Li Fan ran until his lungs burned and the muscles in his calves locked tight with every stride. Branches clawed at his jacket, snapping back into place behind him with sharp cracks that sounded, for one gut-dropping second each time, like footsteps closing in. He didn't look back. The cultivator's last words kept looping through his head — that direction, don't stop — and he held the line as best he could, weaving around root systems thick enough to trip a man twice his size.
The pouch, the token, the talismans — he kept them clamped tight against his chest with one arm, the paper slips crinkling against his palm every time his hand shifted.
He'd made it maybe half a mile when the sound reached him.
Metal on metal, first — a short, ringing clash somewhere behind and to his left. Then a voice, raised and furious, cut off mid-word. Then a wet, tearing crash of something heavy hitting the ground. Li Fan's feet slowed without his permission, his whole body straining to listen even as every instinct told him to keep moving.
A shout followed. One syllable, short and final, and then nothing.
The forest went quiet again, quiet enough that Li Fan could hear his own pulse hammering in his ears.
He didn't need to see it to understand what had just happened. The man who'd handed him a dead sect brother's belongings with his own shaking hands wasn't going to reach the sect himself. Li Fan's throat tightened, something hot and useless rising in his chest, but there was no time to sit with it. Whatever had caught up to that man was still out there, and it hadn't come this far just to stop.
He ran.
The canopy thinned overhead as he pushed on, gaps opening up to a violet sky scattered with stars too bright and too close, throwing pale, broken light down through the leaves. It wasn't enough to see by properly — the ground ahead stayed a smear of shifting gray and black, roots and hollows he had to guess at more than see. Sweat ran down the back of his neck despite the cold, and the smell of crushed undergrowth and torn bark followed him with every step, sharp and green and mixed now with the coppery bite of his own effort.
He heard them before he saw them.
Footsteps — more than one set, moving fast and even, closing the gap in a way his own ragged pace couldn't match. He risked a glance over his shoulder and caught a flash of black cloth cutting between two massive trunks behind him, low to the ground, unnaturally smooth.
Three of them. Maybe four. Black robes, dark enough to swallow most of the starlight, faces hidden behind matching masks. On the chest of the nearest one, for just a fraction of a second as he passed through a gap in the canopy light, Li Fan caught the shape stitched across the fabric — a dragon, coiled and black on black, visible only because the thread caught the light differently than the cloth around it.
He turned back to the trees and pushed harder, but his body had nothing left to give. His lungs scraped with every breath, and the gap between him and the footsteps behind him was closing.
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A hand closed around the back of his collar.
Li Fan's feet left the ground for half a second before he was hauled backward and slammed against a tree trunk, bark biting into his shoulder blades hard enough to knock the air out of him. A masked face leaned in close, close enough that Li Fan could see the eyes behind the fabric — sharp, assessing, and then, almost immediately, bored.
"A mortal." The voice behind the mask was flat, more disgust than surprise. The grip on his collar loosened, just slightly, the pursuer's attention already sliding sideways, scanning the trees behind Li Fan as though the real target had to be somewhere else. Not worth killing carefully. Not worth killing first.
That half-second of contempt was all the room Li Fan had.
His hand was already moving, fingers closing around the first talisman jammed into his jacket pocket. He crushed it.
The paper went to ash between his fingers in an instant, and something slammed into him from the outside a heartbeat later — not pain, but pressure, a wall of force that hit his side and simply stopped there, absorbed into nothing before it could reach him. He heard the masked man's breath catch, surprised for the first time.
Li Fan didn't wait to see what came next. He crushed the second talisman.
Heat spread through his legs first, fast and strange, climbing from his calves into his thighs like something being poured into him from below the skin. His hearing sharpened all at once — the pursuer's robe snapping in the air, the scrape of a boot pivoting against dirt, his own heartbeat suddenly loud and distinct instead of a blur of noise. His vision compressed, the trees ahead smearing into streaks of gray and black as his legs surged forward on their own, faster than he'd ever moved in his life.
He tore free of the loosened grip and ran.
The world blurred past him too fast to track properly, his own speed outpacing his eyes, outpacing his sense of the ground beneath his boots. Trees came at him and vanished before he could register their exact position, and he adjusted on instinct more than sight, throwing his shoulder sideways at the last possible second to avoid a trunk he barely saw coming.
Behind him, a voice snapped out something sharp and furious — the same pursuer, no longer bored.
Li Fan didn't have the breath to look back. His legs kept moving on their own, carrying him faster than his mind could keep pace with, faster than his eyes could properly map the ground in front of him.
The earth disappeared beneath his next step.
There was no warning — no dip in the light, no change in the sound of his own footsteps to tell him the ground had given way to something hollow beneath a thin crust of packed leaves and root. One moment his boot was driving him forward, and the next there was nothing under it at all. His stomach lurched as gravity took over, his arms flailing out for anything solid, fingers scraping uselessly against dirt and stone as he dropped.
He hit something hard, and the world went black before he even registered the pain.