My Dao to Eternity
Chapter 98: A Customer Who Didn't Want Wood
The man who stepped into the shop that afternoon carried himself like someone accustomed to being obeyed rather than served, a small but unmistakable difference Li Fan had learned to catch within the first few seconds of any stranger's entrance. Well-dressed, though not extravagantly. Soft-handed in a way that suggested a life spent directing others rather than laboring himself. He looked over the shop's shelves with the distracted attention of someone who hadn't actually come for anything displayed on them.
"I'm told this shop does fine work," the man said, running a finger along the edge of an unfinished panel without any real interest in its craftsmanship. "I'm also told the younger craftsman here delivered a sealed pouch to the sect's reception hall some years back. Rather a notable errand, for a man who now spends his days carving cabinets."
Li Fan set down the piece he'd been working, unhurried, and gave the man the same level attention he gave any customer, revealing nothing in the small delay beyond ordinary courtesy. "I did carry a pouch to the sect once," he said. "Years ago. I've no notable stories to tell about it. I delivered it sealed, exactly as I was asked to, and received a courtyard for my trouble. That's the whole of it."
"Sealed the entire journey."
"The entire journey."
The man's expression didn't change, though something in his eyes sharpened slightly, cataloguing the answer the same careful way Li Fan had learned to catalogue everything himself. "There's a rumor circulating, out past this city, that the pouch wasn't sealed quite so completely as the sect's own records claim. That a curious mortal messenger might have looked inside before ever reaching the gate." He said it lightly, almost conversationally, the tone of a man testing a blade's edge against his thumb rather than swinging it outright. "Rumors of that kind rarely come from nowhere."
"They rarely come from truth either, in my experience," Li Fan said, holding the man's gaze without either challenge or unease in his own. "I've heard the same story secondhand, from a lacquer merchant who heard it from someone three towns distant. I couldn't tell you who started it, or why. I can tell you it isn't true, for whatever that's worth to a stranger who's walked into my shop specifically to ask."
"Worth a great deal, if it happens to be true." The man finally turned from the shelf to look at him directly, and Li Fan understood, in that single unhurried motion, that whatever this visit actually was, it had never been about wood. "Worth considerably less, if it isn't, and I've simply wasted an afternoon chasing a rumor that amounts to nothing."
He let a silence stretch a moment longer than comfort demanded, the particular pressure of someone accustomed to making others fill silences he had no intention of filling himself. Li Fan didn't fill it. He'd learned that particular patience from men far more dangerous than a soft-handed stranger with pointed questions, and he waited the silence out with the same stillness he brought to a difficult diagnosis.
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"You're remarkably composed," the man said finally, something almost like approval threaded through the observation, "for a mortal craftsman being questioned about matters that could, depending on the answer, prove rather dangerous to know anything about."
"I've nothing dangerous to know," Li Fan said. "A sealed pouch, delivered sealed. A courtyard granted out of gratitude. Ten years of carving cabinets since. If danger's coming for that story, it's coming for a story with nothing at the bottom of it."
The man studied him a moment longer, then inclined his head in something that might have been acknowledgment or might have been simple dismissal, difficult to read either way. "Perhaps," he said. "Or perhaps you're simply better at this than most men your station ever learn to be." He turned toward the door without purchasing anything, without offering a name, without the smallest gesture toward the ordinary courtesies a real customer would have observed. "My apologies for the interruption. Fine work, this shop does."
He was gone before Old Mu emerged from the back room to ask who'd been speaking so long without buying anything.
"A man asking about old commissions," Li Fan said, which was true enough not to require further elaboration, and Old Mu accepted it the same unhurried way he accepted most things now, returning to his own bench without further question.
Li Fan didn't return to his own work quite so easily. He stood a long moment where the stranger had stood, replaying the exchange the same careful way he replayed any encounter worth remembering, cataloguing every word for what it revealed rather than only what it claimed. The man hadn't come to confirm a rumor he already believed false. He'd come to test how Li Fan answered it — the steadiness of his voice, the shape of his denial, whether anything in his composure cracked under a stranger's pointed patience.
He'd passed whatever test that had been. He understood, walking back toward his own courtyard once the shop had closed for the evening, that passing once didn't mean the questioning was finished. A man who tested this carefully rarely stopped at a single visit, and whoever had sent him — sect steward, rival family, something with no name Li Fan had yet uncovered — had learned, at minimum, that the craftsman at the foot of the mountain didn't rattle easily under direct pressure. That was information too, and not all information favored the person who possessed it.
He spent that night beneath the training room floor rather than under the plum tree, checking the concealment array's every node by lamplight the same thorough way he'd checked it after the tremor years ago, tracing each line with a bare thread of qi and watching the silver shimmer answer clean and steady beneath his hands. Nothing had weakened. Nothing had shifted. But he'd learned, across years of patient watching, that a formation checked twice was a formation that had earned its trust honestly, and he wasn't willing to let one visit from an unnamed stranger be the reason that habit slipped even once.
He climbed back up from the chamber well past the hour he usually kept, and sat beneath the plum tree only long enough to let the Primordial Breath settle into something steady before he finally went inside. Whatever was gathering around the old pouch's shadow, it had finally learned his face. He would need, from here forward, to watch considerably more carefully than a distant rumor had ever required of him before.
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