My dao to eternity

Mu Qinghe's ribs had healed enough, three weeks after the beating, that he walked without the careful, guarded stiffness he'd carried through the first days of recovery. The swelling around his eye had faded to a yellowing shadow, barely visible unless a man knew to look for it. He still favored his left side slightly when he moved, a habit Li Fan suspected would linger longer than the injury itself had any right to.

Li Fan was midway through a formation commission for the guild, spirit-stone dust still clinging to his sleeves, when Mu Qinghe and Luo Yulan appeared together at his gate — an unusual enough occurrence, the two of them arriving jointly rather than one calling over the shared wall, that he set his work aside immediately and invited them in.

They explained it plainly, sitting across from him in the modest shade of the workshop's awning. An Azure Cloud Sect disciple, Late Core Shattering by their own account, had come through the district recruiting experienced hunters for an expedition into the deeper reaches of the valley — the sect's own disciples numerous but unfamiliar with terrain that local hunters had spent years learning to read. The pay offered was substantial, more than either of them would earn from a full season working independently, and independent work had grown considerably harder to come by since the sects' own hunting parties had begun claiming ground that used to belong, by long custom if nothing formal, to families like theirs. "We don't love it," Mu Qinghe admitted, the words carrying a rawness Li Fan recognized easily enough — a proud man forced to accept help from the very kind of people who'd put him in his sickbed weeks earlier. "But the ground we used to work is gone. This pays enough to make up for a season we'd otherwise lose entirely." "How long," Li Fan asked. "Could be a month. Could be longer, if the expedition finds what it's looking for." Luo Yulan's voice carried the same careful neutrality Li Fan had come to recognize as her way of managing worry rather than denying it. "We wanted to ask — while we're gone, would you look in on Mu Wan? She's old enough to manage on her own for stretches, but not for a month, not with the ward's activation only meant for emergencies."

Li Fan agreed without hesitation. It cost him little, and the asking itself told him something about how far their trust in him had actually traveled over two quiet years — far enough that a hunting family preparing to leave their only child alone in a city full of arrogant, unaccountable strangers had chosen to lean on the strange formation master next door rather than anyone else.

They were set to leave three days later, and on the morning of their departure, Li Fan met them at the shared boundary between their two courtyards with a modest cloth bundle in each hand. He passed the first bundle to Mu Qinghe, the second to Luo Yulan, and watched their expressions shift from polite confusion to genuine surprise as they opened them and found the contents laid out inside — formation plates, a dozen between the two bundles, etched with defensive, offensive, concealment, and escape arrays. Twenty talismans apiece beyond that, sorted into neat stacks: defensive charms, escape talismans keyed to burst into a short, disorienting speed at the moment of activation, fire-attribute offensive talismans capable of real damage against anything below Core Condensation, and a handful of others meant for emergencies neither of them had likely considered before this morning.

"This is—" Mu Qinghe turned one of the concealment plates over in his hand, studying the density of its etched lines with the particular appreciation of a man who understood, even without formal training, that he was holding something considerably better than the market's usual offerings. "This is too much, Master Lin. We can't repay work of this quality." "I'm not asking to be repaid," Li Fan said. "I made these while studying formations. I had no immediate use for them, and they'll do more good in your hands than sitting in my own storage."

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It was, strictly speaking, a lie of proportion rather than substance — he had indeed made them while studying formations, though considerably more deliberately, and with considerably more care, than the casual explanation suggested. The concealment plates alone were good enough to mask two Peak Qi Sea cultivators from attention that would otherwise register them clearly to anyone several minor stages above their own realm, work that no honestly registered mid-grade formation master should have been capable of producing. Neither Mu Qinghe nor Luo Yulan possessed the training to recognize that discrepancy for what it was. They simply accepted the gift with the particular gratitude of people who understood they were receiving more than they could properly evaluate, let alone repay, and packed the plates and talismans carefully among their own gear.

Li Fan watched them finish their preparations, Blacktooth pacing restlessly near the gate, already sensing the departure before either of his owners had said a word about it aloud. Mu Wan stood a short distance away, quiet in a way that didn't suit her usual bluntness, watching her parents check their packs one final time. "Be careful," Li Fan said, when the moment finally arrived and there was nothing left to check or pack. "Make sure you return."

Mu Qinghe met his eyes and nodded, something steadier settling into his expression than the raw discomfort he'd carried into the conversation three days earlier. "We will." They left through the gate together, the dog trotting ahead of them, and Li Fan stood a moment longer watching the empty lane before returning to his own courtyard and the formation commission still waiting, half-finished, on his workbench.

The week that followed passed the way most weeks passed — commissions completed, materials gathered, Mu Wan climbing the shared wall twice to ask her usual blunt questions before retreating to her own quiet courtyard each evening. Li Fan checked on her each day as promised, nothing more than a brief exchange at the gate to confirm she'd eaten properly and needed nothing, careful not to overstep into anything that might have felt, to a girl old enough to value her own independence, like being minded too closely. He was at his workbench on the seventh evening, a formation diagram spread before him in the lamplight, when he heard her. Not the usual footsteps at the wall. Running, uneven, and beneath it, a sound he had not once heard from her in two full years of knowing her — crying, the raw, frightened kind that came from something a child couldn't yet process into words.

He was at the gate before she reached it, and found her there clutching a small jade token against her chest, tears cutting clean tracks through the dust on her face, her whole body shaking in a way that had nothing to do with the evening's mild chill. "My mother," she managed, between breaths that kept catching before she could finish. "She sent — her voice was — something's wrong, something happened, I don't—" Li Fan crouched to her level, kept his own voice level and unhurried despite everything the words had just told him. "Show me."

She held the jade communication talisman out with both hands, and Li Fan understood, examining the faint, exhausted residue of qi still clinging to its surface, that whatever message had come through it had cost the sender considerably more than an ordinary check-in should have. The talisman itself had already delivered its message and gone quiet, its single use spent, offering nothing further no matter how many times a frightened child had likely activated it again since. He didn't press her for details she was too shaken to give clearly. He simply set a hand briefly, carefully, on her shoulder — the kind of contact he rarely offered anyone, but the moment seemed to call for it regardless — and said the only thing that mattered right now. "Stay here tonight."

She didn't argue. She followed him back into his own courtyard, still shaking, still clutching the spent talisman as though letting go of it might somehow undo whatever her mother's fading voice had told her. He settled her on the low cot in the workshop's side room, the same room that had never once shown a visitor anything beyond formation manuals and half-finished diagrams, and sat with her until her breathing finally slowed into something approaching real sleep. She fell asleep still holding the token, her small hand curled tightly around it even in unconsciousness, and Li Fan sat a while longer in the lamplight, turning over everything he didn't yet know and everything he now understood he would have to find out.

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