My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 111: Five Shapes on the Road Home
Two months of careful, patient digging told Li Fan more than he'd learned in the entire year before it. The Jiang family, he confirmed through a chain of small, deniable inquiries — a genealogist paid in medicine rather than coin, a retired steward who remembered old grudges more clearly than recent gossip — had held the reception hall's rotating liaison seat for eleven years running, an unusually long tenure for a position meant to change hands every few seasons. Longer still, the family's second son had vanished from public record six years back, no death notice, no formal explanation, simply gone from every guest list and family accounting Li Fan could find traces of.
A missing son. A liaison seat held far past its normal term. A ledger entry demanding referral on a decade-old mortal delivery. None of it, laid end to end, formed a certain picture. But it formed enough of one that Li Fan stopped treating the Jiang family as a passive administrative curiosity and started treating them as the center of whatever this actually was.
He felt the change in the air three streets from his own gate, the same prickling wrongness that had warned him once before in the alley behind the tanner's yard, except sharper now, more numerous, five distinct points of pressure closing from different angles rather than one patient watcher dropping from a rooftop.
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He didn't run. Running would have told them plainly he'd sensed them, and cost him whatever small advantage his own calm still bought him. He kept his pace steady, his sword hand loose at his side, and let his senses spread wide across the darkened street while his mind worked through the geometry of five converging points with the same cold clarity he brought to any dangerous unknown.
They revealed themselves together, dropping from rooftops and stepping from shadowed doorways in the same coordinated instant, five figures in plain grey traveling cloth rather than any uniform Li Fan recognized, blades already drawn, forming a loose ring that closed the street's width entirely on both ends.
"Li Fan," the nearest one said, a woman with a thin scar along her jaw and a stance that spoke of real training rather than hired brutality. "The Jiang family requests your cooperation. Come quietly, and no harm comes to the old man you spend your evenings with."
Li Fan felt something go very still and very cold in his chest at the mention of Old Mu, a stillness that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the particular clarity that came, for him, precisely when fear should have taken hold instead.
"You'll find," he said, drawing his blade with no wasted motion at all, "that threatening him was the worst mistake anyone's made against me since I arrived in this city."
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