My dao to eternity

Li Fan told him the next morning, before the shop had opened, the two of them sitting across the back room's small table with a pot of tea going cold between them while Li Fan laid out everything he'd been carrying since the tanner's yard.

He didn't tell all of it. Some threads still felt too thin, too speculative, to hand an old man with a failing heart — the exact wording of a dying cultivator's final request, the precise shape of Wei Baishan's betrayal years before Old Mu had ever known him. But he told the parts that mattered to tonight's danger plainly: the pouch, the false rumor, the soft-handed stranger's pointed questions, the assassin in the alley and the poison meant to finish what the blade hadn't, the ledger's three keepers and the Jiang family's rotating seat over it.

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