My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 94: Prices Along the Road
The dried ginseng went up in price twice that summer, and the second time Li Fan noticed it, he asked the herb seller directly rather than simply paying it and moving on the way most customers did.
"Southern caravans are running thin," the woman said, wrapping his purchase in coarse paper with the same brisk efficiency she brought to every transaction. "Two of the regular routes stopped coming through entirely this season. The ones that still make the trip charge more for the risk, and I've no choice but to pass some of that along." She shrugged, the gesture of someone who'd weathered enough bad seasons not to treat this one as unusual. "Nothing that hasn't happened before. It'll settle."
Li Fan paid the new price without argument and carried the herbs back toward the shop, turning the exchange over the same unhurried way he turned over most things worth remembering. A rumor of fighting near the coast was one thing, easy enough to file away as distant noise. Two caravan routes actually stopping was a different kind of information, the sort that came from real disruption rather than mere talk of it.
He mentioned it to Old Mu that evening, less to raise alarm than to keep their habit of sharing the market's ordinary texture between them.
"Prices always creep before they settle," Old Mu said, though he set his chisel down long enough to actually consider the point rather than wave it off the way he had the spring before. "Two routes is more than a rumor, I'll grant you that much. Still a long way from anything reaching this mountain."
"You said the same about the fighting near the coast."
"I did." Old Mu's mouth pulled into something that wasn't quite a smile. "And I'll go on saying it until the day it stops being true. A man my age has heard enough false alarms to know the difference between smoke on a distant hill and a fire at his own door. This is still smoke." He picked the chisel back up. "Watch it if you like. I trust your eyes for that kind of thing more than I trust most men's. But don't let it steal any sleep from you. Not yet."
Li Fan let the reassurance sit beside his own private accounting rather than replace it, the same way he'd let every piece of unconfirmed information sit for years now, weighed rather than dismissed, watched rather than acted on.
Old Mu's health took a rougher turn that same season, the good stretch of the winter before giving way to a run of shorter, harder weeks. Two spells within ten days of each other, closer together than they'd fallen since the very first, and Li Fan adjusted the tonic's dosage carefully upward, watching the old man's color and breath with the same close attention he'd given the very first night this had happened, refusing to let familiarity dull the edge of his own care.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
"You're hovering," Old Mu said, not unkindly, during one such evening, Li Fan's fingers resting lightly against his wrist for the second time that week.
"I'm working."
"You're hovering while working. There's a difference, and you're old enough now to know it." But he didn't pull his wrist away, and Li Fan didn't stop checking, and the two of them settled into the particular rhythm they'd built across the seasons, honest complaint layered over genuine tolerance, neither one bothering anymore to disguise the second thing as the first.
The records-office sweeper's hands had grown bad enough that spring that he could no longer manage his own broom with any real steadiness, and the office had quietly shifted him to lighter duties, dusting shelves and fetching scrolls rather than the sweeping that had defined his decades there. Li Fan found him one afternoon sitting on the low step outside the office, watching the street with the particular stillness of a man who'd run out of tasks his own body could still reliably perform.
"They'll pension me off before the year's out," the old man said, when Li Fan sat briefly beside him with the usual paper of warming tonic. "Sixty years I've kept that floor clean enough to eat from. Now I can't hold a broom steady past the second stroke."
"Sixty years is a long service," Li Fan said.
"It is." The old man took the tonic with hands that shook only slightly less than they had the week before. "Longer than most men get to keep any single thing. I'll not complain about the ending of it, even if my hands would rather I did." He looked sideways at Li Fan, something sharp and amused still alive behind the tremor. "You've a look about you today. Somebody in your own life running the same road I'm on, is he."
Li Fan didn't answer directly, though the accuracy of the guess settled somewhere quiet in his chest. "Something like that," he said finally.
The old man nodded slowly, as though the vague answer told him everything the specific one would have. "Then you already know there's no fixing it. Only walking alongside it as far as the road allows." He handed the empty tonic paper back, folded neat despite the tremor. "That's not nothing, boy. Don't let anyone tell you it's nothing."
Li Fan's own cultivation held its steady, unremarkable pace through the season, the density of his Qi Sea continuing its slow creep forward, his sword forms losing another fraction of wasted motion each time he tested them properly in the training room's lamplight. He didn't chase the bottleneck. He'd made his peace with that particular patience long ago, and nothing in the season's small disruptions — the rising herb prices, Old Mu's harder weeks, the sweeper's failing hands — gave him any new reason to abandon it now.
He sat beneath the plum tree the night the second caravan route's closure was confirmed by a third source, a merchant this time rather than a gossiping delivery boy, and let the Primordial Breath settle into its familiar rhythm while he turned the accumulated pieces over once more in his mind. Distant fighting. Closed roads. Rising prices. None of it, even stacked together, amounted yet to anything he could act on, and he'd learned, across years of patient watching, not to force a shape onto pieces that hadn't yet finished revealing themselves.
He breathed, and let the evening settle, and understood, sitting there with the koi moving slow beneath the dark water and Old Mu's shop closed for the night somewhere across the city, that watching without acting was its own kind of discipline, no less demanding than the discipline his sword required.
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