My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 103: What the Herb Gatherer Saw
The mountain's western slopes carried a particular strain of frost lily that grew nowhere else within a day's walk of the city, and Li Fan made the climb himself twice a year rather than trust the harvest to sellers who padded their baskets with lesser stock and charged frost-lily prices for it regardless. He'd made the same climb enough times now that his feet knew the trail's uneven stones without his eyes needing to check them, leaving his attention free to range across the slope's ordinary sounds — wind through the high pines, a hawk's distant cry, the particular hush that settled over mountain forest in the hour before dusk.
The hush broke without warning, three ridges over, a concussive crack that sent a flock of startled birds exploding skyward from the tree line and reached Li Fan's own chest as much as his ears, a pressure wave rolling down the slope with enough force to shiver the frost lily's delicate stems around him.
He didn't run toward it. He didn't run away from it either. He moved instead with the same patient, deliberate care he brought to any dangerous unknown, working his way along the tree line toward a rocky outcrop he knew from prior climbs offered clear sight across the intervening valley without exposing his own position to whatever was happening on the far ridge.
What he found, once he'd settled low against the outcrop's cold stone, was a battle already well underway. Two figures circled each other across a stretch of blasted, smoking ground that had, judging by the shattered tree stumps ringing it, been forest only minutes before. One wore the pale grey of an outer sect patrol, a spear held in a two-handed grip that spoke of real training rather than mere ceremony. The other wore no visible affiliation at all, dark traveling clothes scorched along one shoulder, a curved blade trailing faint traces of green light with every movement.
The dark-clothed fighter struck first, a diagonal cut that carried none of the wasted flourish Li Fan associated with performance swordsmanship, only brutal, economical intent. The patrol guard met it with the spear's haft rather than its point, deflecting the blade wide before spinning the weapon's butt end around in a strike aimed at the attacker's ribs — a technique Li Fan recognized distantly from Old Mo's own casual demonstrations years ago in Stonebridge, though executed here with considerably more urgency than any demonstration had ever required.
The strike connected. Li Fan heard the impact from his hidden vantage, a solid, meaty sound followed by a grunt of genuine pain, and watched the dark-clothed fighter stumble back three full steps before catching his own balance against a fallen log. Green light gathered along the curved blade's edge in response, thickening from faint trace into something closer to a visible flame, and the guard's spear came up in a defensive posture that read, even from this distance, as a man bracing for something considerably worse than what had come before.
The counter came fast enough that Li Fan's own trained eye barely tracked its full path — a horizontal sweep that didn't merely cut the air but seemed to tear something loose from it, a visible ripple spreading outward from the blade's edge that shattered two nearby trees clean through their trunks before the guard's frantic parry finally caught and redirected the worst of it. The parry cost him. Li Fan watched the spear's haft split along its length under the impact, the guard himself thrown backward hard enough to crash through a stand of saplings before rolling to a stop against the slope's rising ground.
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He didn't rise again. Li Fan watched a long moment, gauging breath and movement from this distance the same careful way he'd have gauged a patient's condition up close, and found neither — whether from death or simple unconsciousness, he couldn't say for certain at this remove, though the stillness itself told him plainly the fight, at least, had ended.
The dark-clothed fighter didn't linger to confirm the outcome either way. He straightened from his own stumbling stance, wiped the curved blade once against his scorched sleeve, and walked from the clearing at an unhurried pace that carried, even across the distance, an unmistakable air of a task completed rather than a battle barely survived.
Li Fan stayed motionless behind the outcrop long after the fighter had vanished back into the tree line, his own breath kept slow and even, cataloguing everything the encounter had shown him with the same patient thoroughness he gave any lesson worth remembering. The guard's spear technique, competent but ultimately insufficient. The dark-clothed fighter's blade, and the strange green light it carried — not fire, not any elemental signature Li Fan recognized from his own years of study, something closer to raw destructive intent given visible shape.
He noted, too, what the encounter hadn't shown him. No dragon mark, no black robes, nothing that connected this particular violence to the thread he'd been carrying since the tanner's yard. A separate danger, apparently, moving through the same mountain that held his own quiet life, unconnected as far as he could tell to anything currently hunting him specifically. That distinction offered no real comfort. A region with this much unclaimed violence moving through its forests was a region growing more dangerous by the season, regardless of whether any particular danger currently had his own name attached to it.
He gathered his frost lilies once full dark had settled and the valley below had returned to its ordinary mountain silence, working quickly and efficiently rather than lingering over the harvest the way he sometimes allowed himself to on calmer trips. He didn't approach the clearing itself. Whatever had happened there was sect business now, or would be once some patrol eventually found the fallen guard, and Li Fan had learned, across years of careful watching, precisely how little benefit came from inserting himself into violence that had nothing yet to do with him.
He walked back down the mountain path in full dark, his sword worn openly at his hip the same way it had been for weeks now, and turned the fight over once more in his mind with every step, filing the green-lit blade and the guard's shattered spear and the fighter's unhurried departure alongside everything else he was carrying now — the assassin, the ledger, the Jiang family's rotating seat, the dragon mark that still, after all these years, refused to fully leave his thoughts. Separate threads. He still couldn't say, with any real confidence, how many of them might eventually prove to be the same one wearing different faces.
He reached his own courtyard well past the hour he preferred to be home, and sat beneath the plum tree only long enough to let his breathing settle before finally going inside, the frost lilies set carefully aside for tomorrow's proper drying, the evening's violence folded into memory alongside everything else this quiet mountain kept insisting on showing him.
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