My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 100: What the Vial Contained
Li Fan didn't sleep that night, though he made himself lie down for the appearance of it, staring at the courtyard's dark ceiling beams while his mind worked through the same handful of facts from every angle he could find. A trained blade. A sealed poison meant as a second certainty behind the first. No token, no mark, no word spoken that told him anything beyond confirmation that the man had known exactly who he'd come to kill.
He rose before dawn, the same hour he always rose, and carried the small clay jar holding the poison vial and the recovered blade down into the chamber beneath the training room, setting both on the workbench beside his herb texts where the morning's thin lamplight could reach them properly.
The blade itself told him little. Plain steel, unremarkable in its make, the kind of weapon a hundred different smiths across a hundred different cities could have forged without any of them leaving a signature behind. He turned it over carefully in the light anyway, checking the tang, the balance, the small nicks along its edge that spoke of use rather than ornament. A tool. Nothing more, nothing that pointed backward toward whoever had placed it in a dead man's hand.
The poison proved more informative, though not in any way that offered comfort. He worked through the identification with the same patient method Old Sun had once drilled into him over a different, less personal case, testing color, smell, the way a drop reacted against a strip of treated paper he kept for precisely this purpose. Wolfsbane root, refined past what any mortal apothecary could manage, cut with something else beneath it he couldn't fully place — a spiritual compound, faint but present, the kind of refinement that required a cultivator's own qi worked into the brewing rather than simple herbcraft alone.
That detail sat heavier than the poison's lethality did. Whoever had prepared this hadn't been an ordinary hired blade working from a mortal poisoner's stock. Someone with real cultivation, and real alchemical skill, had made this specifically to finish what a knife alone might fail to.
He climbed back up from the chamber once the sun had properly cleared the rooftops, and found himself standing longer than usual outside Old Mu's shop before he finally pushed the door open, the ordinary morning ritual suddenly carrying a weight it hadn't carried the day before.
Old Mu glanced up from his bench, and something in his own weathered face shifted almost immediately, the particular sharpness of a man who'd spent decades reading customers' true intentions past whatever they claimed at the counter. "You look like a man who didn't sleep."
"Didn't," Li Fan admitted, which was true enough not to require the rest of the truth alongside it.
"Trouble?"
Li Fan held the old man's gaze a moment, and felt, for the length of that moment, a genuine pull toward simply telling him everything — the alley, the blade, the poison's spiritual refinement, the whole accumulated weight of dragon marks and dead informants and unnamed strangers asking pointed questions about a pouch he'd carried sealed for years. Old Mu had earned honesty a hundred times over across the years they'd shared this shop. He deserved better than careful evasion.
Unlawfully taken from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
But a man with a failing heart carried enough weight already without Li Fan adding a assassin's blade to it, and there was nothing Old Mu could do with the knowledge except worry himself into an earlier spell than his body had any need to suffer. Some burdens were kinder carried alone, even when carrying them alone cost something in the honesty of the friendship itself.
"Poor sleep," Li Fan said instead. "Nothing more than that."
Old Mu studied him a moment longer, plainly unconvinced, then let it go the same unhurried way he let most things go now, trusting whatever Li Fan chose not to share was chosen for a reason rather than out of any lack of care between them. "Sleep better tonight, then," he said simply, and returned to his own work, and Li Fan carried the small guilt of the omission into his own bench without further comment.
He spent every spare hour that week reinforcing what could be reinforced. The concealment array beneath the training room floor received a second full inspection, every node traced and tested twice over, though he found nothing weakened that his earlier check hadn't already confirmed sound. He added a second, smaller ward along the courtyard's outer wall, a simple alert formation rather than anything defensive, meant only to warn him if something crossed the boundary while he slept rather than to stop it outright — a formation drawn from a technique he'd copied years ago and never before had cause to actually deploy.
He varied his route home each evening, small deviations that cost him little extra time but denied any watcher the easy predictability a fixed pattern would have offered. He carried his sword openly rather than sheathed beneath his robe, a small, deliberate shift that any attentive observer would have noticed, and that Li Fan judged worth the visibility in exchange for the speed it bought him if the alley behind the tanner's yard ever repeated itself.
He sat beneath the plum tree that week's end, the poison vial's emptied glass resting beside him on the stone bench rather than returned yet to the chamber below, and turned the whole shape of things over once more in the quiet evening light. A false rumor about an unopened pouch. A stranger testing his composure with pointed questions. Dead informants who'd traded, likely, in exactly the kind of confidential knowledge someone had used to connect his own name to that same pouch. And now a trained blade, backed by alchemy no ordinary hired killer could have commissioned on his own.
The pieces still refused to form a single certain shape. He didn't yet know who wanted him dead, or precisely why a decade-old delivery had suddenly become worth killing over after so many quiet years of apparent irrelevance. He didn't know whether the dragon-marked sighting in the western market connected to any of it directly, or whether that thread remained, as it had for years now, a separate mystery running parallel rather than through the center of this one.
But he understood, sitting there with the koi moving slow beneath the darkening water and Old Mu's shop closed for the night somewhere across the quiet city, that whatever this was, it had moved past the point where patient watching alone would keep him safe. He would keep watching. He would keep the formations sharp, the routes varied, the blade close at hand. But he would also, for the first time in longer than he could easily remember, begin preparing seriously for the possibility that watching wouldn't be enough.
He let the Primordial Breath settle into its familiar rhythm, slower than it wanted to again, his attention only half surrendered to the cultivation itself, and stayed beneath the plum tree long after the last light had drained fully from the sky.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter