My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 77: Late Qi Sea

The banner over the old Rong warehouse had faded from bright new dye to the same weathered color as nearly every other sign in the eastern market by the time Li Fan realized how long it had actually been hanging there. He stopped beneath it one morning and looked up. The characters were still unfamiliar enough that he had to sound them out in his own mind, though he'd seen them countless times by now.

Years. He did the arithmetic without meaning to, the way he sometimes still caught himself doing when an old detail surfaced unexpectedly, and found the answer farther out than he'd expected.

Years had passed, not in any single moment worth remembering, but in the accumulation of ordinary mornings. Seasons had turned. Roofs had been repaired and repaired again. Children he'd once watched running barefoot through the market had grown tall enough to bargain with vendors themselves. Shops had changed hands. Families had risen, fallen, and been replaced.

And Li Fan was still here.

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Old Mu's hands shook on more mornings than they steadied now. The tremor was small — someone who didn't know him might barely notice it — but Li Fan had spent too many years watching those hands guide a chisel through wood to miss the difference. The strange part was that the shaking always disappeared the instant the chisel touched the work, years of habit taking over where strength had begun to fail.

Old Mu no longer accepted commissions of any real size. He spent most of his days correcting Li Fan's work, finishing smaller pieces when his hands allowed it, and complaining whenever Li Fan made a mistake the old man considered too obvious to forgive. The larger commissions belonged to Li Fan now, not officially — neither of them had ever bothered with the formal words — but the shop's customers had gradually stopped asking whether Old Mu could take their work and started asking when Li Fan would have time for it instead. Old Mu had never once objected. That, more than anything else, told Li Fan how far the old man's trust had actually come.

☯

The courtyard had changed with him. The pond had grown crowded enough that Li Fan had given half its fish away to a neighbor rather than let the water grow thick with more carp than it could properly sustain. The willow had become enormous, its branches reaching the pond's surface with ease even on days when there was barely enough wind to move them. The training room's walls carried scars of his own making now alongside the older marks left by whoever had trained there before him — some shallow, others cut deep enough into the wood that they would likely outlast him.

The garden had changed most slowly of all. Some plants had failed. Others had thrived. A few medicinal herbs he'd planted years ago had become almost permanent fixtures, surviving seasons of neglect and producing more reliably than the expensive seedlings he'd once bought with carefully counted coin. The courtyard no longer felt like a place he'd been given. It felt like somewhere he'd lived. That distinction mattered more than he'd expected it to.

☯

His cultivation had changed with the years too. Thirty-one sword threads had once been his ceiling, that night in the forest clearing still clear enough in memory — ten cultivators closing around him, every thread demanding his full concentration simply to remain where he'd placed it. He hadn't tried to force himself past that number afterward. There'd been no reason to. The number itself had never been the point. Control was.

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What had once required his full attention could now be done almost casually, five or six threads suspended beside him while his breathing stayed perfectly steady, maintaining them no longer feeling like holding a door shut against a storm. The fire technique had followed the same path, the blade of flame that once demanded deliberate breathing now answering his intention almost as naturally as his own hand. The Primordial Stances had gone further still — he no longer needed to think about their movements at all. His body simply knew, years of repetition turned into habit, habit turned into instinct, instinct turned into something so ordinary he sometimes had to consciously remember how difficult those same movements had once been.

☯

The breakthrough came on an evening no different from a thousand others, Li Fan seated beneath the plum tree with his legs crossed, the last light fading slowly across the courtyard. The Primordial Breath moved through him in its familiar rhythm, slow and steady and unhurried, no conscious thought needed to carry it anymore.

Then the pressure came, gathering behind the barrier he'd felt for longer than he cared to count, accumulating with the quiet inevitability of water rising behind a dam. He didn't force it. He didn't accelerate the circulation. He simply let the accumulation reach its own natural limit, and when it finally gave way, it gave way without violence — no explosion, no surge tearing through the courtyard, only something inside him settling. His whole body seemed to grow heavier without gaining weight, denser without becoming rigid, the spiritual energy that had once gathered mostly at his center now permeating every part of him, settling into flesh and bone and meridian with a depth he'd never once felt before. The evening breeze still touched his face. The world around him simply sat a little farther away.

He held the stance until the change had finished, and only then opened his eyes.

☯

He flexed his fingers once. The movement felt lighter than it should have. He reached down, picked up a small stone from the garden path — one he'd stepped over countless times without a second thought — and pressed his fingers together. The stone cracked, then crumbled into several pieces and spilled between his fingers.

He tested his hearing next. The pond sat nearly still, and yet he could hear the faint movement beneath its surface. The willow's leaves brushed against each other overhead. Somewhere beyond the courtyard wall, a cart rolled across the street, and he could pick the separate sounds apart with a clarity that would have been impossible years ago.

Late-stage Qi Sea. He didn't need anyone to tell him what had happened. His own body had told him plainly enough, the same way it always had.

☯

He didn't celebrate. He never had — a breakthrough was useful because it made him stronger, not because it gave him something to boast about. He rose and walked to the pond instead, the willow's branches hanging over darkening water, three generations of fish moving somewhere beneath its still surface, and watched them a while.

His thoughts turned, eventually, toward something he'd been postponing for longer than he cared to admit. The hidden room. He'd meant to dig it beneath this courtyard for years now, and there had always been a reason to delay it — the shop, medicine, cultivation, the garden, whatever problem had most recently arrived at his gate and refused to leave until he'd dealt with it.

But late-stage Qi Sea was different. He was approaching the point where the foundation of his cultivation would matter far more than it ever had before, and the closer he came to Core Condensation, the less acceptable it became to leave his most important preparations unfinished.

He stood beside the pond a moment longer, then turned toward the kitchen shed. The shovel was still there, exactly where he'd left it years ago.

He picked it up. For the first time, he decided he would actually begin.

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