We ran for three days straight.
Not literally,even Foundation Establishment cultivators needed rest. But we moved in brutal cycles: four hours running, two hours rest, repeat until collapse threatened. Lin Mei set the pace, her superior cultivation letting her push harder than Yun Xia or I could sustain indefinitely.
"They'll expect us to head north," she said during our first rest stop, six hours and forty miles from the capital. "Toward known Fate Weaver territories, suspected refuge locations. So we go east first, double back through the mountains, approach from the south."
"That adds a day to our travel time," Yun Xia protested.
"It also adds confusion to their tracking. Right now, they're mobilizing everything,trackers, aerial patrols, formation arrays scanning for our spiritual signatures. The longer we stay unpredictable, the better our survival odds."
She was right. Through stolen moments checking my fortune sense, I could perceive pursuit forming behind us,dozens of cultivators coordinating search patterns, tightening a net designed to catch fleeing criminals.
But fortune manipulation gave us advantages. I severed the causal connection between our footprints and traceable evidence. Made our passage improbable to detect. Spent LP constantly to stay ahead of the hunt.
[LP: 1,081 → 981 → 881 → 781...]
By day two, my reserves were dangerously low.
"I need to absorb the artifacts' fortune," I told Lin Mei during our midday rest. We'd hidden in a cave system, deep enough that aerial patrols wouldn't detect us. "I'm burning through LP faster than regeneration can restore."
"How long will absorption take?"
"Hours. Maybe half a day for everything."
"We don't have half a day. Pursuit is twelve hours behind and closing." She considered. "Take what you can absorb quickly—the smaller items, pendants and talismans. Save the major artifacts for when we reach the refuge."
I pulled out five items with the highest fortune concentration to size ratio: Wang Clan jade pendant, two Chen family talismans, Liu Clan prayer beads, and a Feng family compass.
Each one glowed with accumulated luck from generations of use. Deceased families' fortune, preserved in objects, waiting for someone who could actually use it.
I activated Fortune Absorption on all five simultaneously.
Power flooded my meridians like scalding water. Not painful exactly, but overwhelming—centuries of accumulated probability manipulation condensed into minutes of transfer. My Fortune Foundation trembled under the weight, but held.
[FORTUNE ABSORBED: +1,200 LP]
[CURRENT LP: 1,981]
"Better," I gasped. "Almost two thousand points. Enough to reach the refuge and defend against initial attacks."
"Assuming we reach the refuge," Yun Xia said from the cave entrance. "Because we have a problem."
She pointed at the sky.
Three dots circled overhead—too high for mortals to see, but clear to cultivators. Aerial patrol, scanning methodically, searching for exactly what we were: fugitives hiding in terrain that offered concealment.
"They're using formation-enhanced detection," Lin Mei said, her face tight. "Spiritual sense amplified through arrays. Our basic concealment won't hold against that."
"Can we sever their detection's connection to accuracy?" I asked.
"Not from this distance. You'd need to be within fifty meters, and getting that close means exposing ourselves to direct spiritual sense." She watched the circling cultivators. "We wait. Hope they pass over us. If they investigate this cave system..."
We waited in tense silence.
The three cultivators descended slowly, following a search pattern that would inevitably bring them to our location. Professional, methodical, exactly what I'd expect from Court forces hunting criminals who'd embarrassed them.
"They're Foundation Establishment 5th Layer minimum," Yun Xia whispered. "All three. We could probably take them, but the fight would alert every other patrol within miles."
"Then we don't fight," I said, an idea forming. "We make them not want to search here."
"How?"
"By making this cave causally irrelevant to their search." I extended my fortune sense toward the approaching cultivators, feeling their probability threads. "They're searching for criminals who are likely hiding. What if we make our presence here extremely unlikely?"
Lin Mei's eyes lit with understanding. "Probability manipulation at the investigative level. Make them think they already searched this area, or that caves like this are low-priority targets."
"Exactly. Not hiding from detection,making detection consider us implausible."
[ATTEMPTING: PROBABILITY MANIPULATION - INVESTIGATIVE REDIRECT]
[COST: 200 LP]
[CURRENT LP: 1,781]
I targeted the lead cultivator's decision-making process, injecting improbability into his tactical assessment. Made the cave seem already-searched, uninteresting, strategically irrelevant. Not changing reality,just adjusting his perception of likelihood.
The cultivator's flight path shifted. Instead of descending toward our cave, he banked left toward a different section of the mountain range.
"Probably just smugglers in these caves," I heard him say to his companions through spiritual sense. "Focus on the forest valleys—better places for fugitives to hide."
They flew past, searching elsewhere.
"That worked," Yun Xia breathed. "You made them think investigating here was unlikely, so they didn't."
"Fortune Foundation," I said. "I don't change what's possible. Just what's probable. And right now, us being here is extremely improbable to anyone searching."
We waited another hour before moving, using the patrol's departure to cover our escape from the cave system.
Day three brought worse problems.
We'd covered two hundred miles through indirect routing, entering the mountain range that bordered the Fate Weaver Refuge's territory. Another day of travel and we'd reach safety.
But the pursuit had adapted.
"They're not just using aerial patrols anymore," Lin Mei reported, her spiritual sense extended to maximum range. "Ground teams, formation arrays, and..." she paused, face draining of color, "...Enforcer Wu."
"Who's Enforcer Wu?" I asked.
Yun Xia answered, her voice tight with old fear. "Enforcer Wu is a legend. Nascent Soul 2nd Layer, fifty years as Court hunter, personally eliminated seventeen Fate Weaver bloodlines. When I served as Enforcer, we called him the Extinction Blade. He never fails. Never stops. Never shows mercy."
[DETECTING: NASCENT SOUL CULTIVATOR]
[DISTANCE: 30 MILES AND CLOSING]
[POWER LEVEL: VASTLY SUPERIOR]
[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 4%]
"Four percent," I said flatly. "System says we have four percent survival odds against him."
"System is optimistic," Yun Xia said. "I watched Enforcer Wu kill a Core Formation 9th Layer Fate Weaver in under thirty seconds. He specializes in causality disruption,counters Fate Weaving techniques by severing their connection to reality before they activate."
"He counter-Fate-Weaves?" Lin Mei looked shaken for the first time since I'd met her. "That shouldn't be possible. Fate Weaving counters everything because it manipulates causality itself. What counters the counter?"
"Superior skill. Superior power. Superior experience." Yun Xia checked her weapons grimly. "Enforcer Wu has spent fifty years perfecting techniques specifically designed to kill people like us. We can't fight him. Can't trick him. Can't manipulate probability around him because he's too skilled at manipulating it himself."
"Then we run," I decided. "Faster. Harder. Use every advantage we have."
"He's Nascent Soul. He flies faster than we can run."
"Then I make him slow down." I pulled out Fate Severance, feeling the blade's power resonate with my cultivation. "How much fortune does a Nascent Soul cultivator typically have?"
"Immense. Centuries of accumulated luck from surviving constant danger." Lin Mei understood my thinking. "You want to drain his fortune, make him less effective. But Wei Chen, even drained, a Nascent Soul cultivator is still exponentially more powerful than us."
"Drained and slowed is better than full power and pursuing." I felt Enforcer Wu's approach through my fortune sense,a blazing star of accumulated probability manipulation, terrifying in its intensity. "Lin Mei, can you create a causality trap? Something that activates when he triggers it, buys us time?"
"Maybe. What kind of trap?"
"Temporal severance. Not him,the space he's traveling through. Freeze a section of mountain range in time. When he enters it, he'll be temporarily stuck while causality sorts itself out."
Her eyes widened. "That's... extremely advanced. And incredibly dangerous. If I miscalculate, I could freeze the entire region permanently, create a dead zone where time doesn't flow."
"Can you do it or not?"
"I can. Probably. Maybe seventy percent success rate." She glanced at Yun Xia. "If I fail, reality might collapse locally. Everything within five miles could become causally unstable."
"Seventy percent odds of working versus four percent odds of surviving him directly," Yun Xia calculated. "I'll take those numbers."
"Where?" Lin Mei asked.
I pointed to a narrow pass ahead,the only direct route through the mountains toward our destination. "There. He's tracking us, which means he's following our most logical path. We go through that pass, you set the temporal trap behind us, then we detour around while he's stuck."
"That adds hours to our travel time."
"Better hours than death."
We ran for the pass, moving at maximum sustainable speed. Behind us, I felt Enforcer Wu closing,twenty-five miles, twenty miles, fifteen. He was gaining rapidly, his Nascent Soul cultivation letting him cover ground impossibly fast.
The pass appeared,a natural corridor between peaks, maybe fifty meters long. Perfect chokepoint.
"Go through," Lin Mei ordered. "I'll need five minutes to set the trap properly."
Yun Xia and I sprinted through the pass. On the far side, we turned to watch Lin Mei work.
She stood at the pass's center, her eyes blazing silver with concentrated Fate Weaving. Her hands moved in complex patterns, identifying every causal thread connecting this space to temporal flow. One by one, she began severing them.
[LIN MEI: ADVANCED TEMPORAL SEVERANCE]
[TARGET: 50 METERS OF SPACE]
[DIFFICULTY: EXTREME]
[RISK: CATASTROPHIC IF FAILED]
The air inside the pass began to shimmer. Not visibly—more like reality itself was becoming uncertain, as if the space was deciding whether to exist in present or frozen time.
"Hurry," I said. "He's ten miles out."
Lin Mei's face showed immense strain. Creating temporal traps required precision and power that pushed even her expert-level Fate Weaving to its limits. One mistake, and she'd unmake causality for the entire region.
Five miles.
"Almost... done..." she gasped.
The shimmer intensified. Then snapped into place. The pass looked normal, but my fortune sense screamed that time inside it was fragile, barely connected to normal flow.
"It's set," Lin Mei said, staggering. "The moment someone with strong spiritual presence enters, the temporal severance activates. They'll be frozen for approximately ten minutes while reality decides if that space should contain them."
"Will it hold a Nascent Soul cultivator?"
"For maybe three minutes. Then his power will force reconnection." She looked at me seriously. "Three minutes, Wei Chen. That's all the head start we get."
Three miles.
We ran.
Behind us, I felt Enforcer Wu reach the pass. Felt him enter the trapped space without hesitation,his spiritual sense had detected nothing wrong, the temporal severance too subtle for casual detection.
Then reality stuttered.
Enforcer Wu froze mid-step as time disconnected around him. Not completely,he was too powerful for that. But enough that his acceleration stopped, his pursuit paused, his advance halted while causality sorted itself out.
"Three minutes," I said. "Starting now."
We fled with everything we had.
We reached the Fate Weaver Refuge at sunset on day three, exhausted and pursued but alive.
The valley's formations recognized us immediately,Lin Mei's spiritual signature granted automatic access. We stumbled through the entrance as defensive arrays activated behind us, hiding our passage, confusing pursuit.
Wang Jun and fifty other Fate Weavers met us at the valley entrance, weapons drawn, ready for combat.
"You made it!" Wang Jun's young face showed relief and excitement. "We heard rumors,the Celestial Capital is in chaos, they're saying someone robbed the primary vault, stole legendary artifacts"
"That was us," I said, pulling the Chen Ancestor Sword from my storage ring. "We stole back what they took from our families. Fifteen artifacts total, including things they seized from recently purged clans."
"The Wang Clan pendant," I added, tossing it to Wang Jun. "Belonged to your grandmother, according to the Court's records. Considered it fitting you should have it back."
He caught it, tears suddenly streaming down his face. "Grandmother's pendant. She wore this every day. When they killed her, when they burned everything,I thought it was lost forever."
"Nothing's lost forever," I said. "Just temporarily held by tyrants who needed robbing."
Around us, other refuge residents crowded close, seeing the artifacts, understanding what we'd done. Not just theft—reclamation. Justice enacted through causality manipulation and desperate courage.
Lin Mei raised her voice. "The Celestial Court knows we exist now. Not the refuge's location, but our resistance. They'll escalate. Enforcer Wu is already tracking us—he'll find the valley eventually. We have days, maybe a week before they mobilize assault forces."
"Then we prepare," Elder Shen said, the elderly Foundation Establishment Peak cultivator stepping forward. "We've hidden for eight years. Time to stop hiding and start fighting."
"Agreed," I said. "But first,I need to break through. Fortune Core Formation requires ten thousand LP. I'm halfway there. These artifacts contain enough fortune to push me over the threshold."
"How long?" Lin Mei asked.
"Absorption and breakthrough? Three days minimum. Maybe five if complications arise."
"You have three days," she decided. "After that, Enforcer Wu will be here, and we'll need every advantage we can muster. Including you at Core Formation equivalent power."
I nodded, exhaustion pulling at my consciousness. Three days to break through. Then war.
But first, rest.
I'd been running for three days straight, manipulating probability constantly, burning through LP like water. My body demanded sleep. My mind needed recovery.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Tomorrow I begin the breakthrough attempt. Tonight, I sleep like the dead man I technically am."
Xiao Lan appeared from the crowd, her young face worried. "Young Master, you look terrible."
"Feel worse. But we succeeded, Xiao Lan. We robbed them. Actually robbed the Celestial Court's primary vault."
She smiled. "Good. They deserve worse, but robbery is a start."
I let her guide me toward the medical hall, where Physician Shen could check my condition. Behind us, the refuge celebrated—small victory against overwhelming tyranny, stolen artifacts representing hope that resistance was possible.
The ghost had struck hard.
The dead man had robbed heaven itself.
And in three days, I'd either break through to Fortune Core Formation, or I'd die trying.
Twelve percent odds of heist success. We'd beaten those.
Maybe I could beat the breakthrough odds too.
One impossible task at a time.