My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 133

Chapter 133: The Bench by the Window

Two nights after he settled into the courtyard, Li Fan sat down at the low table by his bed and finally went through everything he'd carried out of Myriad Craft City's ruin.

He'd delayed it deliberately. There had been the gate hinge to fix, the roof to patch, the courtyard's damp corners to air out before the season's first hard rain — practical work that occupied his hands and asked nothing difficult of the rest of him. But a man who didn't know what he actually owned couldn't plan properly for what came next, and Li Fan had never been comfortable moving forward on an incomplete accounting of anything, least of all his own resources.

He laid the pouches out on the table in the order he'd taken them — the three from the bamboo clearing, the single grey one from the creek bed, the three from Crow's Throat — and opened each in turn, sorting the contents into careful piles by the lamp's low light.

Most of it was exactly what he'd expected. Spare clothing, worn traveling boots, dried rations gone stale, a few personal letters he set aside unread, small tools and mundane odds and ends that told him more about the lives these people had lived than about anything worth his attention now. A cracked whetstone. A half-used inkstone. A woman's hair pin, plain silver, tucked into the old flute-player's pouch alongside dried herbs and a spare bowstring she'd apparently never gotten the chance to use.

The spirit stones took longer to count than everything else combined.

He worked through them methodically, drawing on the perfect memory his Qi Sea breakthrough had left him, sorting each stone by grade and tallying the running total without needing to write anything down. Low-grade stones made up the bulk of it, and when the last pouch was empty and the last stone counted, the total came to just over ten million: six million of low grade, four million of middle grade, and not a single stone of high grade among any of it.

High-grade spirit stones were rare even among established cultivators, valuable enough that the Seven Great Sects guarded their known sources as closely as any inheritance or secret technique. It did not surprise him, turning the thought over, that men fighting a war on behalf of an invading sect would have carried reserves of ordinary wealth rather than treasures worth killing over twice — once by the enemy, and once by their own allies.

Ten million spirit stones was not a sum a mortal woodworker could ever explain owning, nor one many established cultivators could explain without a title or sect banner standing behind the claim. Li Fan understood immediately that the wealth sitting in front of him on a borrowed table was, in its own way, as dangerous as anything that had chased him down the southern road — not because anyone could take it by force, but because the mere fact of it, discovered by the wrong eyes, would undo every careful year he'd spent building the appearance of an unremarkable man.

He divided the stones between two of his own storage pouches, keeping only a modest working sum loose in his robe for ordinary transactions, and resolved to spend the rest exactly the way he'd always spent everything else this world had handed him — slowly, quietly, and only when the need was real enough to justify the risk of drawing on it at all.

The workshop took shape slowly, the way everything in Li Fan's life had always taken shape when he had the luxury of doing it properly rather than under pressure.

He spent the first week simply repairing the courtyard itself — resetting the loose gate hinge, patching the last gaps in the roof before the autumn rains turned heavier, clearing a decade's worth of another family's neglect from the single room that would serve as both workshop and home. The work was mindless in the best possible way, muscle and joint doing what they already knew how to do while the rest of him settled into the unfamiliar quiet of a town that expected nothing from him yet.

He built his workbench with his own hands rather than buying one secondhand from the carpenter three streets over, positioning it beneath the room's single window so the morning light would fall directly across whatever he was working on. It was smaller than the bench Old Mu had once sat him down at in Myriad Craft City, rougher in its joinery than anything he would have let leave that old shop's door, but it held steady under his palm when he tested it, and that was the only thing that mattered for a bench nobody but him would ever judge.

His first customer came on the ninth day, before he'd even hung a proper sign.

By then the workshop had settled into something Li Fan found himself genuinely fond of — raw pine and cedar shavings underfoot, the faint sourness of wood glue kept warming in a small clay pot near the window. Sunlight fell across the bench each morning in a long, slanting bar that crept steadily westward as the day wore on, and he'd taken to timing his finer work by its progress rather than any clock, the way Old Mu once had.

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She was perhaps sixty, small and stooped, carrying a wooden ladle whose handle had split clean through near the bowl. Her hands were spotted with age but steady, the calluses on her palms speaking of decades spent working a kitchen fire and a washboard both, and she wore her grey hair pinned back with a plain bone comb that had clearly been mended itself at least once.

"They told me a new woodworker had taken the Chen courtyard," she said, holding the broken ladle out without preamble. "Widow Bai two lanes over. Can you fix this, or do I need to walk all the way to the carpenter's for something so small?"

Li Fan turned the ladle over in his hands, testing the grain, noting the clean break rather than a splintered one. "I can fix it," he said. "Two coppers, and it will be stronger at the break than it was before you split it."

She studied him for a moment with the particular, unhurried scrutiny of someone who had outlived several husbands and trusted her own judgment of a stranger's face more than any recommendation. Whatever she found apparently satisfied her, because she nodded once, sharply, and told him she'd return for it that evening.

He fixed it within the hour, using nothing more than a plain wood glue and a careful reinforcing pin no larger than a fingernail, the kind of repair that required no more than his ordinary craftsman's hands and none of the sutra's deeper understanding at all. When the widow returned, she tested the join with a firm twist, grunted something that might have been approval, and paid him three coppers instead of two.

"For being honest about the price instead of doubling it for a stranger," she said, already turning to leave. "There's a difference between new to town and foolish. You're the first, not the second. That'll serve you well enough here, if you keep at it."

Word traveled through Quiet River Town the way it traveled through every small settlement Li Fan had ever lived in — not quickly, but thoroughly, each conversation carrying his name a little further than the last. Within two weeks, a steady trickle of small repairs found their way to his door: a cracked stool leg, a warped door panel, a farmer's plow handle worn smooth in the wrong places and needing new grip carved into it. None of it paid well. All of it paid honestly, and honest coin from people who genuinely needed the work done was worth considerably more to him than the alternative he'd left behind.

His days settled into a shape he hadn't realized he'd missed until he was living it again. Mornings began with the smell of his own small cookfire, rice water and whatever vegetables the market had offered cheap the day before, eaten standing at the workbench while he planned the day's repairs against the light already climbing the far wall. Afternoons filled with the steady rasp of plane against wood, the particular sweet smell of fresh sawdust curling up from beneath his blade, interrupted every so often by a customer's knock or a neighbor's greeting called across the lane.

He learned the town's rhythm the same patient way he'd learned every town's rhythm before it. The blacksmith, a broad-shouldered man named Old Feng with a scar running the length of one forearm from some long-ago accident with molten iron, opened his forge before dawn and closed it precisely when the light failed, no earlier and no later regardless of how much work remained undone. The two old men who played chess outside the teahouse had, according to Widow Bai, been playing the same running game against each other for eleven years, keeping a tally of wins scratched into a board neither of them would let the other erase.

He kept his own habits deliberately unremarkable. He circulated his qi only at night, behind a shuttered window, the practice folded so far beneath ordinary breathing that even a careful listener pressed against his wall would have heard nothing but a craftsman's tired sleep. He ate at the noodle stall twice a week rather than every day, varied his route to the market rather than walking the same lane each morning, and answered questions about his past with the same simple, unembellished story he'd given the widow who sold him the courtyard — bandits, a scattered family, a decade spent working wherever a woodworker's hands were welcome.

No one pressed him further. Quiet River Town, he came to understand within the first month, was full of people who had similarly simple, similarly unexamined stories about how they'd arrived here, and asking too many questions of a new neighbor was, by unspoken local custom, considered rather worse manners than declining to answer them.

On a cool evening near the end of his first month, sitting at his workbench with a lantern burning low and a half-finished chair leg turning slowly beneath his knife, Li Fan allowed himself, for the first time since Crow's Throat, to simply work without watching the door.

The knife moved through the wood in long, even strokes, each one shaving away exactly as much as he intended and no more, the discipline of it as familiar to his hands now as breathing. Outside, the town had gone quiet in the particular, contented way small towns went quiet after dark — a dog's bark answered and settled, the last cart wheel creaking home, the river itself murmuring low and constant beneath everything else, patient the way rivers were always patient, indifferent to how far anyone standing on its banks had traveled to reach it.

He thought, working, of Old Mu's bench and the crane that had come from it, of Old Sun's silver needles still wrapped carefully among his things, of every teacher and every quiet trade he'd learned across a decade that had ended in fire and had somehow, despite everything, delivered him here — to a smaller bench, in a smaller town, with a chair leg in his hands and nothing chasing him through the dark tonight.

It would not last forever. He understood that plainly, the same way he understood every quiet stretch of his life eventually gave way to something demanding his full attention again. But for tonight, the wood was honest under his hands, the lantern burned steady, and the road south had finally, for the moment, allowed him to simply sit still.

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