My dao to eternity

The shop had gone quiet by the time Old Sun waved him toward the door, the last of the afternoon light slanting low through the front window and catching the dust still hanging in the air from the day's sweeping. "New shipment comes tomorrow," the old man said, not looking up from the ledger he was closing. "Roots, mostly. Sort them before you touch anything else." Li Fan nodded, hung the broom on its peg, and stepped out into the cooling street.

Stonebridge had settled into evening around him — cookfire smoke rising thin and gray above the rooftops, the clatter of a cart being unloaded somewhere behind the market square, a dog barking twice and then giving up. He walked the familiar stretch back to the Green Bamboo without needing to think about the turns anymore.

Madam Yu glanced up from her ledger when the door swung shut behind him. "Herbs again," she said, not really a question, already reaching for a bowl to fill. "Old Sun keeping you busy?" "Busy enough." He took the bowl and a seat near the wall, and she didn't press further, already turning back to whatever she'd been totaling. A week ago she'd asked him three questions before he'd gotten a table. Tonight, one. He ate the broth slowly, listening to the room without meaning to — a pair of merchants arguing over a shipment delay, a woman laughing sharply at something across the room — and let none of it demand his attention.

Upstairs, he latched the door and set the clay cup balanced against the frame, the same as every night. He changed out of the day's robes into something looser, the cloth worn soft from months of the same motion, and ran through the Primordial Stances in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. His breath dropped low into his gut on its own now, no longer something he had to remind himself to do. Sweat beaded along his hairline by the time he finished the last form, and he wiped his face with a damp cloth from the basin before he sat.

He didn't reach for the sutra tonight. He sat a moment longer than usual, weighing something else instead, then closed his eyes and drew on the storage ring.

Books rose into his awareness one after another — cultivation manuals bound in cloth gone stiff with age, thin ledgers, loose pages tied with cord, a few printed volumes with covers cracked along the spine. All of it Wei Baishan's. All of it gathered for a purpose that had nothing to do with handing any of it to Li Fan. He turned that thought over without much weight behind it anymore, the way he turned over most facts about the dead man now — noted, filed, no longer sharp enough to catch on.

He picked the thinnest volume first, more out of habit than plan. A primer, by the look of it — the kind of text a young disciple might be handed before ever touching a real technique. He settled against the wall, angled the book to catch what light the lamp gave off, and began to read.

---