My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 89: A Shorter Day
Spring came in slowly that year, the kind of thaw that took its time deciding whether it meant to stay, a warm morning followed by a hard frost followed by three more warm mornings before the cold finally gave up its claim on the season for good. Li Fan noticed the pond's ice breaking apart into loose plates before he noticed much else about the turning weather, the koi beneath it stirring back into their ordinary lazy circuits once the water opened again.
He kept to the same rhythm he'd kept all winter, stances at dawn, the shop through the middle of the day, medicine and formation study folded into whatever hours remained once the light had gone. The rhythm itself had become so worn into his days that he sometimes caught himself only half aware of moving through it, the way a man walks a familiar road without needing to watch his own feet.
The change in Old Mu arrived first as something Li Fan noticed rather than something Old Mu mentioned.
The old man had always opened the shop before Li Fan arrived, a habit so consistent across the years that Li Fan had never once needed to check whether the front stood unlocked. That spring, twice within the same month, he found the door still latched when he reached it, and Old Mu inside a quarter hour later than usual, moving with the particular stiffness of a man who'd needed longer than he expected to convince his own joints to carry him out of bed.
"Slept poorly," Old Mu said the first time, before Li Fan had asked anything at all. "Nothing worth discussing."
Li Fan let it go the first time. The second time, a few weeks later, he noticed something else alongside the late door — a faint unsteadiness in the old man's gait crossing from the back room to his bench, gone again within a few steps, easy enough to miss if a person weren't already watching for it.
He said nothing about that either, not yet. He filed it the same careful way he filed most things that might matter later, and began paying closer attention to the ordinary details of Old Mu's mornings without making the attention obvious.
A caravan guard came into Hundred Herbs Hall's old routine that spring in an unexpected way — not through the shop, since Li Fan no longer kept one, but through a chance meeting on the street, a man doubled over near the western well, one hand pressed hard against his own side.
Li Fan crossed to him without deciding to, the same old reflex that had never once required conscious thought to activate. The guard's breath came short and shallow, his face gone pale beneath a coating of road dust, and when Li Fan pressed two fingers lightly against his ribs the man flinched hard enough to confirm what his own eyes had already half suggested.
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"Caravan hit a washed-out stretch of road three days back," the guard managed, teeth gritted. "Cart threw me into the wheel spokes. I told the escort captain I was fine to keep walking."
"You weren't," Li Fan said, plainly, working his fingers along the ribs with careful, methodical pressure, cataloguing where the man's breath caught sharpest against where it didn't catch at all. Two ribs, cracked rather than broken outright, the kind of injury that worsened quietly over days rather than announcing itself all at once. "You've been breathing shallow to avoid the pain. That's letting fluid settle where it shouldn't."
He worked the man's breathing back open with pressure applied at three careful points, the same technique Old Sun had drilled into him years ago over a different injured stranger in a different city, and watched the guard's color slowly return over the better part of an hour. He wrapped the ribs tight enough to support them without restricting the lungs further, gave clear instruction on how many days of rest the injury actually required regardless of what any escort captain expected of him, and sent him on his way with a small paper of powdered herb for the pain.
The guard tried to press coin into his hand before leaving. Li Fan waved it off the same unhurried way he waved off most such offers now, and walked back toward the carving quarter without giving the exchange much further thought.
It was Old Mu, oddly, who brought the guard back into conversation that evening, having heard some secondhand version of it already circulating through the market by the time Li Fan returned to the shop.
"You've a reputation you don't seem to notice you're building," Old Mu said, not looking up from the panel he was sanding. "A physician who treats strangers in the street and refuses payment. People remember that kind of thing longer than they remember most kindnesses."
"I don't do it for the remembering."
"I know." Old Mu set the sandpaper down, and studied him a moment with an expression Li Fan had learned, across the years, to read as something closer to fondness than the old man's usual dry flatness ever let on directly. "That's precisely why it works the way it does."
Li Fan said nothing further, and returned to his own bench, the comment settling somewhere he didn't examine too closely.
He tested his cultivation again that night, beneath the plum tree now heavy with its first spring buds, and found the density of his Qi Sea had crept forward by another small, unspectacular degree since the last time he'd properly measured it. Four threads of sword qi now, where three had sat comfortably a season ago, each one holding its shape in the dark without the faint tremor that used to mark the edge of what he could sustain.
He didn't reach further than that. The foundation was still building itself the slow way, and he'd long since made peace with the fact that peace was precisely what the process required.
He thought, walking back toward the main hall once the night's cultivation had settled, of Old Mu's stiff mornings and the unsteady step he'd caught only twice so far, and understood, plainly, that whatever this was, it wasn't finished revealing itself yet. He didn't let the thought curdle into worry he had no evidence yet to justify. He simply carried it the way he carried most things that mattered, quietly, and kept watching.
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