My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 106: What the Old Beggar Once Said
Li Fan told him the next morning, before the shop had opened, the two of them sitting across the back room's small table with a pot of tea going cold between them while Li Fan laid out everything he'd been carrying since the tanner's yard.
He didn't tell all of it. Some threads still felt too thin, too speculative, to hand an old man with a failing heart — the exact wording of a dying cultivator's final request, the precise shape of Wei Baishan's betrayal years before Old Mu had ever known him. But he told the parts that mattered to tonight's danger plainly: the pouch, the false rumor, the soft-handed stranger's pointed questions, the assassin in the alley and the poison meant to finish what the blade hadn't, the ledger's three keepers and the Jiang family's rotating seat over it.
Old Mu listened without interrupting, his weathered hands wrapped around his own cooling cup, and when Li Fan finally finished, he sat quiet a long moment before speaking.
"You've been carrying considerably more than a carving apprentice's ordinary troubles," he said finally, dry despite the weight of what he'd just heard. "I'd wondered, some nights, why a man so careful about everything else in his life kept his sword worn open like a stranger passing through hostile country. Now I suppose I understand."
"I'm sorry it took a boy's broken fingers to earn you the explanation."
"So am I. Though I'll not waste more breath scolding you for it — you've plainly scolded yourself thoroughly enough already." Old Mu set his cup down, and studied Li Fan with an unusually sharp attention. "This dragon mark you keep circling back to. The black robes, the masks. You've mentioned it three times now without ever quite saying why it unsettles you more than the rest."
Li Fan hesitated, then gave him the smallest true piece of it, careful still to keep the fuller history behind glass. "I've seen it before. Years ago, before I ever reached this city. It's connected to something old, something I've never been able to name properly, and every time it resurfaces I find myself no closer to understanding what it actually wants."
Old Mu's expression shifted at that, something considering settling behind his tired eyes. "Dragon mark," he repeated slowly. "Black robes, masks that show nothing but the eyes." He was quiet a moment longer, turning something over privately before he finally spoke again. "There was a beggar, when I was young enough still to be learning this trade properly under my own master. Sat beneath the old banyan near the western well, same as any city keeps one or two of. Harmless-seeming sort, though I've had cause since to wonder how much of that was performance."
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
"Old Mo," Li Fan said quietly, recognition settling cold and immediate.
"You know him."
"I know of him. Not from this city." Li Fan kept the rest carefully vague, unwilling yet to unravel the whole of Stonebridge's history into this conversation. "A man of the same description sat beneath a similar tree in a town I once passed through, far from here. Hidden strength behind a beggar's face. I never learned if it was the same man, or simply the same old habit repeated by different men across different cities."
"Might be either," Old Mu said. "Might be both, for all either of us could prove tonight. But I remember, plainly, an evening my own master sent me to bring the old beggar a bowl of soup — some debt or kindness between them I never fully understood — and I overheard, young and foolish enough to be listening at all, a fragment of something the old man muttered to himself while he ate. Something about dragons wearing men's faces, and a debt owed higher up the mountain than any mortal city could see."
"Higher up the mountain."
"That's what he said. I was perhaps twelve years old, and thought nothing of it beyond an old beggar's rambling. Forgot it entirely for the better part of four decades, if I'm honest, until you sat across this table just now and put a name to the same mark that muttering apparently meant." Old Mu shook his head slowly, something almost rueful in the motion. "Strange, the things a mind keeps buried until the right question finally digs them back up."
Li Fan sat with the phrase a long moment, turning it carefully against everything else he already carried. Higher up the mountain. The sect itself sat higher up this particular mountain than anything else in the region, its grounds rising above the city in terraced stages toward peaks Li Fan had never once been permitted to properly explore. A debt owed to something above the sect's own reach, or a debt the sect itself owed to something beyond ordinary mortal sight — either reading fit uneasily against the accumulated shape of ledgers and rotating family seats and Sage-realm legends the city's own oldest residents still treated as half-myth.
"Did he say anything more," Li Fan asked. "That night, or any other."
"Not that I ever heard. He died not long after — peacefully, in his sleep, the way the old sometimes are lucky enough to go — and whatever he actually knew went into the ground with him, same as most things an old man carries eventually do." Old Mu's gaze sharpened again, fixing on Li Fan with unusual directness. "You're thinking this connects to your dragon mark somehow."
"I don't know yet. I've learned not to force a shape onto pieces before they've finished revealing themselves." Li Fan turned his own cold tea slowly between his hands, the old habit of careful patience warring, this morning, against something sharper and more urgent than patience usually allowed him to feel. "But it's the first time anyone's ever handed me a piece of this that didn't come from my own digging. I'd be foolish to set it aside simply because it arrived easily."
Old Mu nodded slowly, and reached across the small table to refill both their cups from the cooling pot, an ordinary gesture that carried, this particular morning, considerably more weight than the tea itself warranted. "Then dig where it leads you," he said. "Carefully, same as always. But dig. I'll not have you sitting on a decade of silence a second time, boy, not when I've finally been let in far enough to actually help carry it."
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