The valley stretched beneath him like a wound in the earth.
Tianlong flew low — below the cloud line, below the bird paths, below the altitude where cultivators might sense his passage. His dark silk robe whipped in the spiritual wind, the fabric snapping against his body, his golden qi suppressed to a sliver of its true radiance. He didn't want to announce himself. Not yet. Not to this place.
The valley was unnamed. It existed in the gap between two mountain ranges — a narrow corridor of forest and stream and wild grass that connected the eastern lowlands to the central provinces. No sects claimed it. No cities occupied it. The villages that dotted its floor were small, poor, forgotten — the kind of places where mortals lived and died without ever knowing that cultivators existed, that gods walked the earth, that power beyond imagination was separated from them by nothing more than a mountain crossing.
