My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 114: The Chair Nearest the Window
Old Mu's spells came closer together that autumn than they had at any point since the very first, the tonic's careful balance no longer buying the same wide margins it once had. Li Fan adjusted the formula twice more, watched each adjustment hold for a shorter stretch than the one before it, and understood, with the plain clarity he brought to any difficult prognosis, that he was no longer managing a slow decline. He was accompanying the last stage of one.
He said none of that aloud. Old Mu would have heard it anyway, in the new frequency of Li Fan's visits, the way he no longer waited for a summons before crossing the city each evening.
"You've stopped pretending you're only stopping by," Old Mu said one evening, watching Li Fan settle into the chair he'd taken to keeping by the cot rather than his usual bench.
"I have," Li Fan agreed, and didn't dress it in anything softer.
Old Mu accepted that the same unhurried way he'd accepted most hard truths across their years together, and turned his attention instead to the small, unfinished carving resting on the blanket beside him — a second bird, smaller than the crane, its shape not yet clear enough to name. "Started this the week after you told me about the fifth wall you'd found up the mountain," he said. "Might not finish it now. Wanted you to know it exists, regardless. Whatever it was meant to become."
He went in his sleep three nights later, quietly, without any struggle Li Fan could find evidence of when he arrived at first light and found the old man's breathing simply, finally, absent. No grand failing. No final words exchanged in some dramatic parting scene. Only an old heart that had carried a long life for as far as it could carry it, stopping the same unremarkable way most old hearts eventually stopped.
Li Fan sat with him a long while before he did anything else at all.
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Few people came to the small service the following week — a handful of longtime customers, the lumber merchant and his healing apprentice, the records-office sweeper leaning hard on a borrowed cane. The city itself continued around the gathering exactly as Old Mu had always said it would, merchants calling their prices, carts rattling past the shop's shuttered front, no pause anywhere in its ordinary rhythm to mark that anything at all had changed.
Li Fan felt the absence of that pause more sharply than he expected to. He'd watched this city forget a hundred smaller losses without ceremony across his years here, and had accepted, each time, that forgetting was simply what a place this size did to survive its own scale. He hadn't understood, until this particular loss was his own to carry, how much that same indifference could cost the person left standing inside it.
He kept the shop closed for a month afterward, unable yet to bring himself to open it, then reopened it slowly, working alone in a space that had never once, in all his years there, been entirely silent while he worked. The second bench sat empty now in a different way than it had sat empty during Old Mu's two seasons of hesitation over the crane. This emptiness had no piece waiting to eventually fill it.
He found the small unfinished bird a week later, tucked carefully into a drawer beneath Old Mu's own workbench, wrapped in cloth the way a man wraps something he means to return to. Li Fan didn't finish it. He set it instead on the shelf beside the resting crane, unfinished exactly as Old Mu had left it, understanding that some things honored a person more completely by staying incomplete than by being resolved on someone else's terms.
He sat beneath the plum tree that night, its leaves gone fully gold now, a handful already loose across the pond's still surface, and let the Primordial Breath settle into a rhythm that felt, for the first time in a decade, genuinely difficult to find. He thought of every home he'd built and lost since a spatial rift had first pulled him from one world into this one, and understood, plainly, that this loss carried a weight none of the others quite had, precisely because this one had never asked to be temporary.
He didn't let the grief harden into anything sharper than what it honestly was. But he sat with it a long while, and let it settle into the same place every other hard truth in his life had eventually settled, carried rather than resolved, and understood, somewhere beneath the grief itself, that whatever came next in this world, he would be walking toward it alone in a way he hadn't been for a very long time.
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