My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 118: What a Core Actually Buys
He reopened the shop that winter, working alone in a silence he'd stopped fighting against and started simply carrying, the second bench left bare rather than filled with any new apprentice's tools. Word of his absence had already settled into the market's ordinary gossip by the time customers returned — a craftsman's private grief, most assumed, needing no further explanation than that, and Li Fan let the assumption stand rather than correct it.
The Jiang family had gone quiet in the months since the ambush, the sect's watchful word apparently enough, for now, to keep them from trying again openly. Li Fan didn't mistake the quiet for resolution. He simply folded it into the same patient accounting he kept for everything else unresolved, and turned his attention instead to understanding exactly what three months in that chamber had actually bought him.
Divine sense arrived first, unannounced, on a night he'd meant only to meditate. He felt his awareness stretch beyond his own skin without deliberately reaching for it, a faint, diffuse perception spreading outward across the courtyard's walls and settling, briefly, on the shape of Old Mu's shop three streets distant before he consciously understood what he was even sensing. He pulled the awareness back sharply, unsettled by its reach, and spent the following nights learning to extend and withdraw it with proper control rather than letting it wander uninvited into corners of the city he had no business touching.
It came with real limits. A few hundred paces at full extension, thinning fast past that distance into something too faint to trust, and even at its clearest it read presence and rough intention rather than any deeper thought. Still, it was a sense no Qi Sea cultivator possessed, and Li Fan practiced with it carefully, using it to check the courtyard's perimeter before sleep, to confirm an approaching customer's harmless intent before opening the shop's door, small practical uses rather than anything grander.
Flight took longer, and cost him considerably more dignity in the learning. His first attempts, alone in the training room's lowest chamber where no one could witness the failures, produced nothing more than an unsteady half-second of lightness before gravity reasserted itself with an ungraceful thud. He worked at it methodically anyway, the same patient repetition he'd once given a difficult sword stance, until the qi beneath his feet finally learned to hold rather than merely flicker, and he found himself hovering a full body's height above the chamber floor, trembling with the effort but genuinely airborne.
Stolen from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
He didn't take to flying openly through the city. A mortal craftsman who suddenly floated above the rooftops would draw exactly the kind of attention he'd spent a decade avoiding, and he kept the practice strictly to his own sealed chamber, building the skill in private the same way he'd built everything else that mattered.
His elemental control sharpened alongside these newer abilities, the fire technique he'd carried since Qi Sea now answering with considerably less waste, a flame that held its shape without the faint flicker that had always betrayed effort before. His formation work deepened too, the concealment array beneath the training room finally holding steady against a full measure of his new core's qi without so much as a tremor in its silver shimmer, exactly the harder target he'd built it to become.
He tested his sword against the training room's practice post one evening, and found Origin Intent waiting in his grip before he'd consciously reached for anything new at all — his understanding of the blade no longer separate from his perception, the post's grain revealing its own structural weakness to his eye the instant his sword drew close, the same principle Origin Severance had always followed, sharpened now into something closer to instinct than technique.
He sat beneath the bare plum tree once the winter's first proper snow had settled, testing the whole accumulated shape of what these months had built, and found himself, for the first time since Old Mu's death, genuinely absorbed in something other than grief. The work itself hadn't stopped mattering. It had simply widened, quietly, to hold both the loss and the patient, ordinary labor of understanding what came next.
The Jiang family's silence wouldn't last forever. The fifth terrace's mystery still sat unresolved behind its warded gate. The dragon mark still waited somewhere beyond his understanding, patient as it had always been. But Li Fan faced all of it now from a foundation considerably deeper than the one that had nearly failed him in that street, and he intended, this time, to make certain the depth was tested on his own terms rather than someone else's.
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