My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 91: The Second Bench
Old Mu refused to close the shop, and Li Fan didn't argue the point once he understood the shape of what refusing would actually cost the old man. A carver who stopped carving before his hands forced him to stop was a carver who'd already decided he was finished, and Li Fan had watched enough patients make that same quiet surrender to recognize it from a distance now, the particular defeat that settled into a person the moment they let an illness decide more of their life than the illness had actually claimed.
So the shop stayed open. What changed was quieter than a closed door, and took most of a season to settle into its new shape.
Li Fan began arriving earlier, before the sun had properly cleared the rooftops, and found reasons to be the one unlocking the front more mornings than not. He framed it, when Old Mu noticed, as his own restlessness rather than any concern for the old man's mornings — a lie thin enough that neither of them fully believed it, offered anyway because the alternative would have cost Old Mu something Li Fan wasn't willing to make him pay.
The heavier commissions found their way onto Li Fan's bench without either of them ever discussing the shift directly. Old Mu kept the small work, the detail passes, the corrections that mattered more than raw strength or steady hours — precisely the work his hands could still manage on the days his own body cooperated, and precisely the work that let him remain, undeniably, still a craftsman rather than a patient waiting out his own decline.
"You're managing me," Old Mu said one afternoon, watching Li Fan haul a heavy length of cedar onto the main bench without being asked.
"I'm managing the workload," Li Fan said. "You're welcome to disagree with how it's divided."
Old Mu grunted, and didn't disagree.
The medicine took more careful tending than the wood did. Li Fan spent his nights that season working through every text in his own storage ring that touched on the heart's failing rhythm, cross-referencing Old Sun's decades of case notes against a handful of older, denser volumes he'd bought years ago in the capital's book district and never had cause to open properly until now.
Most of what he found confirmed rather than expanded what he'd already understood the night Old Mu collapsed. A failing heart in an old body was not, in most cases, a condition medicine reversed. It was a condition medicine managed, patiently, buying time in small increments rather than offering any single decisive cure. He adjusted the tonic's formula twice over those months, refining the balance between the herbs that steadied the rhythm and the ones that eased the strain on the old man's blood, testing each adjustment carefully before trusting it.
The second formula held better than the first. Old Mu's spells grew further apart under it, three weeks between the worst of them where before there had been ten days, and Li Fan allowed himself something close to satisfaction over that small, hard-won margin, without ever mistaking it for the cure he knew this particular illness didn't have waiting anywhere in his own accumulated knowledge.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
Old Mu grew talkative in a way he'd never quite been before, in the quiet hours between customers, as though some old reluctance in him had finally worn thin enough for ordinary conversation to pass through it more easily than it once had.
He spoke of his own master, a stern, exacting man who'd died at his bench mid-stroke on an ordinary afternoon, chisel still gripped in his hand when they found him. He spoke of the first commission he'd ever completed entirely alone, a modest shrine panel for a family long since moved on from this city, and how proud he'd been of work that, looking back now, he considered barely competent. He spoke, once, briefly, of a wife who'd died young, before Li Fan had ever come to this city, a subject he closed as quickly as he'd opened it and never returned to again.
Li Fan listened to all of it without pressing for more than what was freely given, the same patient discipline he brought to every difficult conversation now, understanding that a man laying out the pieces of his own life in no particular order was doing something closer to sorting than to storytelling, and that the sorting was his to do in whatever order he needed.
The panel Old Mu had been working on the day he collapsed sat untouched on the second bench for nearly a month afterward, neither of them willing to be the one to move it. It was a small piece, a modest relief carving meant for no particular commission, something Old Mu had simply been shaping in his idle hours the way some craftsmen kept a private project running alongside their paid work.
Li Fan finally asked about it on an evening when the shop had gone quiet enough for the question to seem natural rather than pointed.
"It's nothing," Old Mu said, though his eyes lingered on it a moment before he looked away. "An old man's habit of leaving something unfinished on purpose. Keeps the hands honest between real commissions."
"What is it meant to become?"
Old Mu was quiet a long moment. "I haven't decided," he said finally, which Li Fan understood, without needing it explained further, wasn't entirely the truth.
Li Fan's own cultivation continued its slow accumulation beneath all of it, tended in whatever hours the day still allowed, the density of his Qi Sea inching forward the same patient way it always had. He found, some nights, that the discipline required to sit with Old Mu's decline without forcing a solution he didn't have carried over easily into the discipline required to sit with a bottleneck he couldn't force either. Both asked the same thing of him. Attention. Patience. The refusal to mistake urgency for progress.
He sat beneath the plum tree one evening that season, its leaves fully returned now, thick and green against a sky gone the deep orange of a long summer's dusk, and let the Primordial Breath settle into its familiar rhythm. Somewhere across the city, Old Mu would be closing the shop for the night, moving slower than he once had but moving still, the second bench's unfinished carving waiting exactly where he'd left it.
Li Fan didn't know yet what that carving was meant to become. He suspected, sitting there in the fading light, that Old Mu didn't fully know either, not yet, and that some part of the old man was working it out the same slow way Li Fan worked out everything that actually mattered.
He let the thought settle, and returned his attention to his own breath, and let the evening carry itself the rest of the way toward dark.
Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!
Use arrow keys (or A / D) to PREV/NEXT chapter