My dao to eternity

The shop opened the same way it always did. Li Fan swept the front hall in slow, even strokes, dust and dried leaf fragments gathering toward the door in a widening arc, the wood creaking faintly under his weight in the places worn thin by years of the same motion. Old Sun sat behind the counter grinding a fresh batch of root into powder, the pestle turning in his hand at the same unhurried pace it always did, the dry, bitter smell of it filling the front of the shop by the time the first customer wandered in.

A farmer came first, buying salve for a cracked heel. Then a young mother with a basket on her hip, trading a handful of coin for a paper packet of cooling powder against her daughter's fever. Ordinary trade, ordinary morning, the kind Li Fan had grown used to counting off in his head without needing to think about it.

It was well past midmorning before anything about the day changed.

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