My dao to eternity

Most of Li Fan's days settled quickly into a pattern that suited him precisely — mornings inside the courtyard, working through formation theory and the artifact-refining manuals he'd carried out of Crow's Throat, afternoons spent gathering whatever materials that morning's study had shown him he still needed.

Talisman paper. Spirit ink. Talisman pens with bristles fine enough to draw a stable line at a scale most mortal calligraphers would never attempt. Low-grade spiritual metals for the artifact work he'd only begun to properly understand. Medicinal ingredients, more out of old habit than present need. He bought all of it in small, unremarkable quantities, spread across a dozen different stalls rather than concentrated at any single merchant's counter, the same instinct that had once kept him from spending his spirit stones too visibly in a mortal river town.