Chapter 51: The Mountain of Ten Thousand Crafts

Li Fan noticed the air changing before he noticed anything else about the land it moved through, somewhere in the fourth kingdom the road had carried him into. The Primordial Breath had drawn thin and grudging for so many years now that its usual pace had become simply the shape of things, one more fact about the world he'd stopped questioning the way a man stops questioning the color of his own eyes. Here, it didn't.

He sat one evening at the edge of a market town and circulated the way he circulated every night, and the qi came to him faster than it had in longer than he cared to count, gathering with something closer to the steady current Wei Baishan's old manuals had always described rather than the grudging droplets the capital had ever been willing to spare him. He sat with the difference a long while, turning it over the same patient way he turned over everything that mattered, and let himself feel something close to relief without letting the feeling run away from him.

The ground itself was richer here. Whatever the palace's thin, hoarded air had cost him for three long years, this stretch of the world simply hadn't been built to suffer the same scarcity.

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The signs multiplied the further the road carried him. Cultivators grew common enough on the roads that mortal traffic no longer bent around them out of the deep, unconscious deference Li Fan remembered from his very first weeks outside the Myriad Beast Valley — not because these cultivators commanded any less respect, but because there were simply too many of them now for every single one to be treated as an event. Flying swords crossed the sky in ones and twos most afternoons, robed figures standing atop blades of light the way Li Fan had once watched a lone streak cut across the horizon above a distant city and thought, at the time, that he was looking at something rare.

It wasn't rare here. Spirit beasts carried merchants' goods between towns close enough together that the practice had clearly settled into ordinary commerce rather than remaining a luxury. Formation arrays marked the boundaries of more than one town he passed through, faint lines worked into gate stone the same way he'd once seen at the capital's own walls, though here they seemed to serve every town of any real size rather than only the grandest city in a kingdom. The towns themselves carried themselves differently too, buildings worked with small conveniences no purely mortal settlement would have bothered installing — a public well that never seemed to run short regardless of the season, lanterns that burned steady through a driving wind that would have snuffed an ordinary flame in Stonebridge without a second thought.

He read all of it the same unhurried way he read everything, cataloguing rather than marveling, though some quiet part of him understood that this was the first time since falling through a crack in a tomb floor that he was walking through ground genuinely soaked in the kind of qi this world's stories had always promised existed somewhere.

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The mountains announced themselves three days before he actually reached them, a jagged blue-gray line rising along the horizon that never seemed to grow any closer no matter how many miles the road put behind him, the way truly large things always seemed to cheat a traveler's sense of distance. When he finally crested the last low ridge separating him from the range proper, he stopped walking entirely and simply looked for a long while.

It wasn't one mountain. It was dozens, a whole range folded together into peaks and valleys that stretched further than his eyes could properly resolve at this distance, mist clinging to the lower slopes and thinning as it climbed toward summits capped in what might have been snow or might have been something else this world kept for places qi ran this thick. Cities sat nestled into the foothills at intervals along the range's base, smaller settlements he guessed served the larger peaks the way outlying villages once served Stonebridge, except every one of them, even from here, carried the same unmistakable shimmer of formation work worked into their walls.

Between the peaks, faint against the sky, he made out shapes moving that could only be disciples in their thousands, tending terraced gardens that ran in bands around entire mountainsides, crossing the gaps between peaks on bridges of light that existed and then didn't, existed and then didn't, timed to some rhythm he couldn't yet guess at. Somewhere in all of that vastness, smoke rose in steady columns from what he guessed were forges and furnaces too numerous to count individually, an industry of craft running at a scale Tie Kun's single hammer, or even the Hall's largest workshop, had never come close to suggesting was possible.

Hundred Herbs Hall had felt, on the day he first arrived there, like the largest thing he'd ever stood in front of. It felt small now, held up against this. Not lesser — he'd learned enough in three years to know better than to measure worth only in scale — but small, the way any single building looked small once a man had seen an entire mountain range built to hold ten thousand more just like it.

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The gate, when he finally reached it after another half day's walk along a road grown steadily busier with disciples and merchants and pack animals laden with ore and herb alike, sat carved into the base of the nearest peak rather than standing free the way a city's gate stood. Two enormous stone pillars flanked it, worked with a border of tools and flame and formation lines too intricate to take in at a single glance, and above the archway itself, four characters had been cut deep enough into the rock that they'd likely still be legible after another thousand years of weather had worn everything else around them smooth.

Myriad Craft Sect.

Disciples moved through the gate in a steady stream on either side of him, robes of half a dozen different cuts marking specialties Li Fan hadn't learned to read yet, and guards stood posted at careful intervals along the pillars, watching the flow of traffic with the same disciplined attentiveness he remembered from the capital's own walls, scaled up to match everything else about this place.

Li Fan stood at the edge of that stream for a long moment, the sword at his hip and Old Sun's needle case wrapped safe in his pack and three years of a continent's worth of knowledge settled quietly behind his own eyes, and let himself feel the plain, unhurried satisfaction of having actually arrived somewhere he'd spent three years walking toward.

Then he adjusted his pack, and stepped through the gate.

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