My dao to eternity

The Dragon Elephant manual sat open on the workbench for the eleventh night in a row, the same page it had been open to for the past three, its ink gone slightly soft at the corners from handling.

Li Fan read the passage again. Then a fourth time. He set the manual down and pressed two fingers against his own forearm, feeling for the layered structure beneath the skin — muscle over bone, bone wrapped in marrow, the whole arrangement held together by something the text kept circling without ever naming directly.

The workshop was dark except for the single oil lamp on the bench. Outside, the last light had gone out of the sky an hour ago, and the sound of the river came faint and steady through the courtyard wall, a low continuous rush beneath the closer creak of the persimmon tree's branches shifting in the night wind.

The manual was not badly written. It was, if anything, too precisely written — dense with instruction on which meridians to reinforce first, which pressure points absorbed impact best, how to sequence the tempering of bone against sinew against skin. Three Late Core Condensation cultivators, dead in a gorge, were proof enough that the method worked. Old Sun had taught him, over three years, to read a body as a single connected structure rather than a collection of separate parts. Something about the manual's sequence kept snagging against that training every time he reached the same page.