense enough that even a cultivator at Guanshan's realm might have to treat it with caution rather than disregard.

As far as Li Fan could determine, it was the only uncertainty remaining in the pursuit. Everything else had become a predictable struggle that favored Guanshan's patience while consuming Li Fan's dwindling reserves. This was the only part of the terrain neither of them had measured.

He turned toward it.

"You've found something," Guanshan's voice reached him within the hour, no longer entirely unhurried. "I sense it as well. Interesting that you would run toward an unknown rather than away from a known danger."

Li Fan did not answer. From the change in Guanshan's tone, he understood that the Elder had recognized his intention. That changed nothing. Whatever waited within the restriction posed genuine danger to Li Fan as well. Yet remaining outside it and continuing the struggle that had already consumed seventy-nine days carried a danger he knew with certainty was greater.

On the eighty-first day, he crossed the outer edge of the restriction's influence. The cold warning his divine sense had detected from a distance sharpened into physical pressure the moment he passed the true boundary. His qi circulation stuttered against the change. The ambient current flowed against his own circulation, and he had no time to determine why. He forced his breathing and qi back into rhythm and continued deeper.

The air carried a taste unlike anything he had encountered elsewhere in the Realm, faintly metallic and close to the scent released when flint struck stone. Frost covered the undersides of the leaves despite the warmth surrounding the wilderness. It was thick enough to remain even beneath the rising false sun.

Guanshan followed without hesitation.

Li Fan felt the Elder cross the same boundary several hundred paces behind him. At that moment, the restriction's ancient current shifted in response. It did not erupt or display any obvious force. Its movement was slow and deliberate, responding to the difference between the two cultivations now moving within its territory.

Li Fan did not stop to observe what happened behind him. He continued deeper into the restricted ground, driving himself forward with everything his depleted reserves could provide. Whatever the ancient current had begun to do, his survival depended upon distance rather than observation.

The pressure behind him changed on the eighty-third day.

It did not disappear. It simply stopped advancing. Li Fan's divine sense remained stretched thin behind him as he continued forward, and it registered Guanshan's presence fixed in one place, struggling against a resistance that had not existed anywhere else during the pursuit.

"Clever," Guanshan's voice reached him one final time, distant now. There was something in it that might have been reluctant respect rather than frustration. "I cannot follow you further. Not without spending more than I am willing to spend on a curiosity, however interesting it has become."

Li Fan did not stop. He did not look back. He allowed himself no satisfaction, understanding that whatever distance the restriction had given him remained fragile enough that premature relief could destroy the clarity that had kept him alive for eighty-three days.

He continued through the restricted ground for most of another day, creating a genuine distance between himself and the boundary. Only then did he slow. His divine sense swept backward several times, confirming that the presence which had followed him from the western basin had truly stopped.

On the eighty-fifth day, Li Fan found a shallow hollow near the far edge of the restriction and, for the first time in nearly three months, permitted himself something approaching true rest.