My dao to eternity

The question sat with Li Fan for the better part of a week before he finally understood it was a question worth answering properly rather than simply accepting as another of the sutra's unexplained gifts. Divine sense, flight, Origin Intent — three abilities that had arrived within the same span of months, none of them taught to him by any manual, none of them practiced toward before they'd simply appeared. He'd assumed, the same way he'd assumed with every prior stage of this path, that the sutra had granted them outright, the way a teacher hands a student a finished technique.

He stopped assuming it the evening he tried, out of idle curiosity more than any real expectation of insight, to trace divine sense back to its first true moment. Not the night it had fully manifested, reaching unbidden toward Old Mu's shop, but earlier, further back, toward whatever foundation it had actually grown from.

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