My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 135 — Master Lin

The cart wheels stopped turning an hour before dusk, and Li Fan stood alone at the edge of Quiet River Town holding the reins of a horse he had bought two villages back. The air smelled of river mud and woodsmoke. Somewhere behind the rooftops a temple bell rang twice, unhurried, the sound rolling flat over low tiled roofs before fading into the sound of water.

He had walked nine days to get here. He had flown none of them.

The town sat where two rivers met, wide and shallow, the kind of place built for ferrying grain rather than fighting wars. Wooden docks lined the near bank, gray with age, ropes coiled beside them. A handful of barges sat low in the water, waiting for morning. Lanterns were being lit one by one along the main street, small orange points pushing back the coming dark, and under them Li Fan could hear the ordinary sounds of an ordinary evening — a woman calling a child in for supper, the clatter of a shop closing its shutters, a dog barking twice and then losing interest.

No shout of an inbound patrol. No formation hum beneath his feet. No pressure against his skin from robes or auras or old grudges finally caught up to him.

He led the horse forward.

By the following afternoon he had rented a courtyard on the town's northern edge, three rooms and a walled yard with a persimmon tree growing crooked near the well. The previous tenant had been a coppersmith who'd died without children; the landlord, a heavyset man with ink-stained fingers, seemed relieved to have the property occupied again and asked no questions Li Fan wasn't prepared to answer. Li Fan gave his name as Lin. No surname beyond it. The man wrote it down without comment and left. He spent the rest of that day alone in the courtyard, doing nothing that would have looked like cultivation to anyone watching over the wall. He swept the packed earth. He pulled weeds from around the well. He carried water. Ordinary work, done at an ordinary pace, while beneath it his senses moved outward through the town in slow, careful passes.

It took him four days to be certain.

He walked the town in the mornings, buying vegetables he didn't need and asking the kind of questions a new resident might ask — where to find good timber, whether the well water ran clean through the dry season, which road led toward the provincial seat. He listened more than he spoke. He let the shopkeepers do the talking, and they did, freely, the way people talk when nothing about a stranger seems worth guarding against.

What he learned settled into place like stones fitting a wall.

The spiritual energy here was thin — thinner than anywhere he'd lived since leaving the mountains behind Wei Baishan's cave. He could feel it moving through the air in slow, sluggish currents, barely enough to stir a Body Refining cultivator's meridians, let alone sustain a sect. There was no cultivator presence to speak of. No family compound flying a martial banner. No inn that quietly served a second class of guest through a back door. The town's watchmen carried real iron, not talismans, and the strongest fighter among them was, by every account Li Fan gathered, a retired soldier who'd lost two fingers in a border skirmish decades ago and now mostly broke up drunken brawls.

No trade routes ran toward Myriad Craft City from here. No merchant caravan he questioned had ever heard of the Seven Great Sects by name, only vague stories of "the mountain sects," spoken the way mortals everywhere spoke of things too large and too far away to matter to their own lives.

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Quiet River Town did not know the war had happened. It did not know a war was even possible.

Li Fan sat on the low wall of his new courtyard that evening, a cup of unremarkable tea cooling in his hand, and allowed himself something close to satisfaction. Not relief — relief implied fear finally easing, and he had trained himself long ago not to carry fear where it could be read on his face. This was quieter than that. A verification. A door checked and found locked, the way he checked every door before he slept.

This was exactly what he needed.

The materials from Crow's Throat took him the better part of a week to properly sort.

He worked at night, in the innermost room of the courtyard house, windows sealed with cloth and a single oil lamp burning low enough that no light showed through the gaps. Spread across the wooden floor in neat, deliberate rows: two jade slips still faintly warm with residual spiritual signature, a dismantled section of the gravity-array giant's ruined shield, seven spirit stones of middling grade, a pouch of unidentified crystalline shards that hummed faintly against his palm, and the three manuals he had taken off the bodies before burning them to ash in the gorge.

He'd read all three once already, in the days immediately after the ambush, in the flat, functional way a man reads before he understands what he's holding. Now he read them again, slower, a brush and a blank ledger beside him, copying down what mattered and discarding nothing.

The Dragon Elephant Body Strengthening Method. Dense, technical, written in the clipped shorthand of a sect that expected its disciples to already understand half of what it referenced.

The Heavenly Lightning Art. Fewer pages, but denser still, full of diagrams depicting the human body as a lattice of channels he didn't recognize from any medical text he'd studied.

The Heavenly Sound Art. The thinnest of the three, almost sparse, more philosophy than instruction — pages describing principle rather than method, as if whoever had first written it down had understood something the later copies never managed to preserve.

He did not touch the storage ring he'd taken. He did not open the small sealed box that had come off the lightning-rapier youth's belt, its latch marked with a ward he didn't recognize. Both went into a hollow beneath a loose floor tile, alongside the bulk of the ten million spirit stones he was carrying and had no intention of spending carelessly in a mortal town. Ten million spirit stones in a place like this wasn't wealth. It was a corpse waiting to be found.

He would spend in coppers and silver, like Master Lin the traveling craftsman was supposed to.

The workshop took shape over the following two weeks, built with his own hands from lumber bought at the town's timber yard — nothing spiritual about the wood, nothing that would draw a second glance from anyone who wandered past the open gate. A workbench along the south wall, catching the morning light. Shelves for his tools, most of them the same carving implements he'd carried since Old Mu's shop, their handles worn smooth by years of the same grip. A small kiln in the corner for glasswork and simple metal repair, the kind any competent craftsman in a river town might reasonably own. He hung no sign advertising anything grander than what it was: repairs, carving, small commissions. Master Lin, newly arrived, keeping to himself. On the ninth day, an old woman brought him a cracked wooden washbasin to mend, and he fixed it while she waited, using nothing but his hands and a plane and forty years of muscle memory that had never actually belonged to this body — only to the sutra's understanding of what his hands now knew how to do. She paid him three coppers and left satisfied. It was, Li Fan thought, watching her go, an unremarkable transaction between an unremarkable craftsman and an unremarkable customer, in an unremarkable town that did not know his name, his realm, or the mountain he had walked away from with a burning trench at his back. He set the coppers in a small wooden box beside the register book he'd started that morning, and picked up the Heavenly Sound Art again, turning to the first page. Somewhere outside, the temple bell rang once for the evening hour, and the sound rolled out over the rooftops and the two slow rivers, and nothing in the town so much as paused to notice it.

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