Chapter 132: Master Lin of Quiet River Town

My Dao to Eternity — Chapter 132

Chapter 132: Master Lin of Quiet River Town

Li Fan did not fly.

The temptation existed, in the days after Crow's Throat, exactly as often as the ache in his shoulder reminded him how much faster the air would carry him than his own two legs. He set the thought aside each time it rose. A cultivator moving through open sky left a wake behind him, however faint, and after three separate encounters in as many stretches of road, he had learned better than to trust any distance he hadn't earned on foot.

He kept to riverbeds where the water had receded low enough to leave a hard clay bank instead of mud that would hold a print. He crossed barren hills rather than the easier valley roads, where a lone traveler stood out clearly against open ground. He doubled back twice through terrain he'd already crossed, watching from cover to see whether anything followed the trail he'd left, and both times found nothing behind him but wind moving through grass that had already forgotten his passing.

His shoulder healed slowly, the lightning's residue taking the better part of a week to fully clear from his meridians even with careful circulation each night. He rationed his remaining pills with the same discipline he'd once rationed fasting powder in a dead alchemist's cave, treating each dose as though it might need to last considerably longer than he hoped it would.

☯

On the sixth day, he reached a ridge high enough to see the horizon clearly in every direction, and stopped there to look back at what he'd left behind for the first time since the limestone crevice.

The Myriad Craft range was no longer recognizable as a mountain at all. Where seven jagged peaks had once stood against the sky for as long as anyone in the region could remember, a low, uneven plateau remained instead, its surface still wreathed in a thin haze of black smoke that hadn't fully cleared in the days since the fighting had moved elsewhere. No golden lattice traced itself across what was left. No spiritual veins burned bright beneath the surface. The mountain that had sheltered a decade of his life looked, from this distance, like nothing more than a scar left across the land by something enormous that had passed through and kept moving.

He stood there for a long while, the wind pulling at his travel-worn robes, and did not feel the grief he'd half-expected to feel. He had already spent what grief he owed the place three mornings after leaving it, watching a column of light rise from its dying veins and understanding, without needing confirmation, that everything physical he'd built there was already gone.

What remained now was simpler. A decision, already made days ago without his quite noticing the moment it settled: he would not go back. Not to search for answers about what had actually happened on that mountain, not to learn who had won or lost the war that had ended it, not for any reason at all. The place was gone, and going back would change nothing about that fact except how much more of himself he risked losing in the attempt.

He turned south and did not look at the ruined range again.

☯

Nine days after Crow's Throat, the terrain finally began to soften into cultivated land — rice paddies stepped down a gentle slope, a scatter of low farmhouses with smoke rising from their chimneys, the ordinary sounds of livestock and children carrying on the wind long before he reached the settlement itself.

Quiet River Town sat where a wide, slow river bent around a low hill, perhaps four thousand souls by his rough count, with no spirit-stone mine within a hundred li and nothing about its layout suggesting any cultivator had taken particular interest in it for generations. The road into town ran along the riverbank itself, packed earth worn smooth by generations of cart wheels, and Li Fan smelled the place before he saw the heart of it — wet clay from the riverbank drying in the autumn sun, woodsmoke drifting low over the rooftops, the sharp brine of salted fish laid out on drying racks near the water, and beneath all of it the faint, sweetish rot of the river mud itself, thick and slow where the current had nowhere urgent to go.

A blacksmith's hammer rang steadily somewhere near the town's center, an unhurried rhythm that never once broke stride, three strikes and a pause, three strikes and a pause, as though the man behind it had been keeping that exact count his entire working life. Somewhere beneath it ran the creak of a waterwheel turning at the river's edge, its wooden paddles slapping the current in a steady, patient beat, and further off still the lowing of oxen being led in from the paddies for the evening.

The market street ran two rows deep with stalls, awnings faded to the color of old straw, and the noise of it reached him half a street before the sight did — merchants calling their prices over stalls of dried fish and autumn vegetables, a woman haggling loudly and cheerfully over the weight of a chicken, someone's cart wheel squealing for want of grease. A tofu seller argued good-naturedly with a regular customer over the price of a block barely worth arguing over, both of them clearly enjoying the argument more than either cared about its outcome. Two old men played a slow game of chess in the shade outside a teahouse, a chipped porcelain pot of tea cooling untouched between them, unhurried by any concern larger than the next move. A group of children chased each other around a well at the lane's center, bare feet slapping the packed earth, their laughter carrying farther than any of the town's other sounds and drawing not a single sharp word from the adults nearby, who seemed long accustomed to the noise and fond of it besides.

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The air carried the smell of frying oil from a noodle stall near the well, sharp and hot, mixing with the greener scent of fresh-cut scallions someone was chopping on a board just out of sight. A butcher's stall further down the row gave off the coppery weight of fresh meat, flies circling lazily above it despite the season's cooling weather, and past that a dye-worker's shop breathed out a chemical tang that clung briefly to the back of Li Fan's throat before the wind carried it off toward the river.

Nothing here moved with the tight, watchful pace he'd grown used to on the road south. No one checked the sky. No one flinched at a stranger's footsteps or measured a passing traveler's stride for danger. An old woman sweeping her doorstep paused only long enough to nod at him before returning to her work, unbothered, and a pair of young men carrying baskets of river fish on shoulder-poles passed close enough that Li Fan caught the cold, clean smell of the catch and heard them arguing amiably about whose basket weighed more.

He walked the length of the market street slowly that first afternoon, letting himself simply absorb the place rather than search it for anything specific — the particular way Quiet River Town's people spoke to each other, unhurried and familiar, half their conversations clearly continuations of arguments and jokes years old already; the specific creak of loose planking on the footbridge crossing a drainage channel near the eastern lanes; the way late afternoon light slanted gold and low across the rooftops, catching dust motes stirred up by the day's foot traffic and turning the whole street faintly hazy, like looking at it through a fine gauze.

It was exactly the kind of place Li Fan would have chosen, given time and a clear head to choose deliberately rather than simply walking until his legs demanded he stop. Poor enough that no one here would ever have reason to look twice at a modest craftsman with a plain accent and an unremarkable pack. Ordinary enough that its own rhythm — hammer strikes, waterwheel, the market's rise and fall through the day — would eventually become his rhythm too, if he let it.

He found a small, somewhat damp courtyard for sale near the weavers' shacks on the town's eastern edge, its gate hanging slightly loose on one hinge and its single room smelling of old rain and neglected wood, and paid for it with coin drawn from the pouches he'd taken along the road south. He gave his name to the seller as Lin — a woodworker from the north, he explained, whose family had scattered when bandits burned his home village. The seller, an elderly widow eager to be rid of a property her late husband had never finished repairing, asked no further questions and seemed relieved not to have to, her attention already drifting toward the coin in her palm and the evening meal waiting for her elsewhere.

☯

On the third evening, with the courtyard's leaking roof patched well enough to keep out the autumn rain and a simple meal of rice and pickled vegetables settling in his stomach, Li Fan opened the chest he'd carried the entire length of his flight from Myriad Craft City.

Inside, wrapped carefully in oiled cloth that had somehow stayed dry through creek crossings and a fight that had left his own sleeve soaked in blood, sat Old Mu's resting crane, its wings folded exactly as they'd been the day he'd first been given them. Beside it, smaller and rougher, the cedar bird he'd carved himself in the shop's last quiet evening, its wings folded the same deliberate way rather than spread — not imitation exactly, but the kind of echo that happens naturally when a student has learned to see the way his teacher saw.

He set them both on a plain pine shelf above the narrow bed that had come with the courtyard, side by side, and studied them for a moment in the low light of a single oil lamp.

The quiet years in Myriad Craft City were over. The shop was gone. The courtyard with its koi pond and bare plum tree was gone. Old Mu was gone, had been gone since before any of this began, his heart giving out quietly in his sleep long before the war ever reached the mountain that had housed them both. The men who had hunted Li Fan across a hundred li of road and forest and stone were dead, every one of them, left behind in a bamboo clearing, a cracked creek bed, and a gorge that had nearly cost him everything it hadn't already taken.

But the knowledge remained. The patience with difficult grain, the discipline to finish something properly rather than quickly, the plain understanding that a life worth building was worth building even while expecting, every day, that it might not last — none of that had lived in the timber that burned or the stone that shattered. It lived in him, carried the same way his cultivation was carried, refined rather than accumulated, stripped down across every loss to whatever remained genuinely, permanently his.

Li Fan sat on the edge of the narrow bed and began circulating his Primordial Origin Core, slow and unhurried, feeling the last stubborn threads of the lightning's residue finally settle and dissolve from his injured shoulder.

Outside, Quiet River Town continued its ordinary evening — a dog barking somewhere down the lane, a mother calling a child in from the yard, the distant, patient rhythm of the blacksmith's hammer finally falling silent for the night.

The southern road remained long. But for tonight, at least, it had led somewhere he could finally stop walking it.

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