My dao to eternity

Li Fan felt the wrongness before he saw any cause for it, a prickle along the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the night's mild chill, three streets from his own courtyard, the tanner's yard's familiar stink of lime and hide thick in the air around him. He didn't stop walking. He didn't slow. He let his pace carry him forward the same unhurried way it always did, while every sense he'd spent years sharpening turned outward, cataloguing the narrow alley ahead with the same care he gave a difficult diagnosis.

No footsteps. No breath he could catch beneath the alley's own ordinary sounds — a dog somewhere behind a fence, water dripping steady off the tannery's low roof. But the air itself felt wrong, a held stillness where the night's usual small movements should have been, the particular silence of something patient enough not to breathe too loudly.

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