The base approach was the same stone path it had been yesterday, worn smooth by three hundred years of passage, the mountain's pulse running through it at the same steady rhythm it ran through everything in proximity to the Ninefold Heaven Gate Mountain.
What was different was the people on it.
Zhao Tianhe walked at a measured distance behind Lin Yi, his casual robes the same as they had been at every encounter, the Ascendant's presence carried in the specific way of someone who had stopped needing to announce it a very long time ago. Zhao Yuexin was beside him. Behind them, a procession of Zhao Family members that had assembled from the estate's morning population, some of them senior disciples who had been at the courtyard engagement, some of them elders whose faces Lin Yi had not seen before, all of them moving with the quiet attention of people who had come to witness something rather than participate in it.
