My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 136 — The Blood River Gang

The name reached Li Fan the way most things reached him in Quiet River Town — sideways, through the mouths of people who didn't know they were telling him anything important.

He was in Widow Bai's stall buying dried plums when he heard it. Two porters stood near the grain scales, voices lowered but not lowered enough, one of them rubbing at a bruise along his jaw.

"Third time this month," the man said. "Blood River wants two strings of coppers now. Used to be one."

"Tell the magistrate."

"Tell him what. That men with knives walked into my shop and I gave them what they asked for because I didn't want my skull opened. He'll write it down and nothing happens. Nothing ever happens."

Li Fan paid for the plums and left without turning his head.

Over the following days, the picture filled itself in without his needing to ask a single direct question.

The Blood River Gang controlled the villages strung along the river's southern bend, a loose collection of some thirty men led by a scarred former boatman named Gou Feng. They were cultivators, technically — Body Refining, every one of them, and by the sound of it, not one had broken past the middle stage in years. Talent that had run out. Ambition that hadn't. Men who could have spent their lives farming or hauling grain like everyone else, and had instead discovered that a hardened fist and a little qi in the blood made ordinary people afraid, and that fear was easier to live off than labor.

They demanded protection silver from merchants. They took food from farmers who couldn't spare it. Men who refused were beaten in the street, publicly, so the lesson spread faster than any rumor could carry it. Twice in the past year, someone had refused twice. Those two didn't get a third chance.

One detail surfaced only once, from a boatman too drunk to notice he'd said it — that a portion of every collection went upriver each month, carried by a runner none of the gang's own men were permitted to ask about. The boatman laughed it off a breath later, called it a debt from Gou Feng's boating days, and Li Fan let the words settle into memory without comment, the way he let everything settle there, useful or not.

Li Fan listened to all of it with the same flat attention he gave to weather reports and grain prices. He noted names. He noted patterns — which days the gang made their collection rounds, which streets they avoided, which shopkeepers paid without complaint and which ones needed reminding. He did nothing else. A single Body Refining gang, however cruel to the people around them, posed no threat to anyone he needed to protect, and a craftsman named Master Lin, poor enough to be beneath notice, was armor more effective than anything he could have carved from spirit wood. He kept working. The Dragon Elephant manual stayed open on his bench most evenings, its dense shorthand yielding, very slowly, to patient reading.

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They came for him on the eleventh day.

Three men, mid-morning, the workshop door still propped open to let the light in. Li Fan heard them before he saw them — heavy boots on the packed earth outside, unhurried, the particular rhythm of men who had never once been made to feel unwelcome anywhere they walked.

The one in front had a scar running from his ear to the corner of his mouth, pulling his expression into something between a sneer and a wound that had never quite healed straight. He looked around the workshop — the shelves of tools, the half-finished washbasin on the bench, the modest kiln in the corner — and seemed to find it unimpressive, which was exactly the impression Li Fan had built it to give.

"New in town," the scarred man said. It wasn't a question.

"Three weeks," Li Fan said, setting down his brush.

"Then you don't know how things work here yet. Everybody who does business in Quiet River Town pays for the privilege of doing it safely." The man's eyes moved over the workshop again, slower this time, pricing it. "Craftsman like you. Ten taels a month sounds fair."

Li Fan reached into the small wooden box beside his register and counted out ten taels of silver, unhurried, the coins clicking softly against each other in his palm. He held them out.

The scarred man's eyebrows rose slightly — not suspicion, just mild surprise at how easy it had been. He took the silver, weighed it once in his hand, and nodded to the other two.

"Smart," he said. "Wish more of them understood that the first time."

They left without another word, boots receding down the street the same way they'd arrived, unhurried, certain of themselves in a way that only men who had never been meaningfully opposed could afford to be.

Li Fan watched them go from the doorway, then returned to his bench and picked the brush back up.

He dipped the brush and returned to the line he'd been copying from the Dragon Elephant manual, a passage on the relationship between bone density and internal pressure, and let the workshop settle back into its usual quiet. Outside, somewhere further down the street, he could hear the gang's boots fading toward their next stop, and beneath that, fainter, the ordinary sounds of a river town going on with its afternoon exactly as it had before they'd come and exactly as it would after they left.

Later that evening, alone in the small room off the courtyard, he took out the ledger he kept for reasons that had nothing to do with silver and copper, and wrote, in his own private shorthand, three lines beneath the day's date: thirty men. Gou Feng. A runner upriver, once a month, unquestioned. He closed the ledger without adding anything further. It was, for now, only a fact worth keeping — one more small piece filed away in a memory that forgot nothing, waiting for whatever later use it might or might not ever find.

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