My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 75: The Market Turns

The lumber merchant raised his prices without apology on an ordinary morning, erasing the old figures from the board outside his shop and chalking new ones in their place while a line of craftsmen and carpenters stood nearby, watching in varying degrees of disbelief.

Old Mu stopped at the edge of the crowd. "Pale ash," he read aloud. "Nearly double." He moved to the next line. "Cedar heartwood. Almost triple."

The merchant caught his eye. "Don't look at me like that, Mu. I'm paying the same prices you're paying."

"That's supposed to make me feel better?"

"It should."

"It doesn't."

The merchant gave a tired shrug. "The sect's artifact peak has been buying whole shipments before they even reach the market. Every wagon that comes in gets inspected before the timber's unloaded. Refuse their price, somebody else takes the order."

"Do they need that much wood?"

The merchant lowered his voice. "Enough to buy half the valley's supply, from what I've heard."

"For what?"

The merchant glanced toward the mountain. "If you know how to ask a sect why it's buying something, you're a braver man than I am."

Li Fan said nothing, and looked toward the distant mountain instead. From this far away it appeared exactly as it always had. Quiet. Untouchable. Unconcerned with the market beneath it.

☯

The shortage didn't stay confined to the lumber district. Within weeks the forge district felt it — iron first, then coal, then the smaller materials only the larger suppliers could still afford to sell. By the time the medicine quarter began complaining, nobody bothered pretending the changes were isolated. Common roots grew expensive. Simple tonics cost more. Herbs that had never been hard to find began disappearing from shelves for days at a time.

The explanation changed depending on who Li Fan asked. A coming inspection larger than any bell had ever called for. A conflict brewing with another sect. A winter supposedly harsher than anything seen in decades. A refinement project somewhere higher on the mountain. Hoarding. Preparation. Fear. Every explanation had someone willing to swear it was true. None of them carried any evidence behind the swearing.

Li Fan listened, remembered, and bought what he needed before the prices climbed again. That was enough for now.

☯

Old Mu felt the pressure more directly than most. A commission that once cleared a fair profit now barely covered its own materials. He raised his prices. Clients complained. Some left. More than once, Li Fan watched a customer carry a cheaper piece out of another shop while Old Mu said nothing as the door closed behind them.

One evening an unfinished commission sat abandoned on the old man's bench, and he stared at it a long while before he spoke.

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"Forty years," he said. "Forty years I've kept this shop honest." He picked up a piece of cedar and turned it over in his hand. "I never gouged a family because I knew they needed a door panel. Never charged a widow more because I knew she couldn't afford to argue." He set the wood down. "Now the wood itself costs enough that I have to raise the price just to break even." His mouth tightened. "That's a poor kind of honesty."

"Then perhaps the dishonesty would be pretending the wood still costs what it did," Li Fan said.

Old Mu glanced at him. Neither spoke for a moment. Then the old man snorted. "You're becoming irritatingly sensible."

"I've been sensible for years."

"That's what makes it irritating." He picked his chisel back up, and the conversation ended there.

☯

Li Fan's own carving had grown steady enough by then to contribute something meaningful — not much, but enough. A box lid here. A relief panel there. Small pieces that passed through Old Mu's shop under the old man's own mark, though regular customers had slowly begun noticing which pieces belonged to which hand. A few started asking for Li Fan's work specifically.

The coin stayed modest, mostly silver. Twice, though, a cultivator paid him in low-grade spirit stones instead. The first time seemed accidental — the buyer reaching into his own pouch without looking, producing stones instead of silver, waving off the difference when Li Fan pointed it out. The second time was deliberate. A young Qi Sea disciple spent several minutes examining one of his carved panels before asking, plainly, whether the carver himself cultivated.

"No," Li Fan said, the answer coming easily.

The disciple studied him a moment longer, then set two low-grade spirit stones on the counter. "Good work deserves good payment."

Li Fan accepted them without argument. Afterward, Old Mu glanced at the stones. "You'll attract strange customers if you keep doing work that well."

"I'll survive."

"I suppose that's what you're good at."

The stones joined the small reserve he'd already built from medicine and the occasional cultivator willing to pay for discretion along with quality. Not wealth. But it was becoming something — a second source of income, then a third, slowly and quietly, without ever once requiring him to leave the city or draw attention to himself.

☯

The garden suffered its own version of the same pressure, spiritual soil for the rarer plants climbing in price until replacing failed seedlings stopped making sense against the cost. He let one experimental bed go, then the other. The hardier plants survived. The rest didn't, and he didn't mourn them. Not every experiment deserved to be saved. Sometimes the correct response to a bad investment was simply to stop investing.

☯

The strange thing was that the shortage never became a crisis. No riots, no empty streets, no sudden collapse. The city simply grew more expensive. People complained. Merchants adjusted. Craftsmen worked longer hours. Families bought less. The mountain kept consuming resources, and then, gradually, the pressure eased.

It took the better part of a year. Lumber prices fell first, iron following behind it. The medicine quarter recovered more slowly, but the shelves eventually filled again. Old Mu's customers returned once his prices settled back to something ordinary people could afford, and the shop found its old rhythm.

Li Fan never learned exactly why the sect had bought so heavily. He heard, afterward, that the artifact peak had simply stopped purchasing whole shipments one day, as abruptly as it had started. He heard the alchemy peak's demand for herbs had fallen the same way. He heard several explanations in the weeks that followed, each delivered with the particular confidence of someone who'd known nothing at all while the shortage was actually happening.

None of them survived careful examination. He filed the matter away, the way some mysteries got filed away not because they'd been solved but because no answer currently existed worth forcing.

He stood behind Old Mu's bench one quiet afternoon, a half-finished panel beneath his hands, and listened to the market returning to its ordinary rhythm outside — a wagon rolling past, a merchant calling out his prices, someone arguing over the cost of rice. Life continuing.

He lowered his chisel. The wood opened cleanly beneath the blade.

Whatever the sect had been preparing for had passed without touching his life directly. At least, that was what it looked like from where he stood.

He didn't know yet that the mountain's sudden hunger had been one of the first signs that something far larger had already begun moving above the city. He only knew that the wood was affordable again, and that, for the moment, was enough.

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