The logs sat on his table, screaming their perfect lies. Li Fan didn't touch them. He paced.
Paranoia was a living thing in his chest now, coiling tight with every creak of the floor, every distant footstep. Elder Liu's glacial gaze was a brand on his mind. The man would not wait for the deadline. A convenient accident. A found corpse. The mortal, overwhelmed by the crisis, takes his own life. The story wrote itself.
He couldn't stay here. This room was a tomb waiting to be sealed.
He pulled out Lao Chen's map, tracing the lines to a marked location on the palace's remote northern edge: the 'Silent Gorge.' The logs had a single, dry entry about it from six months prior: 'Secondary Jade Sap Vein, tributary B, collapsed. Cause: historical instability. Sealed.' Anomalies were holes in a story. Holes where the truth could leak out.
He needed to see it. He needed something the logs couldn't fabricate: physical evidence.
He found Xiao Lan in a side courtyard, brushing fallen leaves from a stone path. He pulled her aside, his voice low. "I need to go to the Silent Gorge. The old collapsed vein."
Her eyes widened. "That's forbidden. It's unstable. And… it's far from help."
"That's why I'm telling you," he said, holding her gaze. "If I'm not back by nightfall, go to the Empress. Tell her I went seeking the source of the 'historical instability.' Tell her to check who ordered that area sealed." It was a desperate gamble, putting a thread of his life in her hands.
She searched his face, saw the grim certainty there. She gave a tight, quick nod. "Be careful. The ground there… it has a bad feeling."
The journey took the rest of the morning. He followed the map's back ways, skirting guard posts, moving like a ghost through the increasingly wild terrain at the palace boundary. The majestic architecture gave way to raw mountain. The air grew cold and thin.
The Silent Gorge was a wound in the rock. A narrow crack where a bridge once stood, now broken. A heavy, official-looking seal—a stone slab inscribed with warning glyphs—was placed across the entrance, but it had been shifted aside, just enough for a person to slip through. Recently.
Li Fan's pulse quickened. Bait.
He almost turned back. But the proof was inside. The only proof that might save him. He slid through the gap.
Inside, the world was dim and cold. The gorge was a deep, shadowy slit, the sky a strip of grey far above. Rubble littered the floor. This wasn't a natural collapse. The walls were scarred with clean, precise cuts—the marks of concentrated spiritual energy used to bring the rock down on purpose.
He moved carefully, his boots crunching on shale. His Seal throbbed, not guiding him, but reacting to the residual discord in the shattered energy flows. He sifted through the rubble with his hands, ignoring the cold seeping into his bones.
Then he saw it. A flash of color under a grey rock. Not stone. Fabric.
He dug, heaving the rock aside. It was a formation flag, once used to channel and direct energy. The pole was snapped, the silk torn and mud-stained. But in the corner, woven into the fabric with silver thread, was a small, intricate crest: a mountain peak with a single, vertical wave beneath it. The Liu clan sigil.
His breath caught. He'd seen it on documents in the Elder's courtyard. This was it. The smoking gun. A formation flag used to sabotage the vein, left behind in the haste of the collapse, bearing the saboteur's mark.
He stuffed the torn flag into his inner robe, the cold silk a brand against his skin. A fierce, triumphant energy surged through him. Got you.
The ground trembled.
It was not the deep, chaotic groan of the dying veins. It was a sharp, localized shudder, right beneath his feet.
He looked up. High on the gorge wall, a figure stood silhouetted against the strip of sky, hands moving in a swift, complex pattern. A cultivator.
The tremor became a roar. The wall of the gorge directly above Li Fan bulged, then shattered. Not a random fall. A directed cascade. Tons of rock, precisely sheared, poured down like a waterfall of stone, aimed at him.
He dove, scrambling towards the gorge entrance. A boulder the size of a cart slammed into the path ahead, blocking it. Dust blinded him. He turned, seeking another way. There was none.
The world became noise and crushing weight. He threw himself into a shallow crevice just as the main avalanche hit. The impact drove the air from his lungs. Darkness swallowed the light. The sound was unbelievable—a final, grinding crunch that shook his very bones.
Then… silence.
True silence. The dust settled, gritty in his mouth and nose. He was on his side, curled in the fetal position. A solid ceiling of rock was inches from his face. A few tiny gaps let in threads of grey light and cold air. He was buried. Not completely, but effectively. Entombed in a stone coffin of his own making.
He tried to move. A sharp pain lanced through his ribs. His legs were pinned by debris, not crushed, but held fast.
He lay there in the dark, the cold of the rock seeping into him. The torn flag with the Liu crest was a hard lump against his chest.
He had the proof. Irrefutable, physical proof.
And he was going to die with it, alone in the dark, one day before the deadline. The trap hadn't just been laid. He had walked into it, taken the bait, and been sealed shut.
The only sound was his own ragged, dusty breath, echoing back at him from the stone.