My dao to eternity

Old Mu refused to close the shop, and Li Fan didn't argue the point once he understood the shape of what refusing would actually cost the old man. A carver who stopped carving before his hands forced him to stop was a carver who'd already decided he was finished, and Li Fan had watched enough patients make that same quiet surrender to recognize it from a distance now, the particular defeat that settled into a person the moment they let an illness decide more of their life than the illness had actually claimed.

So the shop stayed open. What changed was quieter than a closed door, and took most of a season to settle into its new shape.

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