— ✦ —
They didn't have to fight all thirty-seven.
They had to reach the secondary exit before thirty-seven people found the plateau and decided who they would have to fight for it.
The plateau's concealment formation was already partially known — they had entered through the south wall activation. But that entry was now visible from the plateau's own position because the stone had fissured when it opened.
Anyone who looked up at the right angle from the north cliff entry would see the fissure.
Someone would look up at the right angle.
"We need to leave before they find us," Zhou Jin said.
"Agreed." Wen Dao looked at the plateau. A hundred and forty stones. He hadn't read a quarter of them.
He had to make a choice.
He looked at the one stone he wanted most. The long flat one at the north edge with the deepest qi charge. The one he'd spent the most time at.
He pressed both palms flat on its surface and pushed a concentrated Pale Flame circulation pulse into it.
The stone resonated. The characters brightened.
He was not trying to read more of it. He was trying to determine if it was portable.
The stone was not portable. Five hundred pounds, embedded in the plateau bedrock.
But the qi-stored information wasn't confined to the stone's physical mass. It was distributed in the qi field around the stone. Like a book whose content had soaked into the air of the room.
He ran a specific Pale Flame absorption technique — something he had intuited from the jade token reading in the Iron Mountain chamber. Extended absorption. Not reading, but drawing the qi-encoded information directly into his own cultivation field.
His dantian lit up. Pale Flame circulation surging against the information transfer.
Twenty seconds.
Not everything. The deep archive was too large for twenty seconds. But the first layer — the high-priority summary structure — transferred completely.
He straightened.
"Go," he said.
They moved to the south edge. Below, he could hear cultivators beginning to climb toward the plateau from the north. Shouting. Someone had found the fissure.
The Tiger was outside. He felt it through the formation wall — pacing at the base of the south cliff, having tracked their position through whatever mechanism the Tiger used for tracking.
He dropped first. Twenty feet. His Level Four qi cushioned the landing.
Cai Rong dropped beside him. Zhou Jin was already down, having descended in a controlled slide.
Below on the valley floor, the camp groups had noticed the north entry opening and the subsequent movement toward the hidden plateau. Three of the six groups were reorganizing. The centermost group — the three Level Fives and one Level Six — was moving toward the cliff with precision.
The Tiger appeared from the south tree line.
It looked at Wen Dao and then looked east.
East. Not north.
He understood.
"East," he said.
They ran east along the south valley wall. The Tiger ran beside them — not at speed, but at a pace that matched their fastest movement. Its presence behind them pushed back any qi signature that might have tracked them from the valley floor.
Wen Dao ran and processed the absorbed information simultaneously.
The first layer of the long flat stone's archive was organizing itself in his dantian. Not readable yet — like a book that had been carried into a dark room. He needed stillness and cultivation time to access what he had taken.
But he had it.
They cleared the east end of the valley at a run and hit the forest road ten minutes later.
Behind them, shouts from the Cloud Peak valley. The plateau had been found. Thirty-seven cultivators discovering a hundred-and-forty-stone library simultaneously.
Ahead: road. Trees. The Tiger, padding silently beside them.
"What did you take from that stone?" Cai Rong asked between breaths.
"Information," Wen Dao said.
"What kind of information?"
"The kind I didn't know I needed until I found it."
Cai Rong looked at him. "You're going to make me ask multiple times, aren't you."
"Give me three days to process it properly."
"Fine." A pause. "How many of those stones had content you wanted?"
He thought about the qi density map the Pale Flame had built across the plateau.
"All of them," he said.
"And you got one."
"Parts of one."
Cai Rong ran in silence for a while.
"I hate the parts of this job that involve running away from places full of information," he said.
"All jobs have that part."
"Not the jobs I planned to have."
They ran north on the forest road as the Cloud Peak valley fell behind.
The Tiger ran beside them.
The road kept going.