My dao to eternity

He reopened the shop that winter, working alone in a silence he'd stopped fighting against and started simply carrying, the second bench left bare rather than filled with any new apprentice's tools. Word of his absence had already settled into the market's ordinary gossip by the time customers returned — a craftsman's private grief, most assumed, needing no further explanation than that, and Li Fan let the assumption stand rather than correct it.

The Jiang family had gone quiet in the months since the ambush, the sect's watchful word apparently enough, for now, to keep them from trying again openly. Li Fan didn't mistake the quiet for resolution. He simply folded it into the same patient accounting he kept for everything else unresolved, and turned his attention instead to understanding exactly what three months in that chamber had actually bought him.

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