My dao to eternity

The common room of the Green Bamboo smelled of rice porridge and woodsmoke when Li Fan came down for breakfast, the low tables mostly empty except for a pair of cart drivers hunched over their bowls near the door and, closer to the counter, a merchant's steward complaining to no one in particular about the price of dye.

Li Fan took a table near the wall, out of the morning light spilling through the open shutters, and let a bowl of porridge steam in front of him while he listened. He'd learned, over six days of walking Stonebridge's streets, that a man eating quietly drew far less notice than a man asking questions. People talked freely around someone who looked like he wasn't paying attention.

"—Zhao's cutting the rice price again, third time this season," the steward was saying, jabbing a finger at the air as if the Zhao family patriarch stood in front of him. "Man doesn't care he's driving half the smallholders under. Says it's the Wang family's fault for undercutting the iron trade first, but that's not what I heard—"

"You heard wrong, then," Madam Yu said from behind the counter, not looking up from the ledger she was totaling. "Wang's forge hasn't touched grain pricing in a year. That's Chen family talk, trying to make Zhao look bad so their caravans get first pick of the southern road."

The steward grumbled something Li Fan didn't catch and went back to his bowl. A moment later, two guards passed by outside the open window, their voices carrying in through the shutters before fading down the street. "—said the escort agency's short two men for the caravan going south. Luo Shan's been at the market since dawn trying to hire on anyone who can hold a spear straight."

Li Fan turned that over slowly, spooning porridge without any hurry. An escort agency, hiring. He filed it next to everything else he'd gathered that week — the blacksmith's reputation, the herb shop, the four families carving the city up between farmland and forges and caravans.

Near the counter, an old man in a patched robe leaned against the wall, waiting on his morning bowl, and struck up conversation with the steward without much invitation. "You hear the sect's coming again? Azure Cloud. Three years off yet, but they're already saying it in the market. Recruiters always start the talk early, get families saving up their hopes for nothing."

"My sister's boy tested last time," the steward said. "Spiritual roots, weak water affinity. Took him on as an outer disciple. Family hasn't seen him since."

"Lucky boy," the old man said, without much feeling behind it. "Rest of us just farm."

Li Fan finished his porridge without comment, turning the pieces over as he ate. A sect that recruited every three years, testing for spiritual roots he didn't have. An escort agency short-handed and hiring. Families that ran the city's trade the way the seven sects ran the region beyond it. None of it was new information exactly — he'd heard fragments of all of it over the past week — but sitting still long enough to let the pieces settle side by side told him something the wandering hadn't. Stonebridge had a shape to it now, the same way the valley behind him had once resolved into a shape on Wei Baishan's map. He just hadn't decided yet where he fit inside it.

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