The western hill. Two hundred paces away.

  A signature expanded — not gradually but fully, like a door opened onto a continent of qi. Immortal-stage and above.

  My perception whited out. Everything else — the combat, the signatures, the barriers, Wei's core — vanished, replaced by a presence on a scale I had not encountered this century.

  I turned.

  Not a decision. Reflex. The body's response to a stimulus that bypassed thought and arrived at muscle, at bone. All of me orienting toward it the way a compass orients toward north.

  Two hundred paces up the slope. Grey morning, grey trees. Standing there — simply present the way beings of that magnitude were present. Inevitably — a figure.

  The Hermit Master. The mountaintop. The encounter that had lasted minutes and contained centuries.

  He was here.

  His qi reached me. Not aggressive — probing. One Immortal-tier being assessing another. The question he asked with energy — Are you in danger?

  He had felt Wei's core-flare — the instability, the brightness screaming across the spectrum. And he had come. Because the last time he'd seen me, I was alone on a mountain and now I was here at the center of a conflict. He was trying to protect me.

  The irony. A being who had traveled distance to protect someone who did not need protection. And the protection was the distraction.

  He raised his hand. Two fingers. Extended to salute. The same gesture as before. Friendly. Unsettling. Knowing.

  My back was to the east gate. My back was to Wei. And the third knock was happening behind me.

  I answered. My qi met his — brief, confirmatory. Not in danger. Not from them.

  He adjusted the tilt and lowered his salute.

  The combat continued behind me — distant, muffled. I could hear it the way one hears rain through glass. Real but separate.

  Then—

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  Wei's core. A flare — not the combat flares I'd been tracking. This was a core under maximum stress discharging without governor, without limiter.

  I turned back.

  Of course. Right now.

  The thought arrived cold. The timing was not coincidence but causality — the Immortal arriving at the third knock, my attention pulled at the exact moment Wei ran into open ground.

  I reached for his signature — tried to read the settlement, the positions, the combat. Static. The Hermit's presence had burned through my perception the way staring at the sun burned through vision. The afterimage remained — vast, bright, blinding — layered over everything. I could feel Wei's core. I could feel it was wrong. I could not see through the interference to reach anything else.

  I was on the wall. Facing the right direction. And I was blind.

  I walked the field afterward. Before the blood dried. Before anyone moved the bodies. I walked it the way I had walked battlefields for centuries — reading positions, reading angles, reading the story that violence wrote in dirt and distance.

  The bootprints told me where Wei had stood. The scorch marks told me where qi had discharged. Shen told me the rest — later, in fragments, between sobs, while Auntie Huang held him and I listened from outside the door. And I knew Wei. I knew him well enough to reconstruct every choice he made.

  This is what happened while my back was turned.

  Wei ran. Out through the gate. Into the open. Toward the figure. Alone — completely alone, separated from the settlers, from the walls, from every defensive position.

  Wei reached the figure and knelt. Hands reaching out — the gesture of aid, the instinct Guo had identified and had placed a body to trigger.

  He looked down and saw—

  Clean boots.

  Clean boots on a "scout" who had been crawling through dirt. Clean boots, polished almost. Real scouts had dirt-covered boots, bark, blood. These boots had touched the ground minutes ago and those minutes did not include crawling.

  It was a trap.

  Wei's hand went to his sword. But the false scout was already reaching under his coat. Not for a weapon. For a signal amulet. A pulse of qi: bright, directed — here, now, he's isolated.

  Four signatures converging. From the treeline. From positions held patient and hidden, waiting for the third knock, the beacon, the boy alone in open ground.

  Wei stood with his sword up and his core pulsing dim-bright-dim, his reserves not reserves but mere remnants.

  Four cultivators. Four angles. This was a kill-box.

  And then — from behind Wei, from the gate, from the settlement — a small figure running.

  Shen.

  Auntie Huang's son. Twelve. Who had been pushed toward the escape route by his mother's hands. Who wasn't gone. Who had followed Wei through the gate because he followed Wei everywhere.

  Fifteen paces in front of Wei. In the open ground. Between Wei and the converging signatures.

  In the crossfire.

  You turn around and they're gone.

  Auntie Huang's words. At the landslide. The sentence that had passed through me once and settled somewhere deep.

  The boy stood there, small and confused, looking at Wei with the expression of someone who had followed a hero into a place where following was dying.

  Wei saw the child and the attackers both.

  Four signatures closing. Ten seconds.

  The boy standing, frozen.

  Wei's core flickering, the light at his sternum visible and bright — the countdown counting in heartbeats.