The tremor through the stone never repeated. Whatever had caused it eventually settled into a slow, heavy rhythm somewhere deep in the tunnel — long, even breaths, spaced far enough apart that Li Fan guessed the thing had gone to sleep.
He waited another stretch of time before he trusted it, counting the breaths until they blurred into a steady pattern that didn't change. Only then did he ease himself out of the crevice, one limb at a time, testing his weight against the stone floor before he committed to it.
He moved slower than he thought possible, sliding his boots forward instead of lifting them, feeling for loose stone before letting any weight settle. One wrong step, one click of gravel underfoot, and he had no idea what waited in the dark behind him. He kept his hand against the tunnel wall the whole way, the same cold, damp rock guiding him back the way he'd come.
The tunnel brightened by degrees, gray light bleeding in ahead of him, and then the crisp bite of open air hit his face — clean, cold, and a massive relief after the reek that had followed him the entire crawl back. He stepped out of the cave mouth into the pale mist of early dawn, the forest around him hazy and gray, and didn't stop walking until the cave was long out of sight behind the trees.
He walked for hours after that, unhurried, putting as much distance as he could between himself and whatever hunting ground surrounded that cave. Dried mud cracked and flaked off his jacket with every step, and the stench of the previous night's disguise still clung stubbornly to his skin no matter how far he got from its source.
The forest didn't change much as he moved — massive trunks stretching up into a canopy so dense it filtered the light down into a soft, gray wash, roots thick enough to trip him if he wasn't watching his footing. He tracked the pale smear of sunlight through the leaves overhead, using it to hold a rough direction, and kept an eye out for anything that looked like a trail or the glint of running water.
His stomach still ached with hunger, worse now than the day before, but he kept his pace steady. Panic wouldn't get him a stream any faster than patience would.
He was pushing through a dense stand of ferns, taller than his head, when a sharp sound cracked through the quiet ahead of him.
Li Fan dropped instantly, every muscle locking into stillness. He crept sideways toward the mossy bulk of a fallen tree, wider around than a car, and flattened himself against the dirt behind it, pressing his body low into the damp leaf litter.
He held his breath and listened.
Ragged breathing came first — wet and uneven, dragging in and out like each inhale cost something. Then footsteps, heavy and irregular, dragging through the undergrowth with none of the rhythm of a healthy stride. Something — someone — was moving toward him, hurt badly enough that every step sounded like an effort.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
A voice cut through the ferns a moment later, low and strained, forcing words out through obvious pain.
Li Fan didn't recognize a single syllable of it. The language was nothing like anything spoken back on Blue Star — different rhythm, different weight in the mouth, sounds that shouldn't have meant anything to him at all.
Except they did.
The words arrived in his mind as clear, plain thought, the same instant they reached his ears, no translation lag, no effort on his part. He understood every word as if it had been spoken in his own language from the start.
His first thought was the sutra. It had to be — nothing else in him could explain understanding a language he'd never heard a single word of before this moment. Whatever the Primordial Dao Origin Sutra actually was, it wasn't only reshaping his body. It was handling something far stranger, some baseline rule of this world's speech, and doing it without him asking.
Through the gap in the ferns, the voice kept going, breathless and pained, the same words repeating like a lifeline the speaker was holding onto.
"I need to get back to the sect... I just need to get these things back to the sect..."
No mention of pursuers. No warning shouted to unseen enemies. Just a man in obvious pain, talking to himself to keep moving, fixated on reaching somewhere called a sect.
Li Fan's pulse picked up, but not from fear this time.
He'd read enough of those late-night stories to know what a word like that usually meant in a world like this — an organization, a home base, people with resources and knowledge he didn't have a fraction of. If he stayed out here alone, dodging cave predators and eating tree bark, he'd die of exposure or hunger long before he learned anything useful about where he'd landed. A wounded stranger heading toward some kind of civilization was the first real lead he'd had since he woke up in this forest.
It was a risk. An unknown man, badly hurt, possibly hunted by something worse than himself. But staying hidden forever wasn't a plan. It was just a slower way of dying.
Li Fan set his jaw, pushed himself up off the dirt, and stepped out from behind the fallen trunk.
He parted the tall fern leaves in front of him with both hands.
The man beyond them was on his knees, robes soaked dark with blood down one side, torn at the shoulder where something had clearly clawed through fabric and skin both. His face was pale, slick with sweat, one hand braced against the ground to keep himself upright.
At the rustle of the ferns, his head snapped up.
Their eyes locked across the clearing, and neither of them moved.