Chapter 157 — Two Years of Ordinary Life

The first year passed the way years always seemed to pass once a life finally settled into its proper shape — not as a single continuous stretch of memory, but as a collection of fragments, each one unremarkable on its own, accumulating into something Li Fan only recognized as substantial when he finally paused to look back at all of it together.

Mu Qinghe left for the valley in early spring and returned eight days later with a shallow cut along his forearm and a haul good enough that Luo Yulan spent the following week in unusually good spirits. He left again before the month was out, alone this time, and came back leaner than he'd left, saying little about what had gone wrong. Luo Yulan took her own expedition through the height of summer, returning with a pair of rare beast fangs that fetched, by the fragment of conversation Li Fan caught over the shared wall, enough silver to cover the household's needs for the better part of a season. Autumn brought a joint expedition that lasted nineteen days, the longest either of them had attempted since Li Fan's first year in the district, and Mu Wan spent most of those nineteen days at his own gate more often than she spent them at her own, until her parents finally returned, tired but whole, and the household's ordinary rhythm reasserted itself within days.

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Blacktooth aged visibly across that first year, the gray around his muzzle spreading further than it had been when Li Fan first heard him barking through the wall. He still accompanied the family on most expeditions, though Li Fan noticed, watching from his own gate on the mornings both parents left together, that the dog's pace through the courtyard carried a stiffness that hadn't been there before. He still returned exhausted from every trip he made. He simply took a day longer, now, to recover the energy that had once come back to him within hours. The defensive formation around the Mu residence became, over that same stretch of months, less a commission Li Fan remembered building and more simply a fact of the neighborhood — present, reliable, occasionally requiring a minor adjustment when a particularly heavy storm disturbed one of its outer nodes, maintained by Li Fan without any renewed discussion of payment, since neither of them seemed to consider the arrangement worth reopening for the sake of a small repair.

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Mu Wan grew more comfortable in his courtyard with each passing month, until her visits stopped requiring any deliberation on either side at all. She learned, without ever being taught directly, which parts of his workshop she could touch and which she couldn't, developing the same unconscious respect for a craftsman's tools that Li Fan himself had once learned watching Old Mu work. Blacktooth stopped barking at him entirely sometime around the turn of the second year, a shift Li Fan noticed the way he noticed everything — not through any single dramatic moment, but through the gradual absence of a sound that had once been reliable enough to set a clock by. Mu Qinghe began, without any particular ceremony, leaving small hunting materials at Li Fan's gate on his way past — an unremarkable beast hide too plain for the guild's better buyers, a bundle of herbs gathered in passing that Mu Qinghe himself had no use for but assumed a formation master might. Li Fan accepted each small offering with the same measured gratitude he showed everything, and used more of them than Mu Qinghe likely realized, folding beast materials into artifact-refining experiments and herbs into the alchemy no one in the district knew he practiced at all.

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Luo Yulan, for her part, began asking his opinion on minor formation questions of her own — a ward that seemed to be losing potency faster than it should, a market stall's protective array that struck her as poorly balanced. Li Fan answered honestly and without excessive detail, the same careful calibration he brought to every conversation that touched, even lightly, on the depth of what he actually understood. He treated an injury of theirs on three separate occasions across those two years, always carefully, always framed as ordinary first aid rather than anything a trained physician would recognize as more — a wrapped wound here, a poultice applied there, nothing that would ever raise the question of where a formation master had learned to do such things so competently.

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The Formation Guild's own accounting of him grew steadily across the same span, though far less personally than the Mu family's had. Qin Mo came to expect Lin Fan's completed commissions arriving on schedule, without fanfare, their quality consistent enough that he stopped reviewing them as carefully as he once had. The guild clerk, a young woman named Shen Lian who processed most of the hall's day-to-day paperwork, began recognizing his handwriting on sight, and the particular economy of his written requests — never more words than the commission actually required, never fewer. His work became known, gradually and without any effort on his part to make it so, as dependable. He charged fair prices. He never competed for another formation master's clients, never advertised beyond the modest listing the guild itself maintained, never sought any commission larger or more prestigious than what happened to come to him through ordinary channels. He simply accepted work, completed it competently, collected his payment, and disappeared back into his courtyard until the next commission found its way to him. The guild, over those two years, developed its own quiet description of him, repeated occasionally among the other masters when his name came up at all. That strange formation master who wants nothing.

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Li Fan heard the phrase secondhand, the way he heard most things said about him, and turned it over with the same private satisfaction he'd given every previous name the city had settled on him. The Turtle. The formation maniac. The strange man who wanted nothing. Three descriptions, accumulated across two quiet years, each one true in its own limited way and each one, taken together, describing precisely the shape of the life he had spent every one of those years carefully building. Nothing about those two years had been dramatic. No breakthrough beyond the quiet one that had followed his first night in this courtyard. No confrontation, no danger, no thread from his past reaching far enough to trouble the ordinary rhythm of formations, commissions, and a neighbor's daughter climbing a shared wall to ask what he'd been doing all day. That, he understood, sitting alone in his courtyard as the second year drew toward its close, was precisely the point. He had not come to Myriad Beast City to become someone remarkable. He had come to disappear into it thoroughly enough that remarkable would never again be a word anyone thought to apply to him — and two years in, watching Mu Wan's silhouette disappear back over the shared wall in the last of the evening light, he understood that he had very nearly succeeded.