My dao to eternity

He saw Myriad Beast City ten days after the fork in the road, first as a shape against the horizon that could have been cloud or could have been mountain, and only on the final afternoon of walking toward it resolved into something built rather than grown. He could have covered the distance in two days. A cultivator at his realm, moving at the speed a proper flying sword or a disciplined qi-assisted stride allowed, ate up ground the way a mortal traveler could never hope to match — Core Condensation carried a man across open country fast enough that ten days on foot became two in the air, sometimes less. He had the technique for it. He had practiced it enough, in the empty stretches south of Myriad Craft City years before, to trust it completely. He walked anyway. Nine dead scouts lay in ash on a forest road two hundred miles behind him, and whatever sect had sent them would eventually notice the silence where a report should have arrived. The chance that anyone connected to Vermilion Abyss might already be watching the roads near Quiet River Town, tracing outward from wherever the search had last reported in, was small. He did not need it to be large to take it seriously. A flying cultivator crossing open sky left a signature any trained eye could follow for miles — a streak of qi, a displaced current of air, a shape moving too fast and too straight to belong to any bird. A man walking a public road with a horse and a modest chest looked like every other traveler on it, and vanished into that sameness the moment he stepped off. Ten days cost him nothing he needed urgently enough to spend the risk instead. He had spent three years already proving to himself that patience outlasted almost anything a faster, louder choice could offer, and he saw no reason the lesson stopped applying now simply because the destination had changed.

Walls first — pale stone, high enough that the buildings behind them showed only as rooflines and the occasional spire of something taller, catching the afternoon light in a way no timber or plaster ever caught it. Then the shape of the gate itself, wide enough for four carts abreast, banners hanging from either side that he was still too far to read. Then, faint even to his sharpened hearing, a sound the road hadn't carried since he'd left Myriad Craft City behind — the low, layered noise of a place with more people in it than a man could count by looking.