My dao to eternity

Li Fan didn't return to the fifth terrace's gate. He'd meant what he told Old Mu, but meaning it and rushing it were different things, and he spent the following weeks instead gathering whatever pieces he could reach without ever setting foot near that ward again.

The first piece came from his own memory of the array itself, worked out slowly over several nights in the training room's lamplight, sketching what he'd glimpsed of the gate's formation from recall and comparing it against every structural principle he'd taught himself across a decade of copied manuals. The ward wasn't merely a concealment or a defense. Buried in its deeper lines, as best he could reconstruct them, sat a containment structure — built, unless his reading was badly mistaken, to keep something in rather than to keep intruders out.

---