Two men half-carried, half-dragged a third between them. The one in the middle had gone pale under a weathered, sun-browned face, his trouser leg dark and heavy with blood from mid-thigh to ankle, each step dragging a thin red smear across the floorboards Li Fan had swept that morning.
"Boar got him," the man on the left said, breathing hard. "Tusk caught him wrong on the way down."
Old Sun was already moving before the sentence finished, sweeping the wrapped bundles off the low table by the back curtain with one arm and pointing at it with the other. "There. Lay him flat."
The two hunters eased their companion onto the table, and the smell hit Li Fan a moment later — copper and sweat, sharp under the dry herb scent that usually filled the shop. The wounded man's breathing came fast and shallow, his hands trembling where they gripped the table's edge.
"Water, boiling. Now." Old Sun didn't look up as he said it, already cutting through the ruined trouser leg with a short knife pulled from somewhere behind the counter. "Cloth, the clean stack, not the rag bin. And the gray jar on the third shelf, left side — bring the whole jar."
Li Fan moved. He'd banked the stove low that morning out of habit more than need, and it took only a few breaths of feeding in kindling before the kettle over it began to rattle against its lid. He tore clean cloth into strips while the water heated, the fabric rasping under his hands, and pulled the gray jar down from the shelf without needing to check the label — he'd sorted that shelf himself three days ago. Behind him, the wounded man let out a low, cut-off groan as Old Sun probed the edges of the gash with two fingers.
"Deep, but it missed the vessel that matters," Old Sun said, mostly to himself, then raised his voice slightly. "Boy. Powder, on the wound, thick as you can pack it. Then press. Hard. Don't let go until I tell you."
Li Fan knelt at the table's edge and did exactly that — tipped a measure of the gray powder from the jar directly onto the open gash, then laid a folded strip of cloth over it and drove the heel of his palm down. The wounded man hissed through his teeth, back arching off the table, and one of the other hunters gripped his shoulders to hold him still.
"Keep pressing," Old Sun said, already threading a curved needle with waxed thread pulled from a small tin box. "Don't ease up because he's in pain. Pain means he's still alive to feel it."
Li Fan kept his weight down, steady and even, watching the cloth beneath his palm slowly darken and then, gradually, stop darkening further. His own pulse had picked up somewhere in the last few minutes without his noticing when. He didn't let it show in his hands. The pressure stayed constant, unhurried, exactly the way Old Sun had told him to hold it. The old man worked quickly once the bleeding slowed enough to see the wound clearly, needle passing through skin in short, practiced motions, thread drawing the ragged edges together one stitch at a time. He didn't speak while he worked, only grunted once when the hunter on the table flinched too hard and had to be held down again.
When the last stitch was tied off, Old Sun sat back on his stool and wiped his hands on a rag hanging from his belt, breathing out slow through his nose.
"Anyone can stop a man's bleeding," he said, to no one in particular, folding a clean strip of cloth into a proper bandage and binding it around the stitched leg. "Half the herders in this city could have done what we just did, if they'd kept their head. Stopping the wound from turning bad after — that's the part most of them get wrong. That's the part that kills a man three days later instead of on the table."
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He pressed a second, smaller jar into the uninjured hunter's hand. "Change the dressing morning and night. Clean water only, boiled first, nothing else on it. If the leg swells past the knee or the skin around the stitches goes hot, you carry him straight back here. Don't wait to see if it passes on its own. It won't."
The two uninjured hunters helped their companion sit up slowly, color already returning a shade to his face now that the bleeding had stopped. They paid what Old Sun asked without haggling, and the one who'd spoken first pressed his palms together toward the old man before turning toward the door. His eyes caught on Li Fan on the way past, still crouched by the table with bloodied cloth in one hand. "New apprentice?"
"Assistant," Old Sun said, before Li Fan could answer for himself. Nothing else followed it. The hunter nodded, satisfied by whatever the single word told him, and the three of them worked their way out through the door, the bell chiming once behind them.
The shop went quiet again. Li Fan carried the bloodied cloth out to the courtyard and dropped it into the wash basin, then came back in and knelt to scrub the floor where the drag marks had darkened between the boards. Old Sun watched him work for a moment from his stool, then went back to the ledger without comment.
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The Green Bamboo's common room smelled of stewed cabbage and woodsmoke when Li Fan pushed through the door that evening, the dinner crowd already settling into the low tables. Madam Yu glanced up from behind the counter, her eyes catching on his sleeve before they reached his face. "Blood," she said, nodding at the faint rust-colored stain along his forearm. "Busy day?"
"Busier than usual." He set his coin on the counter for a bowl and didn't offer more than that. She studied him a beat longer, then reached for a ladle. "You'll get used to it." A small, dry smile followed the words, and she said nothing else, already turning to the next customer waiting behind him.
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Upstairs, with the door latched and the clay cup balanced against its frame, Li Fan sat against the wall and drew a different volume out of the storage ring than the one he'd been working through the last few nights — a thinner text, its cover plain, its pages given over entirely to medicine rather than alchemy or cultivation. He hadn't opened it before tonight. The alchemy texts had always felt more useful, more directly tied to what he needed. But the memory of pressing his palm down over a stranger's wound sat close enough behind his eyes now that he wanted to understand more of what he'd just watched happen.
The book didn't concern itself with rare cures or forbidden methods. It explained, in plain, careful language, why certain roots calmed a fever while others only masked it. Why a wound packed too soon after cleaning trapped heat beneath the skin instead of letting it escape. Why herbs cut and dried in full sun lost half their strength before a physician ever got the chance to use them — the same lesson Old Sun had given him without explanation, that first week, moving a drying tray off the sill and into shade without breaking stride. He read that passage twice, something in it settling into place the way a missing piece settles into a shape he hadn't realized was incomplete.
Wei Baishan had studied medicine too, once, buried somewhere in those shelves behind the sealed door — Li Fan remembered the herb ledgers now with a clearer eye than he'd had reading them the first time. But Wei Baishan had studied it as a road toward something else, a means of stretching a body's limits, buying time toward a breakthrough that never came, and beyond that, toward something Li Fan still didn't like to think too closely about. Old Sun studied the same plants, the same properties, the same careful methods, for no reason beyond keeping a hunter's leg from turning bad three days after the bleeding stopped. Same knowledge, aimed in two different directions. Li Fan didn't weigh one against the other. He only noted the difference, the way he noted most things now, and let it sit.
He closed the book eventually and set it aside with the others, then looked down at his own hands in the lamplight — knuckles still faintly stained where the powder had caught under his nails, a thin red line where the wounded man's leg had bled through the cloth. This morning those hands had sorted roots by size, indifferent work, the kind that filled most of his days. By noon they'd pressed down hard enough to hold a stranger's life together while an old man stitched him closed. Tonight they'd turned pages by lamplight, chasing understanding one line at a time, the same slow habit that had carried him this far already. The same pair of hands could do any of it. Kill, if it came to that. Heal, when it was needed. Reach, patiently, toward whatever the Dao actually was. He banked the lamp low, and let the thought settle where it belonged — one more fact laid quietly beside all the others he'd gathered since falling through a crack in the world that wasn't his.