Old Sun was already crouched by the wall drawers when Li Fan swept in through the front hall, three of them pulled open and mostly empty, their contents reduced to a scattering of dust and broken stems. The old man clicked his tongue at the last one and shut it harder than it needed.
"Fever-root's gone. Cooling leaf too. Whatever's left of the bitter vine wouldn't fill a single packet." He straightened, joints cracking, and jerked his chin toward the door. "Take a basket. The northern hills, past the second stream crossing — you'll remember the ground from the ledger drawings well enough."
"You want me to buy them from a trader?"
"I want you to cut them yourself." Old Sun was already turning back to the counter, done with the subject. "Buying from a cart means buying whatever a stranger swears is fresh. You know what fresh looks like now. Go get it."
Li Fan took the basket down from its peg without answering further. Six months ago the old man would have written out a list, described each plant twice, and sent him off half convinced he'd bring back the wrong root entirely. Today there was no list. Just a basket and a direction.
The road north out of the city thinned quickly from packed cart-track to a narrower footpath, farmland giving way to scrub and low stone outcroppings within the first hour of walking. Li Fan kept the sword at his hip and the basket looped over one arm, his pace unhurried, the same steady rhythm he used for every errand that didn't demand speed.
He passed three travelers before the road properly narrowed. A merchant's cart first, wheels grinding over a rutted stretch, the driver too focused on the uneven ground to spare him more than a glance. Then two cultivators walking together, robes a deep blue-gray, swords slung across their backs instead of at their hips, moving with an ease that covered ground faster than their unhurried pace should have allowed. Neither looked at him twice. A third came alone not long after, older, robes plainer, a bundle of scrolls tied at his waist — some wandering scholar or minor talisman peddler, judging by the ink-stained fingers Li Fan caught sight of as the man passed.
None of them slowed. None of them needed to. Li Fan noted, without much surprise, how the road itself seemed to bend a little around each of them — a farmer's cart easing wider than the path required, a pair of foot travelers stepping off into the grass rather than share the same stretch of dirt. Nobody stared. Nobody needed to be told to make room. It happened on its own, the way water finds the lowest ground without being asked.
He kept his own pace even, his eyes down more often than not, one more traveler with a basket and a plain sword who drew no attention because he gave nothing worth noticing. That suited him. Cultivators moved through this world the way weather moved through it — passing, indifferent, gone again before anyone thought to ask their business. He had no wish to become the kind of thing a road bent around.
The hills past the second stream crossing held exactly the kind of ground the ledger had described — thin soil over broken shale, low scrub clinging to whatever shade the rocks offered, water cutting shallow channels down from higher ground after the last rain. Li Fan worked the slope in a slow traverse, eyes moving over leaf shape and stem color the way they once had over Wei Baishan's diagrams, except now the diagrams stayed folded away in the storage ring, untouched.
He found the fever-root first, a low cluster with serrated leaves growing in the shadow of a split boulder, and cut a handful without needing to check the vein pattern twice. Cooling leaf came next, further up the slope, the pale undersides catching the light in a way he recognized before his hand had fully closed around the stem. He caught himself, halfway through binding the third bundle, realizing he hadn't once reached for the ledger tucked in the storage ring. The knowledge simply arrived when he needed it, the plant's name and use surfacing the same way the sutra's meaning had once surfaced behind his eyes, except this time it had been built one afternoon of grinding roots at a time rather than handed to him whole.
A narrow crevice higher on the slope held a denser patch of bitter vine, tangled thick around a fallen limb, and he approached it slowly, checking the ground with the toe of his boot before committing his weight the way he'd checked ground in darker places than this. A faint, dry rustle sounded from somewhere beneath the tangle, gone before he'd finished going still. He waited, counted a dozen breaths, and backed off half a step rather than push through blind. Whatever moved under that vine wasn't worth a bitten hand over a plant that grew in a dozen other places on this same slope. He found a second patch further along instead, cleaner ground beneath it, and cut what he needed without incident.
By the time the basket sat full, the sun had climbed well past its highest point, and Li Fan started back down toward the stream crossing with the same unhurried pace he'd carried up.
He'd meant to walk straight back to Hundred Herbs Hall, but the road home ran past the forge before it reached the market square, and the ring of Tie Kun's hammer against iron carried out into the street well before the building itself came into view.
Li Fan slowed as he passed the open front of the shop, the same old habit of watching without lingering that he'd carried since his first week in this city. Heat rolled out to meet him, dry and sharp, carrying the tang of hot metal and coal smoke. Sparks scattered orange against the dim interior each time the hammer landed, and Tie Kun's broad shoulders rose and fell in a rhythm too steady to belong to anyone who thought about the motion anymore.
The hammer stopped mid-stroke.
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"You." Tie Kun set the hammer down against the anvil and wiped one forearm across his brow, eyes already fixed on the hilt at Li Fan's hip rather than his face. "Herb boy from Old Sun's shop."
Li Fan stopped in the doorway, basket still looped over one arm. "That's me."
"Draw that." Not a request so much as an order, delivered the way a man might tell an apprentice to hand him a tool. "Whole way."
Li Fan drew the sword and held it out, more out of curiosity than obligation. Tie Kun took it without ceremony, turning the blade toward the forge's light, running one thick thumb along the edge in a single unhurried pass. His mouth twisted.
"Rust starting at the base, here." He tapped a spot near the hilt Li Fan hadn't thought to check closely. "Edge is dull past where a whetstone alone will fix it easy. And there's oil dried into the fuller that should've been wiped off before it ever got the chance to sit." He handed it back, hilt first, with the flat, disapproving look of a man watching someone leave good food to spoil. "Whoever sold you this steel did his part right. You've done nothing since."
Li Fan turned the blade over in his own hands, looking at it now with a closer eye than he'd bothered to give it in months. He hadn't thought about the sword much beyond swinging it — cleaned the blood off it after the bandits on the road, wiped it down after the wolf, and otherwise let it sit against his wall between one use and the next. It had never occurred to him that neglect could work on steel the same slow way it worked on anything else left untended.
"I don't know how to maintain it properly," he said. "How would I learn?"
Tie Kun snorted, already reaching for a whetstone and a stained cloth from the shelf behind him. "Sit."
He didn't explain much at first, simply worked the blade himself while Li Fan watched, the whetstone moving in slow, even passes along the edge, angled at a slant Li Fan tried and failed to measure by eye alone.
"Angle stays the same, every pass," Tie Kun said eventually, not looking up. "Change it halfway through and you'll grind the edge crooked without noticing until it's already ruined." He held the blade up to the light again, tilting it slightly, and pointed to a spot near the tip. "See that? Small chip. Happens against bone, against another blade's edge, against a rock if you're careless enough to let steel meet stone. Left alone, it spreads. Caught early, a stone smooths it out in a few passes."
He worked the chip down while he talked, unhurried, the rasp of stone against steel settling into its own rhythm under the forge's heat. When he finished, he passed the whetstone over. "Your turn. Other side."
Li Fan's first pass came out uneven, the angle wandering halfway down the blade before he caught it and corrected. Tie Kun watched without comment, arms crossed, until the second pass came out straighter.
"Oil after," Tie Kun said, once he'd judged the edge fit to stop touching. He nodded at a small clay jar on the shelf, its contents dark and faintly sweet-smelling. "Thin coat, whole blade, every time it's been drawn and put away wet — sweat off your hand counts as wet. Steel left dry rusts slower than steel wiped clean and left bare, which surprises most men the first time they hear it. Wipe first. Oil after. Never the other way." He passed Li Fan a folded cloth. "And sheath it dry. Oil in a wet sheath just traps the damp against the steel and does the opposite of what you wanted."
Li Fan worked the cloth down the blade the way Tie Kun had shown him, then the thin film of oil after, watching the dull sheen it left behind catch the forge light differently than the blade had a few minutes before. Small work. Nothing that asked anything of his cultivation, his knowledge of herbs, or any of the six months he'd spent building a foundation behind a locked door. Just a craftsman's habit, passed along the way Old Sun's habits had been passed along — a correction given once, expected to hold.
"A blade that isn't sharp is a stick with delusions," Tie Kun said, sheathing it for him and holding it out. "Keep it clean, keep it oiled, and check the edge every few weeks whether you've used it or not. Rust doesn't wait for you to notice it."
Li Fan took the sword back and reached for the coin pouch at his belt. "What do I owe you for the lesson?"
Tie Kun didn't wave him off. He held out one broad palm without looking up from the anvil, already turning his attention back to the half-finished blade waiting there. "Ten copper."
Li Fan counted the coins out and pressed them into the man's palm. Tie Kun pocketed them without breaking stride, testing the weight of his hammer with the other hand.
"Steel costs money," he said, picking the hammer back up. "Stones wear down. Oil isn't free." He brought the hammer down against the anvil, sparks scattering, and didn't look up again. "Neither is what I just gave you. Come back if the edge chips bad enough you can't fix it yourself. Otherwise you know what to do now."
Li Fan stood in the doorway a moment longer, sword back at his hip, then gave a short nod Tie Kun wasn't watching for and stepped back out into the street.
The Green Bamboo's common room had thinned by the time he reached it that evening, and Madam Yu only glanced up long enough to note the basket before waving him toward the stairs without her usual round of questions. He delivered the herbs to Hundred Herbs Hall's storeroom before supper — Old Sun checked the bundles with a quick, practiced eye, grunted once in what passed for approval, and said nothing more about it.
Upstairs, door latched and the cup set against its frame, Li Fan ran the Primordial Stances through their full sequence before drawing the sword and moving out to the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. The first form came around cleaner than it had two nights before, the wrist turn settling into the motion without the small hitch that had dogged him through the first hundred repetitions. Not smooth. Not anything close to what a real swordsman would call clean. But better, in the same small, unglamorous way every other improvement in his life had arrived — not overnight, not through insight, just through enough repetition that his body stopped needing to be told.
When he finished, he didn't set the sword against the wall the way he always had before. He drew the cloth from where he'd tucked it into his robe, wiped the blade down the way Tie Kun had shown him, checked the edge by eye and by the pad of his thumb along its flat rather than its bite, and worked a thin coat of oil into the steel until it caught the lamplight the same dull, even sheen it had in the forge that afternoon. Only then did he sheath it and set it against the wall.
It was a small ritual, and it cost him only a few minutes he could easily have spent elsewhere. But sitting back against the wall afterward, listening to the last of the inn's noise settle below him, Li Fan found he didn't mind the time it took. A tool cared for stayed a tool he could trust the next time he needed it without wondering. He'd learned that lesson from a cracked pestle once already, in a cave most of Stonebridge would never believe existed. It seemed the kind of lesson that was going to keep teaching itself to him, one object at a time, for as long as he kept picking up new ones.
He banked the lamp low and let the dark settle over the room, the sword resting clean against the wall beside him for the first time since he'd carried it out of that valley.
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