My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 124
Chapter 124: Three Days, Counted Down
Li Fan spent the first of his three days on the wards.
He walked the courtyard's perimeter twice, checking each node by hand rather than trusting his divine sense alone, pressing two fingers against the buried stones and feeling for the faint, steady thread of qi still circulating beneath them. The formation held. It had held through the tremor years ago, through the triple-bell search, through every lesser test since. He reinforced it anyway, feeding a measured stream of Core Condensation qi into the weakest node near the eastern wall until the stone under his palm went warm and the silver shimmer overhead brightened by a degree no ordinary eye would have caught.
The morning was cold enough that his breath showed in the air, and the plum tree's bare branches clicked faintly against each other in the wind. Somewhere down the street, a cart wheel groaned over a loose paving stone — one of the last few families still loading their belongings before the roads south grew too crowded to move through quickly.
He worked through the hidden chamber next, carrying up what mattered and leaving behind what didn't. Wei Baishan's older texts, the ones he'd already stripped for everything the sutra could use, stayed on their shelves. The notes on the dragon mark, the ledger pages on the Jiang family, Old Mu's crane and the second unfinished carving — those he wrapped in oiled cloth and packed into a chest small enough to carry on his own back without slowing him down.
The second day, he went to the shop.
He hadn't planned to open it. There was no one left on the street to buy anything, and the notice pinned to the market gate three days ago had made the sect's position plain enough that pretending at ordinary business felt almost dishonest. But he unlocked the door anyway, swept the sawdust from the floor one final time, and sat at Old Mu's old bench with a block of pale cedar he'd been saving for over a year.
He didn't carve anything ambitious. A simple bird, small enough to fit in a closed fist, its wings folded rather than spread. He worked slowly, the way Old Mu had taught him to work when a piece mattered more than the time it took, and didn't finish it until the light through the front window had gone long and orange.
When he was done, he set it beside the crane on the shelf, then took both down and wrapped them together in the same cloth. Whatever happened to the shop itself — burned, looted, left standing and empty for years — the two carvings weren't staying behind for it to happen to.
A neighbor's boy found him locking the door as evening settled, one of the few children still left on the street. He was perhaps eight, thin-shouldered, clutching a wooden practice sword nearly as tall as himself.
"Are you leaving too, Uncle Li?" the boy asked.
"Soon," Li Fan said. "Is your family still here?"
"Papa says we go tomorrow morning. He says the road's still bad but it's worse if we wait." The boy looked past him, up toward the mountain, where the faint gold shimmer of the sect's formation still traced itself against the darkening sky. "Do you think the sect will win?"
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Li Fan considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things a child asked him, rather than brushing it aside with false comfort. "I don't know what they're fighting," he said. "I don't think anyone in this city does. But the sect has stood on that mountain longer than your grandfather's grandfather was alive. That should count for something."
The boy seemed to accept this, nodded once, and ran off toward his own gate before his mother's voice, calling from somewhere down the street, could finish calling his name a second time.
The third day brought word that the eastern trade road had been closed entirely, sect guards turning back anyone still trying to leave that direction and redirecting the last stragglers south with the rest. Li Fan heard it from the old woman who sold pickled vegetables three doors down, one of the handful of residents who seemed to have no intention of leaving at all regardless of what the notices said.
"I buried my husband in the hill behind this street forty years ago," she told him, not looking up from the jars she was sealing with wax. "I'm not walking away from him now because some sect elders can't settle their business quietly." She glanced up, taking in the pack across his shoulders, the chest strapped beneath it. "You're going, though."
"I am."
"Good. You're young enough that staying would be foolish rather than stubborn." She went back to her jars. "Go quickly, carver. Whatever's cracked up on that mountain, I don't think it cares much for anyone's reasons for lingering."
He left her with more coin than the last of his medicine supplies were worth, which she didn't argue over, and spent the remainder of the morning walking the city one final time — not searching for anything in particular, only fixing the shape of the streets in his memory the way he'd once fixed the shape of Wei Baishan's cave, or the road out of Stonebridge, or every other place he'd left behind without knowing, at the time, that he was leaving it for good.
The market square stood almost entirely empty by midday. A handful of stalls remained shuttered rather than abandoned, their owners perhaps still telling themselves they'd return once the trouble passed. The tanner's yard where he'd fought his first assassin was silent, the alley behind it swept clean of anything that might have marked what had happened there. The records office had gone dark days ago, its sweeper reassigned or simply gone, the shelves he'd once combed through for scraps of information now locked behind a door no one had bothered to guard.
He returned to his courtyard as the sun dropped toward the western ridgeline, and found the sky over the Ancestor's Peak had changed again.
The golden lattice of the protective formation still traced itself faintly against the clouds, steady and unbroken. But behind it, higher up, the bruised, unnatural color he'd first glimpsed the morning of the bell had spread further than before, no longer confined to the peak's immediate crown but bleeding outward across a wider stretch of horizon, thick and slow-moving in a way no ordinary storm front ever moved.
Li Fan stood beneath the bare plum tree with his packed chest at his feet and watched it for a long while, feeling the same pressure against his own senses that he'd felt the day the wards first woke — heavier now, and closer, though nothing yet had crossed whatever boundary the sect's formation still held.
A low sound reached him from somewhere far to the north, carried faint and strange on the evening wind. Not thunder. Not a bell. Something with a rhythm to it, a distant, rolling cadence that didn't match anything the mountain had produced across the ten quiet years he'd spent beneath it.
He thought of the boy's question from the evening before — whether the sect would win — and found he still had no honest answer to give. What he had instead was a packed chest, a courtyard he'd spent a decade turning into something worth calling home, and three days that had run out sometime in the last hour without his quite noticing the exact moment it happened.
Li Fan picked up the chest, settled it against his shoulder, and took one last look at the plum tree before he latched the courtyard gate behind him for what he suspected, without yet being certain, was the final time.
The road south was still open. He meant to use what remained of it before that changed too.
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