Old Sun's private quarters sat in a courtyard Li Fan had visited perhaps a dozen times in three years, small by the standards of an elder's residence but larger than the one Li Fan had been given, a single old cypress standing where Li Fan's own plum tree stood, its bark gone dark and rough with an age that made the tree in his own courtyard look like a sapling by comparison. Old Sun had the kettle already going when Li Fan knocked, as though he'd been expecting the visit before Li Fan had ever decided to make it.
"Sit," Old Sun said, the same word he'd opened with on a gray morning behind a modest counter in Stonebridge three years and half a kingdom ago now. Li Fan sat.
Neither of them spoke while the tea steeped. Old Sun poured two cups once the leaves had settled, set one in front of Li Fan without ceremony, and studied him over the rim of his own for a long moment before he finally broke the quiet.
"You didn't come here for tea."
"No," Li Fan admitted. "I came to tell you I'm leaving Hundred Herbs Hall."
Old Sun didn't look surprised. He set his cup down, slow and unhurried, and folded his hands together on the low table between them. "I know."
"You know," Li Fan repeated, not quite a question, though something in it asked one anyway.
"The librarian mentioned a disciple had finally exhausted the reading hall's whole collection, restricted case included." Old Sun's mouth curved, dry rather than warm, though the warmth sat somewhere underneath it all the same. "There's exactly one disciple in this Hall fool enough to have managed that in three years instead of thirty. I didn't need the second telling to know who she meant."
Li Fan turned his cup slowly between his palms, the tea's heat settling into his fingers. "I'm not leaving because there's nothing left here. The wards would still teach me things a lifetime of practice teaches that no book ever could. I know that."
"But you've already read past me." Old Sun said it plainly, no bitterness in it, the same flat acknowledgment he might have given a difficult diagnosis once it finally made sense. "Three nights ago, over that case of mine you solved before I'd finished describing it. I've thought about that conversation more than once since." He picked his tea back up, held it without drinking. "I spent forty years building what's in my head one hard case at a time. You built more than that in three, out of paper. I won't pretend that doesn't mean something."
"It doesn't mean I've surpassed you," Li Fan said. "Only the part of this trade that lives in books. The rest of it — a hand that's actually packed ten thousand wounds instead of a few hundred, a physician's instinct that only comes from years standing over real patients — I don't have that yet. I don't think reading gets me there either. I think only time does."
Old Sun nodded slowly, and something in his face settled, less surprise than confirmation of something he'd already worked out for himself. "That's the most honest answer I've had from a disciple in longer than I care to count." He took a slow sip, set the cup down again. "Most men your age who'd read what you've read would already be telling themselves they'd outgrown their own teacher entirely. You're the first one who's split the difference correctly."
"Where will you go next?" Old Sun asked, though something in the way he asked it suggested he'd already guessed.
"The Myriad Craft Sect."
Old Sun didn't react the way Li Fan had half expected him to — no surprise, no argument, not even the raised eyebrow he sometimes gave a prescription he disagreed with. He simply nodded once, slow and considering, and let the silence sit a moment before he spoke again.
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"Formations. Talismans. Artifact work. Things this Hall was never built to teach you, whatever else it managed." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, an old habit Li Fan had watched him repeat a hundred times without ever once asking what it meant. "A phoenix was never meant to nest with sparrows forever, however comfortable the nest. You've outgrown mine. I'd rather see you walk toward a bigger one than watch you shrink yourself to fit this one out of loyalty you don't owe me."
"I owe you a great deal," Li Fan said, and meant it plainly enough that Old Sun's dry expression cracked, just slightly, into something closer to real feeling.
"You owe me nothing," Old Sun said. "A teacher who counts debts isn't teaching for the reason worth teaching for." He was quiet a moment, looking down into his own tea rather than at Li Fan. "I've kept apprentices before you. Good ones, some of them. None of them read the way you read, and none of them ever once made me feel like the years I've spent in this trade were catching up to something faster than they could keep pace with." He looked up again, and the dryness came back into his voice, though it didn't quite reach his eyes this time. "The only thing I've still got more of than you is years. Everything else, you've already matched or passed. That's not a small thing for an old man to admit. Don't make me say it twice."
Old Sun rose without further ceremony, crossed to a low chest against the far wall, and drew out a flat wooden case Li Fan had never seen before, its lacquer worn thin at the corners from decades of handling. He set it on the table between them and opened it himself.
Inside, nested in cloth gone soft with age, sat a set of silver needles, each one slender as a hair and cased separately in its own narrow slot, the metal still holding a dull, careful shine despite whatever years had passed since anyone had last used them.
"My teacher's needles," Old Sun said, "before they were mine. Older than either of us put together, and better made than anything a smith in this city could manage today, whatever the smiths in this city might tell you otherwise." He nudged the case an inch closer to Li Fan. "I never had a son. Never had a daughter who stayed long enough to want them. I've kept them in that chest for longer than I care to admit, waiting on a reason to take them out again." He met Li Fan's eyes squarely. "Take them. Not because you need better tools. Because I'd rather they went on being used by someone who'll actually use them than sit in a box until I'm gone and some stranger sells them for the silver."
Li Fan reached out slowly and closed his hand around the case, the weight of it settling against his palm the way every gift that had ever actually mattered in this world had settled — quiet, unglamorous, and heavier than its size accounted for.
"Thank you," he said, and found the words sat smaller than what he actually meant by them.
"Don't thank me for tools," Old Sun said, waving the sentiment off the same way he'd once waved off a farmer's overpayment. "Thank me by not letting them sit unused the way I let them sit."
They sat a while longer after that, the tea going cold between them, neither of them in any particular hurry to end the conversation now that the practical matters of it had been settled. Old Sun asked, eventually, in the same unhurried way he asked most things, what Li Fan meant to do once the sect had taught him whatever it had to teach.
"Keep walking," Li Fan said. "There's a road ahead of me longer than either of us has words for yet. I mean to walk all of it, one stretch at a time, the same way I've walked everything else since a stone alcove in a valley you've never seen."
Old Sun studied him a moment, then huffed something that might have been a laugh if he'd let it go any further than that. "Whatever that alcove was, whatever brought you out of it and into my shop with your robes covered in road dust and a story that never quite added up — I stopped needing to know years ago. I hope wherever the road takes you, you find whatever you're actually walking toward." He lifted his cold tea in something almost like a toast, and drank it anyway. "Go pack. I imagine you already have."
Li Fan had. He rose, the needle case cradled against his chest, and paused at the doorway of the small courtyard, looking back once at the old man still seated beneath his ancient cypress, alone with a cold cup of tea and forty years of a trade he'd never once managed to hand to anyone worth the giving until now.
"I'll come back," Li Fan said. "When I'm ready to hand something back."
"I'll still be here," Old Sun said, not quite a promise and not quite a joke either, something settled comfortably between the two. "Or I won't. Either way, the trade will still need someone carrying it forward. See that it's you."
Li Fan bowed, the first proper bow he'd given the old man in three years of sweeping floors and grinding roots and reading by lamplight, and left the courtyard before either of them could turn the moment into something heavier than it needed to be.
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