My dao to eternity

Two months of careful, patient digging told Li Fan more than he'd learned in the entire year before it. The Jiang family, he confirmed through a chain of small, deniable inquiries — a genealogist paid in medicine rather than coin, a retired steward who remembered old grudges more clearly than recent gossip — had held the reception hall's rotating liaison seat for eleven years running, an unusually long tenure for a position meant to change hands every few seasons. Longer still, the family's second son had vanished from public record six years back, no death notice, no formal explanation, simply gone from every guest list and family accounting Li Fan could find traces of.

A missing son. A liaison seat held far past its normal term. A ledger entry demanding referral on a decade-old mortal delivery. None of it, laid end to end, formed a certain picture. But it formed enough of one that Li Fan stopped treating the Jiang family as a passive administrative curiosity and started treating them as the center of whatever this actually was.

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