Chapter 133: The Bench by the Window
My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 133
Chapter 133: The Bench by the Window
Two nights after he settled into the courtyard, Li Fan sat down at the low table by his bed and finally went through everything he'd carried out of Myriad Craft City's ruin.
He'd delayed it deliberately. There had been the gate hinge to fix, the roof to patch, the courtyard's damp corners to air out before the season's first hard rain — practical work that occupied his hands and asked nothing difficult of the rest of him. But a man who didn't know what he actually owned couldn't plan properly for what came next, and Li Fan had never been comfortable moving forward on an incomplete accounting of anything, least of all his own resources.
He laid the pouches out on the table in the order he'd taken them — the three from the bamboo clearing, the single grey one from the creek bed, the three from Crow's Throat — and opened each in turn, sorting the contents into careful piles by the lamp's low light.
Most of it was exactly what he'd expected. Spare clothing, worn traveling boots, dried rations gone stale, a few personal letters he set aside unread, small tools and mundane odds and ends that told him more about the lives these people had lived than about anything worth his attention now. A cracked whetstone. A half-used inkstone. A woman's hair pin, plain silver, tucked into the old flute-player's pouch alongside dried herbs and a spare bowstring she'd apparently never gotten the chance to use.
The spirit stones took longer to count than everything else combined.
He worked through them methodically, drawing on the perfect memory his Qi Sea breakthrough had left him, sorting each stone by grade and tallying the running total without needing to write anything down. Low-grade stones made up the bulk of it, and when the last pouch was empty and the last stone counted, the total came to just over ten million: six million of low grade, four million of middle grade, and not a single stone of high grade among any of it.
High-grade spirit stones were rare even among established cultivators, valuable enough that the Seven Great Sects guarded their known sources as closely as any inheritance or secret technique. It did not surprise him, turning the thought over, that men fighting a war on behalf of an invading sect would have carried reserves of ordinary wealth rather than treasures worth killing over twice — once by the enemy, and once by their own allies.
Ten million spirit stones was not a sum a mortal woodworker could ever explain owning, nor one many established cultivators could explain without a title or sect banner standing behind the claim. Li Fan understood immediately that the wealth sitting in front of him on a borrowed table was, in its own way, as dangerous as anything that had chased him down the southern road — not because anyone could take it by force, but because the mere fact of it, discovered by the wrong eyes, would undo every careful year he'd spent building the appearance of an unremarkable man.
He divided the stones between two of his own storage pouches, keeping only a modest working sum loose in his robe for ordinary transactions, and resolved to spend the rest exactly the way he'd always spent everything else this world had handed him — slowly, quietly, and only when the need was real enough to justify the risk of drawing on it at all.