My dao to eternity

The disciple led him north through streets that grew quieter the further they walked from the mountain road, the forges and open stalls thinning behind them until the only sounds left were their own footsteps on packed stone and, somewhere off to the left, water moving over rock.

"Elder Ren asked for something away from the main quarter," the disciple said. "Said you struck him as a man who wouldn't want neighbors close enough to hear him think." He glanced sideways, not quite a question, and Li Fan said nothing to confirm or deny it, which seemed to settle the matter well enough on its own.

The wall came into view at the end of a narrow lane bordered by old cypress trees, pale stone standing taller than the walls around it, moss growing thick and undisturbed along its base where the sun rarely reached. A single gate stood at its center, wood gone silver-gray with age but sound under the disciple's palm when he pushed it open.

Li Fan stepped through, and stopped.

☯

The courtyard opened out further than he'd expected from the modest width of the gate, packed earth giving way almost immediately to a stone path that curved off in two directions rather than one. To the left, a garden had gone half wild with neglect — old plum and cassia trees grown tall and untrimmed, a stand of bamboo thick enough to block the wind, weeds claiming what had once clearly been tended beds along the far wall. To the right, the path led toward a cluster of low buildings connected by covered walkways, tiled roofs dark with moss in places, the wood beneath still solid where he tested it with his hand.

He counted the rooms as he walked through them, the same unhurried habit he'd used to catalogue Wei Baishan's shelves years ago. A main hall, empty and swept clean by whoever had last serviced the property, tall enough that his own footsteps echoed faintly against the rafters. Two smaller side rooms branching off it, one with a hearth already built into the wall, the other bare but for a low writing desk left behind, its surface dry and cracked from disuse. A separate building further back held what had once been a kitchen, cold ash still sitting in the stove from some tenant years gone. Past that, a narrow covered corridor led to a final structure standing apart from the rest, its floor laid in worn wooden boards rather than packed earth — a room built for training, by the look of the reinforced beams overhead and the deep scoring marks worked into one wall where a blade had clearly struck it more than once.

He stood in the middle of that room for a while, running one hand along the scarred wall, and said nothing.

☯

The pond sat behind the last building, fed by a narrow channel that ran in from somewhere beyond the courtyard wall, its water dark and still under the shade of an overhanging willow. Li Fan crouched at its edge and looked down into it, and after a moment a shape moved beneath the surface — a carp, pale gold, drifting lazily through water gone slightly green with the moss that had grown undisturbed along the pond's stone lip.

"Whoever kept this place before you stocked it," the disciple said, coming up beside him. "Elder Ren mentioned it's sat empty the better part of a decade. Nobody thought to drain it."

Li Fan watched the carp turn and vanish back into the shadow beneath a rock ledge. "I'll keep it stocked," he said, and meant it the same plain way he meant most decisions, without any particular weight attached to the words.

The disciple looked at him a moment, then shrugged, the look of a man who'd long since stopped trying to guess what a stranger might find worth caring about. "The deed will name you as tenant, not owner — sect land, held for you as long as you're of use to it. Elder Ren didn't say how long that might be. Men like him rarely do." He inclined his head, unhurried and courteous. "Someone will come by within the week to confirm the arrangement properly. Until then, it's yours to use."

He left the way they'd come, and Li Fan stood alone in the courtyard for a long while after the gate had swung shut behind him, listening to the water moving through the channel and the faint, dry rustle of bamboo somewhere off to his left.

☯

He spent the rest of that first day walking the grounds slowly, a second time and then a third, the way he'd once walked Stonebridge's streets in his first week there — not out of pleasure, though something close to it sat underneath the habit now, but because a place he didn't fully understand was a place that could still hold surprises he hadn't accounted for. He found no hidden formation lines worked into the walls, no sealed chamber, no dead man's shelves waiting behind a locked door. Only an old courtyard, larger than anything he'd lived in since falling into this world, quiet enough that the loudest sound most evenings would likely be his own breath during the stances.

That suited him.

He turned the matter of medicine over that evening, sitting on the training room's worn boards with his sword laid across his knees, and reached the same conclusion he'd reached walking down from the mountain the day before. He wouldn't hang a notice. He wouldn't take a stall in the medicine quarter, however easily his three years at Hundred Herbs Hall might have opened that door for him. A physician's counter drew a particular kind of attention — patients first, then reputation, then the kind of quiet regard that had once, in a much smaller city, drawn every family in Stonebridge into circling something they thought worth fighting over. He had no wish to become the next thing a mountain full of cultivators decided was worth circling.

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He'd treat whoever genuinely needed it, quietly, the way Old Sun had once treated a stranger's fever without asking for a name in return. He wouldn't build anything around it that another person could point to and call a reputation.

☯

The city gave him something else to look at over the following days, and it found him the way most things worth finding had always found him — sideways, while he was looking for something else entirely.

He'd gone down into Myriad Craft City to buy oil for the sword and a few staples for the kitchen he meant to put back into use, and the route back toward the northern quarter carried him past a narrow street he hadn't walked before, tucked between a forge and a shuttered talisman shop. The smell reached him first — not the mineral bite of hot metal or the dry paper-and-ink scent he'd grown used to elsewhere in the city, but something warmer, cleaner. Fresh-cut wood, resin still weeping faintly from a raw edge, sawdust fine enough to catch the afternoon light drifting down from an open window above.

An old man sat on a low stool just inside a shopfront with its shutters folded back, a half-finished panel braced across his knees, a narrow chisel moving in short, careful strokes along a line of grain Li Fan couldn't yet see the shape of. Shavings curled away from the blade and fell in a loose pile at his feet, pale against the dark floorboards. Along the walls behind him, finished pieces hung and stood in careful rows — a screen worked with a running pattern of cranes in flight, their wings only suggested by the angle a few cuts had left in the wood; a set of box lids inlaid with some darker grain along their edges; a long panel meant for a door lintel, carved with a river that seemed, from a few steps back, to actually move.

Nothing about any of it was gaudy. Nothing shouted for attention the way some of the sect's finer artifact work did in the shop windows further up the street. It simply sat there, plain and exact, each line doing precisely what it needed to and nothing more.

Li Fan stopped in the street and watched for longer than he meant to.

☯

The old carver noticed him eventually, glancing up without breaking the rhythm of his chisel. "Buying, or just standing in my light?"

"Watching," Li Fan admitted. "I didn't mean to block your window."

The old man grunted, not unkindly, and turned the panel a few degrees to catch the light better rather than to see Li Fan more clearly. "Most men in this city walk past without looking twice. Formation work and artifact refining pay better, and pay faster. Nobody wants to spend three seasons on a screen when a talisman sells inside a week." He set the chisel down long enough to blow a fine layer of dust off the surface, checking the line beneath it with one calloused thumb. "You're not from the mountain."

"No."

"Didn't think so. Cultivators who wander in here usually want something with qi worked into the grain — carved to hold a minor formation, or channel a technique. I don't do that kind of work." He nodded toward the crane screen along the wall. "That's just wood. Cut the way wood asks to be cut, nothing more added to it than the shape it already wanted to be."

Li Fan crossed the threshold without deciding to, the same way he'd once crossed into a Stonebridge shopfront reading a hiring notice he hadn't planned on reading that morning. He studied the river panel a while, close enough now to see the individual strokes that made up the current, each one shallow and precise, none of them wasted.

"How long does a piece like this take?" he asked.

"That one. Four months, working most mornings." The old man didn't sound proud of the number, only certain of it, the same flat certainty Old Sun had once given a dosage. "Longer for the screen. A man who rushes wood ends up with a pile of kindling and a wasted season."

Li Fan turned that over, and something in the number settled comfortably rather than daunting him — the same shape of patience the sword manual had once demanded, the same shape the pulse beneath a stranger's wrist had once demanded before it finally stopped feeling like nothing more than a drum.

"Would you take on someone who's never held a chisel?"

The old man looked up properly for the first time since Li Fan had stopped in the street, studying him the way Old Sun had once studied a tray of untested roots — unhurried, without much expression given away either direction.

"Most who ask that question want to carve something worth selling inside a month," he said. "They don't last a week once they understand how long the wood actually takes."

"I'm not in a hurry," Li Fan said.

Something shifted behind the old man's eyes, faint enough that Li Fan might have missed it a year ago, unmistakable to him now. "That's the first honest answer I've had to that question in longer than I care to count." He set the panel aside, braced both hands on his knees, and pushed himself up off the stool with the slow, deliberate care of a man whose joints had earned the right to complain and mostly didn't bother. "Sit down, then. We'll see how honest it actually is once your hands start bleeding."

☯

Li Fan walked back toward the northern quarter that evening with a plain wooden box tucked under one arm — a chisel, a mallet, and a stack of offcuts the old man had pressed on him without charge, muttering something about a man needing to ruin cheap wood before he earned the right to touch good wood. The light had gone gold over the rooftops by the time he reached his own gate, the mountain's peak catching the last of it high above the city, and he let himself into the quiet courtyard with the box held carefully against his chest.

He sat that night on the worn boards of the training room, not with the sword laid across his knees this time, but with a single offcut of pale, plain wood and a chisel he didn't yet know how to hold properly. The first cut went wide, gouging a shallow scar across the grain rather than the clean line he'd meant to draw. He turned the wood over, studied the mistake without any particular frustration attached to the study, and reset his grip the way the old man had shown him that afternoon.

He tried again.

The pond outside caught the last of the evening light through the training room's open door, still and quiet, the carp somewhere beneath its surface settling in for the night the same as he was. Somewhere past the courtyard wall, the mountain stood dark and vast against a sky just beginning to hold its first stars, and Li Fan sat with a scrap of ruined wood in his lap, turning the chisel over in his hand, and began again.

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