Chương 185: The Howl

They were already here? Well, that wasn't good.

"Yggy, back inside for now," I said, and the vine creature gave a small movement to show it wasn't happy about it before it dissolved back into energy and withdrew into my inner world. I would bring it back out at the point where its presence would do the most useful work.

"The spiritual pressure from the north is continuing to build," Azure reported.

"I'd say we have fifteen minutes before the leading edge of the wave makes contact." I nodded and ran through a final mental inventory of everything that needed to be in order. New runes inscribed, tested, and confirmed to work. Formation arrays properly anchored and charged across their placement points. Emergency supplies loaded into my storage ring. And finally, ongoing deep suspicion regarding Chu Feng and whatever he was actually doing here.

With that sorted, I retrieved the warning tablet from outside the front door and put it back into my storage ring and then I walked toward the village gates. The streets were silent around me and my footsteps bounced off the walls of the empty buildings on both sides in a way that made the emptiness feel even more pronounced than it actually was.

As I moved through the streets, I caught occasional movement in the upper windows of certain buildings, the residents who had flatly refused to leave during the evacuation, the elderly ones mostly, the ones who announced that they would prefer to die in their own beds than spend any amount of time hiding in a cave.

There were always some of those people in every village when a beast wave came, though the number this time had been reduced considerably after some very detailed and specific descriptions were provided to them of what spirit beasts were known to do to unprotected people.

"You have been very quiet," Azure observed.

"I was thinking about how many cultivation stories begin with spirit beasts killing the protagonist's family," I said.

"I have a strong personal preference against being the protagonist in a story like that."

"So you are following the protect the hometown storyline rather than the revenge journey one?"

"Yeah," I laughed.

"The character development opportunities are better and the whole experience is much less damaging overall." The defensive positions came into view ahead of me as I got close to the village entrance and the various teams were already in their assigned locations. Su Yue's fire attribute presence to the east gave off a warm quality even at this distance.

The Yan Clan cultivators to the west maintained that carefully understated signature that somehow managed to feel more noticeable than an obvious display of power would have been. And at the center the Heavenly Jade disciples held the main line, their pure yang energy was like a concentrated point of light. Whatever had happened to Wei Xuanyu in our earlier encounter had apparently done nothing at all to reduce his confidence, if anything the energy coming off him seemed higher than before.

"You left it quite late," Liu Chang said from my left as I reached the gathering point for the Mobile Response Team.

"I wanted to make sure everything in the house was properly secured," I said, moving into my position.

"My mother's silk collection isn't something I'm willing to be responsible for losing." Something that was almost a smile crossed his face.

"Your parents reached the shelters okay?"

"Eventually. After conducting three separate inventories of the shop and packing enough supplies to sustain themselves through a month-long siege." I shook my head.

"I think they are more concerned about the shop than they are about the beast wave."

"Family," he sighed, then his expression turned serious.

"You and Yan Ziheng are the final position. If anything passes through the main formations..."

"Nothing gets to the shelters," I said, and I held his gaze when I said it.

"Nothing." My officially recorded cultivation level meant I wouldn't be expected or required to hold any position at the front of the fighting, and beyond that my value in this situation was most concentrated in the support role my formation work provided rather than in direct combat, just the way I preferred it.

"The arrays are ready?" he asked.

"All anchors placed and charged. Five hundred spirit stones distributed across the three main arrays," I confirmed.

"But I still think the mountain side defenses needed a heavier allocation than they received."

"We need the reserves," he said.

"This could go on for days and we can't spend everything in the first hours." It was a reasonable position even if I didn't enjoy agreeing with it. Beast waves didn't come with advance notice of how long they'll take and the recorded history of them showed enormous variation, from a matter of hours to, in one particularly extreme case involving a cosmic alignment and an extremely angry dragon, six full months of continuous assault.

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"The formations running on spirit stones rather than personal qi is the one good piece of news in all of this," I said.

"It means we're not burning our own reserves just to keep the arrays working, that energy stays available for actual fighting."

"And the limitations?"

"Sustained assault from anything above sixth stage is going to start creating problems. A seventh stage or higher landing a serious hit on one of the anchor points..." I let the implication finish itself.

"Which is why the teams are positioned where they are," he said, and then after a brief pause: "I notice the formation barriers are placed behind the defensive lines rather than in front of them."

"The positioning is deliberate," I said.

"A barrier in front of the line gives people something to lean on psychologically and they start treating it as their primary protection rather than their own ability and attention. Behind the line they know they are the first thing any beast encounters. And they can step back into the barrier's protection if they need a moment to recover, their own attacks still pass outward through it but nothing coming inward from the beasts' side can." He raised an eyebrow slightly.

"There is another reason as well?"

"The barriers sit between the beasts and the path up to the caves," I said.

"Yes."

"Your family is up there," he said, and his tone wasn't a question.

"Everyone's family is up there," I said.

"The whole village." He was quiet for a moment, and I understood that he understood what I wasn't saying directly. Fighting with the possibility of your own death as a consequence was simply a standard occupational reality for anyone in cultivation. Fighting with the knowledge that failure meant everyone you had any connection to died alongside you was a different kind of weight to carry. Try not to die," he said, meeting my gaze.

"I've taken a liking to you." The sincerity in his voice and the sad look in his eyes caught me off guard.

"You as well," I said after a moment.

"There are people worth coming back to on both sides of this."

Yan Ziheng was already at the assigned position when I arrived and he had the look of someone whose composure was doing real work to hold itself together, his eyes were making continuous sweeping movements across the darkness beyond the perimeter line.

"The arrays are holding stable?" he asked by way of greeting.

"For now," I said, settling into position beside him and extending my own awareness outward to monitor the network.

"The battle will tell us things testing never fully can." He was quiet for a moment and then whispered: "I am hoping that whatever comes through here stays below seventh stage." I looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

"You're worried about facing something at your own level?"

"I'm not a combat practitioner," he said with a shrug, not seeming embarrassed at all.

"My family wanted me to learn formations because they believed it would keep me away from situations like this one." That was a perspective I appreciated hearing.

The cultivation world contained a tendency in how it was discussed to imply that everyone involved was a natural fighter who lived for life and death battles, and people like Yan Ziheng who had real and valuable abilities and no particular interest in testing them against hostile opponents were a much larger part of the actual population than those stories suggested.

"That is why we work as a team," I said.

"You maintain the formations, I handle whatever comes through." He looked at me with visible skepticism.

"You're sixth stage."

"I'm also extremely cautious by nature," I said, "which means I have a lot of options for moving away from danger very quickly if the situation requires it." That got an actual laugh out of him, which had been what I was hoping for.

We settled into a discussion of formation theory while we waited, which was probably not the most contextually appropriate conversation to be having given what was approaching us through the darkness, but pre-battle tension needed somewhere to go and apparently for both of us it went toward theoretical frameworks for pentagonal array structures in active defensive contexts.

The first sign wasn't a sound or a sight but a pressure, the atmospheric change that arrives just before a very large storm commits fully to existing, when the air itself seems to become heavier and more charged.

"They're very close now," I said quietly, pushing qi to my eyes to sharpen my night vision. It wasn't a complex technique and it burned through reserves at a rate that became meaningful only over extended time, but the alternative was waiting for something to be close enough to see without enhancement. Then the howl came.

It carried enough concentrated qi inside it that I felt the resonance in my bones before I realised it was sound, and for a moment my body stopped responding to my instructions as the paralysis effect washed through me and locked my muscles in place. It was a powerful technique and the beast producing it was at minimum at the ninth stage of Qi Condensation. I pushed qi through my meridians in a fast circulation pattern and broke the effect before it could fully establish itself.

Around me I could see other cultivators doing the same thing, and some of them took longer than others.

"That wasn't what the scouting estimates suggested we should expect," Yan Ziheng said, and his face had lost some of its color.

"That was only the introduction," I said. Spirit wolves came out of the darkness in numbers that made the word flood feel accurate. Their coats ran through shades of grey and black and their eyes carried active spiritual energy in them that made every individual animal visible as a moving point of light, and the total number of those points of light coming toward us was very large and well-coordinated.

Su Yue's steam barrier took the first significant group and the Heavenly Jade disciples brought jade colored lightning across the valley entrance in a continuous curtain. The sounds coming from the Yan Clan position to the west were considerable even if I couldn't see what was producing them. The majority of the wolves were operating in the third through sixth stage range, serious threats to anyone without cultivation but manageable for us.

But distributed through the wave were larger beasts, seventh and eighth stage specimens that moved at speeds that required real attention to track properly. And behind all of them, holding its position at the back of the wave, was the one I had been waiting to see and hoping not to. The Alpha stood above its pack by a full head and its fur was dark enough that it seemed to reduce the light around it rather than simply fail to reflect it.

Its spiritual pressure reached me from that distance as a physical sensation, a heaviness in the air that confirmed ninth stage Qi Condensation. But it wasn't watching the battle happening in front of it. Its gaze was directed past all of it, past the defensive lines and past the village and upward toward the mountain behind us. Toward the Sacred Grove. Toward the shrine.