Chapter 134: Three Philosophies on a Borrowed Table
My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 134
Chapter 134: Three Philosophies on a Borrowed Table
A week after the accounting of spirit stones, once the workshop had settled into a rhythm steady enough to spare him a few undisturbed evenings, Li Fan turned his attention to the manuals.
He'd set them aside deliberately that first night, the same way he'd set aside the unread letters and the woman's silver hairpin — not out of disinterest, but because a mind still raw from Crow's Throat was no mind to trust with unfamiliar cultivation texts. A decade of caution had taught him that lesson long before Wei Baishan's remnant had nearly cost him his life over a "final inheritance" left too eagerly unexamined. He read new texts only when his judgment was clear, and only ever to study, never to practice blind.
That evening, with the lamp trimmed low and the shutters closed against the autumn chill, he finally laid them out.
The lamp's oil burned with a faint mineral smell, sharp against the cooler air seeping in through the shutter seams, and the paper beneath his hands carried its own scent in turn — old ink, dust, and beneath both the faint, particular mustiness of pages that had spent years pressed inside a storage pouch's compressed space. Outside, the river murmured low and constant, and somewhere down the lane a dog barked twice at nothing before falling silent again.