My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 90: What the Pulse Said
Old Mu went down without any warning Li Fan could later point to, not a stumble or a stagger, just a sudden, complete loss of the strength holding him upright, his chisel clattering against the bench a half second before the rest of him followed it toward the floor.
Li Fan crossed the shop before the sound had finished echoing, catching the old man's shoulders before his head could strike the boards, and lowered him the rest of the way down with the same careful control he'd once used to lower a poisoned child's breathing into something steady. Old Mu's eyes were open, aware, his mouth working without producing anything Li Fan could immediately understand.
"Don't try to speak yet," Li Fan said, already pressing two fingers to the old man's wrist, cataloguing the pulse beneath his fingertips with the same trained attention he gave any patient, though his own chest had gone tighter than professional distance should have allowed. Fast. Uneven. Skipping every fourth or fifth beat in a way that told him plainly this wasn't simple exhaustion.
He carried Old Mu to the narrow cot in the shop's back room, the same cot the old man kept for afternoons when the work ran long enough to warrant a rest, and worked through the examination with the unhurried thoroughness he brought to every difficult case now. Breath. Color. The dilation of the eyes. The strength of grip in each hand, tested one at a time, the left noticeably weaker than the right had been a moment before.
By the time Old Mu's breathing had steadied enough to speak properly, Li Fan had already settled on the shape of what he was looking at, though he kept the diagnosis to himself a moment longer, unwilling to say it aloud until he'd confirmed it as thoroughly as the old man's condition allowed.
"How long was I down," Old Mu said, his voice thinner than Li Fan had ever heard it.
"Not long. A few breaths before I reached you." Li Fan kept his hands moving as he spoke, pressing gently along the old man's chest, listening to what his own honed hearing could catch of the rhythm beneath the ribs — a faint, irregular flutter that no ordinary mortal physician's ear would have picked out at all. "Has this happened before?"
Old Mu was quiet a moment too long for the answer to be no.
"Twice," he admitted finally. "Smaller both times. A dizziness, mostly. I sat until it passed and told myself it was nothing worth mentioning."
Li Fan sat back on his heels, and let the silence hold a moment before he spoke again, choosing his own words the same careful way he chose most things that mattered.
"It's your heart," he said, plainly, no dressing softening the fact. "Not a poison. Not an injury. The blood isn't moving through it the way it should anymore, and the rhythm's begun slipping because of it. This is what age does to a heart that's carried a man for as many years as yours has carried you."
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Old Mu absorbed that the same unhurried way he absorbed most things, his gaze fixed on the ceiling beams rather than on Li Fan's face. "How bad."
"Bad enough that I'll be watching it closely from here forward. Not bad enough, tonight, that I think you're in immediate danger." Li Fan kept his voice level, refusing to soften the truth into something gentler than it actually was, the same discipline Old Sun had once drilled into him over a different patient's difficult prognosis. "But it will get worse. Slowly, most likely. I can't promise you slowly."
Old Mu was quiet a long while after that, his breathing settling further into something closer to normal, though the faint flutter beneath it never fully smoothed away under Li Fan's attentive hearing.
"Well," Old Mu said finally, dry as ever despite everything. "At least it's an honest enemy. Can't bargain with old age. Can't out-craft it either." He gave a short, humorless breath that might have been a laugh in better circumstances. "Forty years I've spent this trade telling myself the wood would outlast me. Turns out I've got that backward. I'll outlast some of it. Not all."
Li Fan brewed a tonic that evening from what stock the shop's back shelf still held, a formula meant to steady an uneven pulse rather than cure the underlying weakness driving it, and pressed the first dose into Old Mu's hands with clear instruction on how and when the rest should follow.
"This won't mend it," he said. "It will make the bad moments further apart, and less severe when they come. That's the most honest promise I can make you."
"That's more than most men my age get offered," Old Mu said, and drank it without further argument.
Li Fan stayed at the shop long past its usual closing that night, sitting on an overturned crate near the cot while Old Mu drifted in and out of an uneasy rest, listening to the old man's breathing the same careful way he'd once listened to a poisoned child's, cataloguing every small change against what he'd need to know the next time this happened.
He walked home well after the last lantern in the carving quarter had guttered out, the streets empty and quiet around him, his own footsteps the only sound on the packed stone beneath him. He didn't hurry. There was nothing left to hurry toward tonight, only the plain, settled fact of what he'd learned sitting somewhere in his chest, heavier than he wanted to examine too closely.
He sat beneath the plum tree once he reached his own courtyard, not to cultivate, only to sit, the koi beneath the pond's dark surface moving in their same slow, familiar circuits. He thought of every danger this world had ever handed him that he'd been able to meet with a sword, a formation, careful preparation, patient study. He thought, too, of the one kind of danger none of those things had ever once been built to answer.
He didn't let the thought turn into despair. Old Mu was still alive tonight, still breathing steadily in the back room of a shop that had stood for decades before Li Fan had ever walked through its door, and there was real work left to do in the space between tonight and whatever eventually came. He would watch closely. He would keep the tonic stocked. He would learn everything this world's medicine could teach him about a failing heart, and apply every scrap of it he could find.
But he understood, sitting there in the dark with the pond's slow ripples the only movement in the whole quiet courtyard, that some things simply couldn't be fought the way he'd fought everything else. Only tended. Only accompanied, for as long as the tending allowed.
He sat with that a long while before he finally went inside.
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