My dao to eternity

He walked back into Quiet River Town two days after the fight, the same tired traveler who'd left it, nothing about his bearing suggesting he'd spent the intervening nights burning nine bodies to ash on a forest road forty miles south.

The bandages under his sleeve had already been changed twice. The cut across his shoulder had closed to a thin, tender line, faster than it should have for a wound that deep, his body's returning path doing in three days what an ordinary cultivator's flesh would have taken two weeks to manage. He walked through the northern gate at the same unhurried pace he always walked at, nodded once to the gatekeeper who'd long since stopped noting his comings and goings, and let himself back into the workshop as though nothing about the world had changed while he was gone.

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