My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 113: What Four Bodies Bought Him
Old Mu didn't sleep that night either, once he'd seen the state Li Fan came home in. He said little while cleaning and stitching the wounds himself, hands steadier than they'd been in months, some old, buried competence surfacing under the plain necessity of the work. Only once it was finished did he speak.
"You're done hiding this from the sect," he said. "Four bodies in a street is not a thing that stays quiet, whatever you intend. Better they hear it from you, on your own terms, than from a watch patrol's report shaped by whoever the Jiang family gets to first."
Li Fan agreed, and went the following morning, before exhaustion could talk him out of it, carrying the recovered blades and the scarred woman's dropped weapon as evidence rather than trusting his account alone to carry weight. He gave his report to a sect investigator plainly — the assassin months back, the ledger's referral, the ambush, all of it laid out with the same careful precision he gave a difficult diagnosis, holding back only the fifth-terrace mystery, which had no place yet in an official complaint against a rival family.
The investigator, a stern woman of middling rank, listened without visible reaction until the account finished, then studied the recovered weapons a long moment. "You're a mortal," she said finally, "who survived five trained cultivators and killed or disabled four of them. That alone will draw more attention than the complaint itself."
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"I'm aware," Li Fan said.
The sect's response came within the week, faster than Li Fan had expected and considerably more careful than he'd hoped. No formal charge against the Jiang family — insufficient proof, the investigator explained, that the attackers had acted on official family orders rather than some rogue faction within it — but a summons for the Jiang steward to answer questions, and a quiet, unofficial word passed to Li Fan through the same investigator: the sect would be watching the family's conduct toward him closely going forward, whatever the formal record showed.
It wasn't justice. It was, Li Fan understood, turning the outcome over with Old Mu that evening, the most he could reasonably have expected from a sect that had no strong reason to burn a resource-generating family over a mortal craftsman's grievance, however sympathetic. But it changed the calculus meaningfully regardless. The Jiang family knew now that the sect itself had eyes on this. Whatever they wanted from him, they would need to want it more carefully from here forward.
His wounds healed over the following weeks with the steady efficiency his cultivation had always granted him, faster than any ordinary mortal's flesh would have managed, though the memory of the fight itself lingered considerably longer than the physical marks did. He found himself, in the training room's quiet hours, running the scarred woman's fourth strike over and over in his mind, the tell in her weight that had ultimately decided the fight, and understood, with a clarity that settled somewhere deep and permanent, that he had been one misread signal away from losing everything that night.
He sat with that understanding rather than flinching from it, and let it shape the resolve that followed. Peak Qi Sea had carried him this far. It would not, he suspected, carry him through whatever came next.
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