My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 70: Thirty Threads

Li Fan broke off from the heavier man's next strike rather than meet it, letting the exchange go unfinished, and closed the distance toward the lead man in three fast strides.

The talisman had already caught its first spark by the time he reached him — a folded strip of paper, dense ink markings crawling faintly along its edges the way Li Fan remembered a different pair of talismans crawling once, pressed into his hands by a dying man in a forest clearing a lifetime ago. Whatever this one meant to do, it hadn't finished doing it yet.

Li Fan's blade caught the man's wrist before the spark could spread further, not deep enough to cripple, deep enough to make the fingers holding the paper open on reflex. The talisman fell, its half-formed light guttering out against the damp leaf litter before it ever completed whatever it had been built to call.

"You should have used that the moment I stepped into this clearing," Li Fan said, "rather than waiting to see if your friend could wear me down first."

☯

The lead man didn't answer. His free hand came up instead, qi gathering fast and unrefined around a second blade drawn from somewhere at his hip, and the fight lost whatever careful shape it had carried until now.

Li Fan let the sword qi build past a single thread for the first time, three strands extending past his blade's edge at once as he turned to meet the renewed attack from both the lead man and the heavier cultivator together. The threads cut clean through the lead man's second blade at the guard, the same way the first thread had ruined a lesser weapon earlier in the fight, and the heavier man's own strike met a fourth thread head-on, sparks scattering where qi met qi in the dark clearing.

He drew on the fire technique without breaking his own stance, a controlled blade of flame extending from his free palm rather than his sword, and used it the way he'd used it in a hundred quiet mornings of practice — not wild, not indiscriminate, a single precise cut that caught the heavier man's sleeve and forced him back a full step swatting at the flame before it could climb further.

Five threads. Six. The count climbed with his own breath, each one thinner than the last but no less exact, until the clearing itself seemed lit from a dozen small points of bright, cutting light rather than only moonlight and a guttering ember of flame.

☯

The remaining early-stage cultivators broke first, the ones still standing scattering back toward the tree line rather than press an attack that had already cost four of their number blood and two more their weapons. Li Fan let most of them go. A man running wasn't worth chasing, not tonight, not against numbers that had already stopped mattering the moment the fight's real shape had revealed itself.

He caught sight, once, of the reluctant one from earlier — blade still held loose and unused, already three strides into the tree line and moving fast, no backward glance spared for the two men still fighting at the clearing's center. Li Fan let him run without a second thought spent on it. A man who hadn't drawn blood tonight wasn't a man worth spending his own effort chasing down in the dark.

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☯

The heavier man fell first, his favored right side finally exploited the moment Li Fan judged the pattern confirmed beyond doubt — a feint toward that same angle, the guard closing a fraction too slow the way it always closed too slow from that side, and a clean thrust finding the gap before the recovery could catch up to it. He went down without rising again, breath still moving but the fight plainly finished for him.

The lead man fought on alone after that, longer than Li Fan expected, driven by something closer to desperation than skill once his own second blade lay ruined in the leaf litter and his talisman had guttered out unused. He was fast, and he was frightened, and neither quality closed the gap between what he actually carried and what stood in front of him now with a dozen threads of sword qi still faintly visible along a blade he hadn't yet needed to swing at full strength.

It ended on the thirty-first thread, more threads than Li Fan had ever drawn in a single unbroken stretch, a bright, converging cut that found the space between the man's guard and his own exhausted reflexes. He went still mid-motion, the same way every real ending in a fight like this had gone still for Li Fan before it — no drama in it, no triumph, only the plain fact of a man who'd stopped being a threat.

☯

The clearing went quiet the way it always went quiet once a fight finished — wind through high branches, some small animal Li Fan had startled off much earlier finally daring to move again somewhere in the dark. He stood a moment, breathing steady, sword still faintly warm along its edge, and let the threads of qi fade back into nothing before he moved.

He worked through the fallen methodically, the same unsentimental accounting he'd once given a dead bandit leader's purse on a road behind him now by years rather than months. Storage pouches came off wherever a man had carried one, most of them thin and unremarkable, a few carrying enough spirit stones or minor supplies to be worth the taking. He left the wounded where they lay, breathing and alive, no further threat to anyone once their blades had already fallen from hands too tired or too frightened to pick them back up.

The lead man's own pouch held more than the others — coin, a handful of low-grade stones, and beneath them, folded small enough that Li Fan nearly missed it in the dark, a strip of paper carrying a single line of instruction in a hand too careful and too formal to belong to any of the rough men who'd carried it into this clearing.

Confirm the courtyard's contents before the family's own men are sent. Report only to the steward. No names spoken beyond this paper.

☯

Li Fan read the line twice in the moonlight, turning it over the same careful way he turned over anything that changed the shape of a problem he'd thought he already understood.

These men hadn't marked him on their own patience alone, the way weeks of careless conversation outside a tea stall had once suggested. Someone had sent them — a steward, working for some family with enough standing to speak of its own men as a resource held in reserve, patient enough to test the ground first with hired blades before spending anything more valuable on the question. A courtyard's contents, the note said, not a courtyard's owner. Whoever had written this cared what Li Fan kept behind his own walls more than they cared what he actually was.

He folded the note and tucked it away, and didn't let himself reach further than the plain facts in front of him tonight. A family. A steward. A question about his courtyard that had cost ten men their evening and one of them his life. He had no name yet to attach to any of it, and chasing one in the dark, standing in a clearing full of bodies, would only cost him time better spent finishing what tonight had already started.

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