My dao to eternity

The bell above the door gave its soft chime again as it settled, and the smell inside hit Li Fan before his eyes had finished adjusting to the dimmer light — dried herb and old wood, sharp and bitter in some corners, faintly sweet in others, with a thread of sandalwood running underneath it all. Shelves rose from floor to ceiling on every wall, packed with labeled drawers in neat, uniform rows, each one marked in brushwork too small to read from the doorway. Bundles of herbs hung from the rafters overhead, drying in loose clusters, their shadows falling long and soft across the counter in the slanted morning light. A set of brass scales sat beside a row of stone mortars, their surfaces worn smooth and pale from years of grinding.

Old Sun lifted his head slowly from where he'd been dozing behind the counter, one eye opening before the other, his chin still tucked toward his chest for a moment before he straightened. He looked Li Fan over without hurry — sword at the hip, ordinary robes gone soft with travel dust, hands that didn't fidget.

Buying medicine?" His voice carried the flat, unbothered tone of a man who'd asked the same question ten thousand times before.

"No." Li Fan kept his own voice level, the same even register he used for anything that mattered. "I came about the notice outside."

The old man's gaze drifted toward the door, as if he needed to confirm the notice still hung there. "The hiring notice."

"Yes."

Old Sun didn't move to test him right away. He sat back instead, folding his hands over his stomach, and studied Li Fan the way a man might study a horse he was thinking of buying — not rushed, not suspicious exactly, just thorough. His eyes moved over Li Fan's hands first, calloused and steady, then up to his posture, straight without being stiff, then to the sword, then back to his face.

"Where are you from?"

"East of here. Small villages, mostly." The same vague answer he'd given Madam Yu, worn smooth now from repetition.

"Why here?"

"Looking for steady work. Somewhere quiet."

"Can you read?"

"Yes."

"Worked in a shop like this before?"

Li Fan considered the question a moment before answering, the way he considered most things before he let them out of his mouth. "I learned from an elderly physician. Not in a shop." True enough, in its own way, and close enough to the truth that nothing about it would crack under a second question.

Old Sun's eyes lingered on him a beat longer, and Li Fan understood, without being told, that the old man had noticed the gaps in the answer — noticed and decided, for now, not to press them. He didn't ask a follow-up. He simply nodded once and pushed himself up off his stool with a low grunt, joints cracking faintly in the quiet of the shop.

"Sit." Old Sun gestured toward a low stool across the counter, then crossed to one of the wall cabinets, drawers sliding open and shut in a sequence too practiced to be anything but decades of habit. He came back with five small bundles laid across a wooden tray and set them down between them without ceremony.

"Name them."

Li Fan leaned in. The first was a coiled root, pale and fibrous, its cut end still faintly moist. The second, dried leaves gone brittle and gray-green, curling at the edges. He worked through them one at a time, matching each against the pages he'd spent months memorizing by lamplight in a cave most people in this city would never believe existed. None of the five gave him any trouble. Common herbs, nothing rare, exactly the kind of thing Wei Baishan's ledgers had drilled into him early and often.

Old Sun listened without expression, then began asking past the names — uses, how each was prepared, how it kept in storage, which part of the plant carried the medicine and which was worthless or worse. Li Fan answered plainly, no flourish, giving only what the question asked for and nothing more. When the old man asked what shouldn't be combined with the third herb, Li Fan told him, and watched something small shift behind Old Sun's eyes — not surprise, exactly. Interest.

The old man reached for the tray to clear it, then paused, his hand hovering over the drawer behind the counter a moment longer than the motion required. He hadn't expected to need a second one.

He swept the first tray aside and came back with a harder test. Two roots, nearly identical in shape and color, one perfectly safe, the other capable of stopping a man's heart if steeped too long. Li Fan turned each over, checking the faint ridging along the underside the way the ledgers had taught him, and set them apart without hesitation. Old Sun grunted, whether in approval or simple acknowledgment Li Fan couldn't tell yet, and kept going — dried roots next, then seeds, then strips of bark, then a small dish of powdered medicine ground fine enough that Li Fan had to bring it close and test the smell before he could name it with any confidence.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

By the time the tray was empty, Old Sun had stopped reaching for new items right away. He sat with his hands folded again, studying Li Fan in the same unhurried way as before, except now the weight behind it had changed. Not shock. Just a man recalculating what he'd assumed when the bell first rang.

"Come." Old Sun rose and led him through a curtained doorway into a back room, narrower than the shop front, crowded with baskets of unsorted herb and drying racks strung with cord from wall to wall. Dust hung faint in the shaft of light from a high window, and the bitter smell of green, unprocessed plant matter sat thicker back here than out front.

"Sort these." Old Sun nodded at a basket heaped with mixed cuttings, leaves and stems tangled together without order. "Damaged leaves aside. Tie the rest in bundles. Weigh what needs weighing. Grind what's marked for grinding."

He didn't wait for an answer before shuffling back toward the front counter, leaving Li Fan alone with the work.

Li Fan worked through it the way he'd worked through Wei Baishan's shelves — slowly, in order, checking each piece before setting it aside rather than tearing through the basket in a hurry that would only cost him later. He separated bruised leaves from whole ones by feel as much as sight, and set a tray of the sorted leaves on the sill beneath the high window, where the morning light fell warm and steady across the wood. It seemed the natural place to leave them to finish drying.

Old Sun's voice reached him a short while later, unhurried, from somewhere behind him. "Not there." Li Fan turned to find the old man already lifting the tray away from the sill, setting it instead on a shaded shelf near the back wall. "Direct sun cooks the oils out before you've even bundled them. Shade, always, unless the leaf calls for otherwise." He said it without any weight behind it, the way a man corrects a habit he expects to only need to correct once, and shuffled back out without waiting to see if the lesson landed.

It landed. Li Fan moved the rest of the drying trays into shade before he touched another basket, and didn't make the same mistake with the ones that followed. He tied the remaining herbs into bundles with even, practiced loops of cord, and set the brass scale's weights with a care that made the needle settle clean instead of swinging past its mark. Grinding came last, the pestle's motion familiar under his palm in a way that had nothing to do with this shop and everything to do with months spent hunched over a stone basin underground.

He was halfway through the second basket when Old Sun reappeared in the doorway without a sound, watching for a long moment before he stepped in and adjusted one of Li Fan's tied bundles — loosening the cord half a turn, retying it slightly looser than Li Fan had left it.

"Too tight bruises the stem," the old man said, not unkindly. "Ruins the oils inside."

Li Fan studied the correction, turning the next bundle in his hands, and matched the looser tension without needing to be shown twice. Old Sun watched him do it, said nothing further, and left him to the rest of the basket.

By the time Li Fan finished, the light through the high window had shifted further across the floor, and Old Sun was waiting for him back at the front counter with two cups of tea already poured, steam curling faint above them.

"Sit," he said again, and Li Fan took the stool across from him. Neither spoke for a while. The tea was plain and slightly bitter, the same bitterness that seemed to live in every corner of the shop.

"Wages aren't high," Old Sun said finally.

"I understand."

"You'll sweep."

"Yes."

"Carry water."

"Yes."

"Sort herbs, clean jars, mind the drying racks."

"Yes."

"Read prescriptions when I ask you to." The old man's eyes stayed on him, steady, unreadable. "Some customers can't read what I write. You'll read it back to them plain."

"Yes."

Old Sun set his cup down with a small click against the counter. "You're hired."

No ceremony followed it, no handshake, nothing that marked the moment as anything other than what it was — one more transaction in a shop that had likely seen ten thousand of them. Li Fan nodded once, the same way he'd nodded through the whole exchange, and reached for his own cup.

"Start tomorrow, then," he said, more to himself than to the old man, testing the shape of the words.

"No." Old Sun was already turning toward a broom propped against the wall behind the counter, pulling it free and holding it out. "Now. Customers will start coming through soon enough."

Li Fan took the broom.

He swept the front hall in slow, even strokes, working dust and dried leaf fragments toward the door in a widening arc, the wood floor creaking faintly under his weight in places worn thin by years of the same motion. The bell above the door chimed twice within the hour — first a mother with a small boy pressed against her hip, the child's face flushed and his breathing thin and wheezing; then an old farmer with a wrapped hand, wincing each time his fingers curled. Old Sun handled both without hurry, weighing herbs on the brass scale, folding paper packets shut with quick, precise creases, murmuring instructions the customers had clearly heard from him before and trusted without question.

Li Fan kept sweeping, kept watching, filing away the weight of dosages and the names of complaints the same patient way he'd once filed away the shape of Wei Baishan's shelves. No cultivation today. No hidden mysteries pressing in from the dark. Just a broom in his hands and a shop settling into its ordinary morning around him — exactly the kind of quiet he'd come looking for.

Near the back of the room, Old Sun glanced up from the medical text he'd propped open beside the register, his eyes finding Li Fan's back for a moment before dropping again to the page, unreadable as ever.

Old Sun lowered his eyes to the open medical text once more, though he did not turn the page for a long while.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!