My dao to eternity

He woke the next morning with the waiter's information settled clearly in his mind, sorted the way he sorted everything worth keeping — three districts, a neutral arrangement built on trade, an office near the boundary between outer and inner where a man with no sect behind him could still rent honest ground to stand on.

He ate a plain breakfast at the Amber Lantern, paid for another night in case his business ran long, and walked out into a morning already busy with the ordinary noise of a city that never seemed to fully quiet down. He did not walk toward the outer district this time. He walked past the crossroads where he'd stood the day before without understanding what separated one side of the city from the other, and let his feet carry him toward the boundary the waiter had described — the point where the streets widened, the crowd thinned, and the air itself began carrying a steadier weight of qi against his skin.