My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 92: What the Wood Was For
Autumn came around again the way it always did, the market stalls swapping their summer melons for strings of drying peppers, the carving quarter's evening air turning sharp enough that Li Fan began keeping a second robe folded near the training room door for the walk home. Old Mu's spells had held steady through the warm months, three weeks between the worst of them holding as a rough average, close enough to a rhythm that Li Fan had stopped bracing quite so hard each time the old man paused mid-motion at his bench.
He still watched. He'd learned, across a season of careful attention, that watching for the wrong sign was almost as dangerous as not watching at all, so he kept his attention loose rather than fixed, catching the real changes without inventing ones that weren't there.
The second bench's carving finally moved on an ordinary afternoon in late autumn, no ceremony announcing it, Old Mu simply picking the piece back up after nearly two seasons of leaving it untouched and working it the rest of the way through in the space of four unhurried days.
Li Fan didn't ask about it this time. He'd learned that much from the first refusal, and let Old Mu work in whatever silence the old man wanted around it, the shop's ordinary sounds filling the space instead — the scrape of Li Fan's own chisel through a merchant's commissioned lattice screen, the creak of the front door as customers came and went, a cart's wheels rattling past outside.
On the fourth evening, once the shop had emptied and the light outside had gone the deep orange of an early autumn dusk, Old Mu set the finished piece on the counter between them, the same flat, unceremonious way he'd once set down the Wen family's original commission letter, years ago now.
It was a small carving, no larger than two cupped hands, shaped into a single crane standing at rest rather than in flight, its wings folded close against its body, its head turned slightly to one side as though listening for something just beyond the edge of the wood.
"Take it," Old Mu said, before Li Fan had found anything worth saying.
"For what occasion?"
"No occasion. That's rather the point." Old Mu's hands, still faintly unsteady even at rest, folded together on the counter's worn surface. "A flying crane means ambition. A young man's carving, usually, meant for someone still climbing toward something. This one's resting." He nodded once toward the piece. "I started it the week after you ruined my first Wen commission, if you want the honest timing of it. I've been shaping it, on and off, ever since, whenever I couldn't quite say the thing I meant to say plainly."
Li Fan turned the crane over in his own hands, the same careful attention he'd give any well-made piece, though something in his chest had gone tighter than the examination strictly required. The wings held real depth beneath their simple lines, each feather distinct without any of the excess Old Mu had spent years training out of Li Fan's own early attempts. The bird's stillness carried weight rather than absence, the particular stillness of something that had already arrived wherever it meant to go.
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"I had two apprentices before you," Old Mu said, his voice carrying none of its usual dry flatness now. "You know that already. What I never told you plainly is what I decided, after the second one left, about what I actually wanted from a third, if I ever let myself risk a third at all."
He was quiet a moment, his gaze fixed on the crane rather than on Li Fan.
"Not talent alone. The boy who robbed me had talent to spare, and it meant nothing once his hands decided coin mattered more than the trade. Not gratitude either. The girl who left wasn't ungrateful, only young, and gratitude alone was never going to keep her here past a better offer." He looked up, finally, meeting Li Fan's eyes directly. "I wanted someone who'd stay because the work itself was enough reason to stay. Not for what it earned him. Not for what it might lead to. Someone who'd still be standing at that bench on an ordinary Tuesday with nothing waiting for him afterward except more of the same, and find that sufficient."
He nodded once more toward the crane resting in Li Fan's hands.
"That's what I carved, near enough as wood allows. A crane that's stopped climbing because it's already found the branch worth resting on. Took me a long while to understand that's what I was even making. Longer still to understand why it kept needing your face in my mind while I worked it, though I'll admit that part plainly enough now, since I've apparently decided tonight is the night for plain admissions."
Li Fan sat with the weight of the small carving a long moment, turning it over once more in the fading light, and found the words he reached for felt too small for what the moment actually held.
"I'll keep it," he said finally, simply, which was the truest thing he had to offer.
"See that you do." Old Mu's dry tone had returned by the time he said it, the same familiar flatness settling back over him like a robe pulled back on after a moment spent without it. "I've no intention of carving another. My hands aren't what they were, and that one took more out of me than I'll admit to twice."
Li Fan walked home that evening with the crane wrapped carefully in a scrap of cloth inside his robe, the weight of it small against his chest but strangely present the whole distance back, the way a thing that mattered always seemed to weigh more than its actual size accounted for.
He set it on the low shelf in the main hall once he reached his own courtyard, beside nothing else of particular significance, and stood looking at it a while in the lamplight before he finally sat beneath the plum tree for the evening's cultivation.
He thought, settling into the Primordial Breath's familiar rhythm, of every home he'd built and lost and rebuilt since a spatial rift had first pulled him out of one world and dropped him into this one. A cave. A courtyard granted by a grateful sect. A shop that had slowly, across years neither of them had tracked carefully enough to notice passing, become something closer to a second family than a place of simple employment.
He didn't let the thought grow larger than the evening could comfortably hold. He simply breathed, and let the crane sit quiet on its shelf behind him, resting exactly the way Old Mu had carved it to rest, and let that be enough for one ordinary night.
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