My dao to eternity

The months that followed settled into a rhythm Li Fan hadn't expected to find again so soon after Old Mu's death, though it wore a different shape than the old one had. He worked the shop alone, cultivated deeper into Core Condensation's early stages, and fed the sutra's quiet, patient hunger with whatever new knowledge he could still find reason to chase — a formation text bought secondhand from a traveling scholar, an hour spent watching a blacksmith work metal past the point most customers ever bothered to observe, a conversation with an old fisherman about the particular way current moved beneath still water.

The Jiang family stayed quiet through all of it, no further attempts, no further questions, the sect's watchful word apparently enough to keep them patient rather than reformed. The dragon mark surfaced nowhere new. The Ancestor's Peak's gate remained exactly as warded and unreachable as it had always been. Li Fan let each thread rest exactly where it sat, unresolved, and told himself, with the same discipline he'd always trusted, that unresolved didn't mean forgotten.

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