My dao to eternity

Two years to the day since he'd first walked through Myriad Beast City's open, unguarded gate, Li Fan stood in his own courtyard at dusk and took stock of exactly what he had become to the people who lived around him.

Lin Fan. A mid-grade formation master, registered and unremarkable, his commissions filed neatly among a hundred others at the guild hall. A formation maniac, the phrase worn smooth by two years of casual repetition until no one bothered questioning whether it was still accurate. A strange recluse who kept his own counsel and asked little of anyone. The Turtle, still, in the mouths of merchants who'd first coined it and never found reason to retire it. Reliable. Fair in his dealings, never once haggling harder than the moment required or softer than his own interests could afford. And harmless — the reputation he valued above every other layer of the identity he'd built, because it asked nothing further of anyone who held it, and offered him, in exchange, precisely the invisibility he'd spent two patient years constructing.

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