My dao to eternity

He spent his first full day inside Myriad Beast City simply walking it, the way he'd once walked Quiet River Town in his first days there, learning a place by moving through it rather than by asking it questions it hadn't offered to answer.

The main street ran wide and straight from the gate, lined with shopfronts painted in bold, confident characters — spirit stones by the pouch, common talismans, medicinal ingredients laid out in neat wooden trays, a blacksmith's stall ringing with hammer on spirit iron loud enough to carry over the general noise of the crowd. He saw it before he reached the central square, rising above the rooftops the way a mountain rises above lesser hills — a single curved rib bone, pale as old ivory and easily forty feet at its highest point, arched across the open plaza like the frame of some vast, vanished doorway. Two more ribs, smaller and half-buried, flanked it on either side, and market stalls had grown up around all three the way moss grows around standing stone, awnings strung between the bone and the surrounding buildings as though the carcass had simply become part of the architecture generations ago. He did not need anyone to tell him what it was. Something had died here, once, on a scale the current city couldn't have built around by accident — and whoever had founded this place had chosen to build beside the bones rather than clear them away, as though the reminder itself was worth more than the ground it occupied.