My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 93: Word From the Trade Roads
Winter passed gently that year, mild enough that the market never fully emptied even on its coldest mornings, and Old Mu's health held its steady rhythm through the whole of it, three weeks between spells stretching, twice, into four. Li Fan allowed himself a cautious measure of relief over the stretch, careful not to mistake a good season for a cure, but grateful for it regardless.
The shop settled into a rhythm neither of them needed to discuss anymore. Li Fan opened most mornings now. Old Mu worked the smaller pieces at his own unhurried pace, corrected Li Fan's larger commissions when correction was warranted, and complained, with real feeling, whenever a customer haggled too aggressively over a fair price. Between them, the work continued.
The lumber merchant's apprentice brought more than timber that spring, a lanky boy of perhaps fourteen who'd taken to lingering at Old Mu's counter longer than any delivery strictly required, drawn, Li Fan suspected, less by the wood itself than by whatever gossip he could trade for a few idle minutes out of his own master's sight.
"Caravans coming up from the southern road say there's fighting near the coast," the boy said one morning, hauling a bundle of cedar planks off his cart while Li Fan checked the grain for warping. "Two sects, they're saying. Something over a mining rights dispute that turned into blades faster than anyone expected."
"Which sects," Li Fan asked, more out of habit than any real investment in the answer. News from distant coastal sects rarely touched Myriad Craft City directly, and he'd learned, across years of hearing similar rumors pass through the market unconfirmed, to hold most of them loosely until something more solid arrived behind them.
The boy shrugged, hefting another plank. "Nobody agrees on the names. My master says it's nothing, the kind of squabble that happens every few years and settles itself before it ever reaches this far inland." He grinned, young enough still to find the prospect more exciting than alarming. "I say it sounds like something worth hearing more about."
Li Fan finished his inspection of the wood and paid the boy the agreed price, and thought little more of the exchange once the cart had rattled off down the street. Distant conflicts between sects he'd never had cause to deal with directly had drifted through this market's gossip for as long as he'd lived in this city, most of them settling themselves the same way the boy's own master predicted, far from anywhere Li Fan's quiet life had ever needed to notice.
He raised it with Old Mu regardless, later that afternoon, less out of concern than out of the habit of sharing whatever the market's ordinary noise carried through the shop's open front.
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Old Mu waved a dismissive hand without looking up from the small relief panel he was working. "There's always fighting somewhere. Some year it's a mining dispute on the coast. Some year it's two families arguing over a border stream three provinces off. The world's always burning somewhere at the edges. Doesn't mean the fire's coming here."
"You don't sound concerned."
"I'm not." Old Mu set his chisel down long enough to meet Li Fan's eyes properly. "I've lived through six of these rumors in my time in this city, and every one of them settled itself into nothing worth remembering by the time the next season's gossip replaced it. The mountain above us has stood a very long while. It'll stand through this too."
Li Fan let the reassurance settle, and returned to his own bench, though he found himself, in the quiet hours that followed, turning the boy's rumor over once more the same careful way he turned over most things worth remembering, filing it beside everything else this world had ever handed him without immediate explanation. Not urgent. Not yet worth chasing further. Only another loose thread added to a growing collection he'd learned, across years of patient watching, never fully to discard.
His own cultivation reached a small, satisfying milestone that same season, the kind of quiet progress that came without any dramatic breakthrough attached to it. He'd spent months working the concealment array beneath the training room floor into something closer to elegant than merely functional, refining the node placement until the formation drew less qi to sustain itself while holding its silver shimmer steadier than it ever had before.
He tested it late one night, extending a full measure of his own qi directly against it rather than the bare thread he usually risked, and watched the response hold without so much as a flicker of instability. He sat back afterward, satisfied in the same unhurried way satisfaction usually reached him now, understanding that the improvement, small as it looked from outside, represented a genuine deepening of formation principles he'd once only copied without truly grasping.
He thought, climbing back up from the chamber that night, of Wei Baishan's old concealment formation, the one that had hidden a whole cave from black-robed pursuers all those years ago. He wondered, briefly, whether his own work now would have satisfied that long-dead alchemist's exacting eye, and found he rather thought it might have, though the thought carried no particular weight beyond simple, quiet pride in his own patient progress.
He sat beneath the plum tree once the formation work was finished, its branches heavy again with the season's new leaves, and let the evening settle around him the same unhurried way most evenings settled now. Somewhere beyond the courtyard wall, the city carried on its ordinary business, merchants closing their stalls, lanterns being lit one by one along the carving quarter's narrow lane, a dog barking somewhere distant and briefly before falling quiet again.
He didn't reach for the rumor of coastal fighting again that night, nor for anything larger than the evening itself required. The mountain had stood a long while, exactly as Old Mu said. Whatever burned at the world's distant edges, it hadn't yet found any reason to reach this far inland, and Li Fan let that plain, ordinary fact carry him the rest of the way into an unremarkable, peaceful night.
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