Chapter 124: Three Days, Counted Down
My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 124
Chapter 124: Three Days, Counted Down
Li Fan spent the first of his three days on the wards.
He walked the courtyard's perimeter twice, checking each node by hand rather than trusting his divine sense alone, pressing two fingers against the buried stones and feeling for the faint, steady thread of qi still circulating beneath them. The formation held. It had held through the tremor years ago, through the triple-bell search, through every lesser test since. He reinforced it anyway, feeding a measured stream of Core Condensation qi into the weakest node near the eastern wall until the stone under his palm went warm and the silver shimmer overhead brightened by a degree no ordinary eye would have caught.
The morning was cold enough that his breath showed in the air, and the plum tree's bare branches clicked faintly against each other in the wind. Somewhere down the street, a cart wheel groaned over a loose paving stone — one of the last few families still loading their belongings before the roads south grew too crowded to move through quickly.
He worked through the hidden chamber next, carrying up what mattered and leaving behind what didn't. Wei Baishan's older texts, the ones he'd already stripped for everything the sutra could use, stayed on their shelves. The notes on the dragon mark, the ledger pages on the Jiang family, Old Mu's crane and the second unfinished carving — those he wrapped in oiled cloth and packed into a chest small enough to carry on his own back without slowing him down.