My dao to eternity

Autumn came around again the way it always did, the market stalls swapping their summer melons for strings of drying peppers, the carving quarter's evening air turning sharp enough that Li Fan began keeping a second robe folded near the training room door for the walk home. Old Mu's spells had held steady through the warm months, three weeks between the worst of them holding as a rough average, close enough to a rhythm that Li Fan had stopped bracing quite so hard each time the old man paused mid-motion at his bench.

He still watched. He'd learned, across a season of careful attention, that watching for the wrong sign was almost as dangerous as not watching at all, so he kept his attention loose rather than fixed, catching the real changes without inventing ones that weren't there.

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