My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 95: A Thread Pulled Loose from the Sleeve
The tailor's wife told it first, and by the time it reached Li Fan secondhand through Old Mu's counter, the story had already passed through enough mouths that he had to sort the shape of it from underneath everyone else's embellishments before he could trust any of it at all.
Three strangers had come through the western market two days past, she said. Robes black enough to swallow the lamplight around them, faces covered by plain cloth masks that showed nothing but the eyes, and when one of them had reached up to adjust his hood against a gust of wind, something had caught the light along his sleeve — a dark thread worked into the black cloth, coiled like a serpent, gone again the instant the arm dropped back to his side.
They'd bought nothing. Asked no questions anyone could recall. Simply walked the length of the market once, unhurried, and left through the eastern gate before the hour was out.
Li Fan set down the plane he'd been running along a cabinet door's edge, and didn't pick it back up for a long moment.
He'd heard variations of this story before, scattered thin across years of city gossip — a glimpse of dark robes on a distant ridge, a rumor of masked riders passing through some other town three provinces off, nothing ever solid enough to hold. This one held differently. A dragon worked into black thread was not a detail an ordinary tailor's wife would invent out of nothing, and the particular stillness with which she'd apparently described the strangers' passage — unhurried, purposeless, gone before anyone thought to be afraid — matched a memory Li Fan had carried, unexamined, since long before he'd ever set foot in this city.
He remembered the weight of a storage pouch pressed into his hands by a dying man's failing grip. He remembered the sound of a fight somewhere behind him in the dark, cut short. He remembered, most of all, the particular contempt in a masked stranger's voice the instant before that contempt had bought him the one opening he'd needed to survive it.
That had been a different forest, a different life, more years behind him now than he cared to count precisely. But black robes and a dragon worked into the thread were not the kind of detail that simply repeated itself by coincidence across an entire continent.
"You've gone quiet," Old Mu said, glancing over from his own bench.
"Thinking," Li Fan said, which was true enough not to require further explanation.
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Old Mu studied him a moment longer than the answer strictly earned, then let it go the same unhurried way he let most things go now, trusting Li Fan to speak further only if speaking served some purpose. "The tailor's wife exaggerates everything," he said instead, returning to his own work. "Give her a stray dog and she'll have you believing it was a tiger by sundown. I wouldn't lose sleep over three strangers walking through a market without buying anything. Strange men pass through this city every season."
"Most strange men don't leave a market without spending a single coin."
Old Mu paused at that, chisel stilled against the wood. "No," he admitted slowly. "They don't, at that." He didn't press further, though something in his expression suggested he'd filed the detail away with more weight than his dismissive tone had let on.
Li Fan walked the western market himself the following morning, unhurried, buying nothing he didn't actually need, cataloguing the ordinary texture of the stalls the same careful way he catalogued anything that might matter later. Nothing marked the street as different from any other. Fishmongers called their prices. A child chased a loose chicken between two carts. The tailor's own shop sat exactly where it always had, its owner's wife visible through the front window, deep in conversation with another customer who was very likely hearing the same story Li Fan had already heard twice now.
He found no fresh trace of black robes, no lingering wrongness in the air the way Wei Baishan's old texts sometimes described a place a powerful cultivator had recently passed through. Whatever had walked this street two days ago had already moved on, leaving nothing behind but a story that would keep circulating, growing stranger with every retelling, until it settled eventually into the same category as every other unconfirmed rumor this city had ever half-believed and then forgotten.
Li Fan didn't intend to let it settle quite that easily. He added the sighting to the same private accounting he'd kept for years now — the sealed pouch he'd delivered and never learned the contents of, the fight in a distant forest he'd survived through nothing but a stranger's contempt, the black-robed shapes he'd glimpsed once before on a northern ridge locked in battle with something he still couldn't name. Separate threads, none of them yet woven into a shape he trusted enough to act on. But threads that kept reappearing, season after season, in a life he'd built specifically to avoid ever being found by anything that mattered.
He sat beneath the plum tree that evening later than usual, the koi beneath the dark pond barely stirring, and let the Primordial Breath settle slower than it wanted to, his own attention still turning the tailor's story over rather than surrendering fully to the rhythm of cultivation. He thought of the years he'd spent building this particular quiet — the shop, the courtyard, Old Mu's steady, familiar presence a short walk across the city — and understood, without letting the thought curdle into anything sharper than plain awareness, that quiet built this carefully could still be visited by things it had never invited in.
He didn't reach for his sword that night, nor for any technique meant to answer a threat that hadn't yet announced itself as one. He simply sat, and breathed, and let the tailor's story take its place among everything else he was learning, patiently, never to discard.
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