Spirit-beasts came at dawn. The bandits came moments later. The combination was coincidence or design or the universe being occasionally efficient in its distribution of problems.

  You were awake for it so you saw it. You were hunched near the embers with your notebook already open, pretending you were only recording the weather.

  Two spirit-beasts of different species. One the cat-type that operated in forested terrain, the size of a large dog, qi-armored and fast. The other was something bovine, heavier, slower, the kind that charged and relied on bulk and certainty.

  Neither was dangerous to me. The spirit-beasts were insufficient. They were problems I had solved before problems had names.

  The cat-type moved first. Fast enough that you flinched. Fast enough that the thought it's-fast formed and dissolved in the same breath.

  Fast for what it was. Slow for what I was.

  I stepped aside. Less than a body's width of lateral movement, using the beast's own momentum as the mechanism of its failure. It passed me. Its claws found the space I had occupied. The space was empty.

  The bovine charged. Direct. Honest in the way heavy things were honest.

  It relied on an the assumption that I would still be where I had been when it committed.

  I wasn't. The horn cut air. The air was cooperative.

  Two fingers on the cat-type's flank as it skidded past — a tap on the qi-meridian behind the shoulder blade. The bovine got the same, palm flat against its skull mid-charge, a pulse that found the central channel and closed it the way one pinched a candle. They folded. The sound of large bodies meeting ground.

  I had dealt with both in the interval that you later described as "less than I could track", which was your way of saying, that it was fast enough that your perception — human-speed, cultivator-enhanced but still fundamentally human-speed — lost the sequence.

  The bandits arrived as the beasts were falling. Four of them. Armed. Swords and spear, the armament of opportunistic predators at the margins of civilization. Perhaps they'd been tracking the beasts. Perhaps us. Perhaps both.

  They saw the beasts. Falling, unconscious, the limpness of qi-channel shutdown applied with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this for longer than their species had been cultivating.

  They reassessed.

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  The reassessment took approximately the same duration as the fight. A breath, maybe two. The calculation that engaging the person who had just incapacitated two spirit-beasts in a fraction of a second was not favorable.

  Two of them ran. Two of them — the kind of stupid that survival pressures had not yet eliminated — advanced.

  The first one reached me and I let him.

  He swung. A sword. Functional and maintained, the weapon of someone who used it regularly and cared about it the way professionals cared about their tools. Horizontal arc. Standard. The kind of attack that worked against targets unable to avoid it.

  I could have avoided it. The way I had avoided the cat-type, the way I had avoided the bovine, the way I avoided everything that came at me with the casual ease of a body that had been doing this for millennia. I could have stepped aside and the sword would have found air and the bandit would have found the ground.

  I didn't.

  The sword caught my sleeve. Left upper arm. The fabric tore, the sound of woven material separating under a sharpened edge. The blade continued through the fabric and into flesh. My flesh.

  Pain.

  The pain was present. Clear. Unfiltered. The blade entered my arm. The nerves fired and the pain was the first thing in weeks that was completely, undeniably, unambiguously real.

  I breathed it in. Literally. The warm scent of my own blood. Mineral, old, the scent that predated humanity.

  Blood. My blood. The color and viscosity of blood that had been inside me and was now outside. Warm and wet on my arm. Real.

  The bandit saw the blood. His face — for one breath — showed the expression of someone who believed they had succeeded, who believed the blood was the evidence of mortality.

  Then it healed.

  With a short delay. One second during which the wound stayed open, the blood flowing, the pain present. The delay was mine. I held it. One second. Not consciously. The way one held a breath, the moment of suspension between intake and release.

  One second of pain. Then the flesh closed. The skin sealed.

  The bandit's expression changed. The transition from triumph to a category that did not have a standard name but occupied the space between disbelief and religious terror.

  He swung again. The terror still in his eyes but the arms committed, the muscle-memory overriding what the mind had already understood. The second arc came faster — desperation's contribution to technique.

  I caught the blade. Two fingers. The edge stopped between them the way a door stopped against a frame. The steel vibrated once and was still.

  His eyes moved from my face to my fingers to the blade held between them and the sequence of that looking was the sequence of a world rearranging itself.

  A tap on his wrist. Same principle as the beasts — the meridian found, the channel closed. His hand opened. His knees followed. He folded next to the spirit-beasts, the three of them arranged like a lesson in the consequences of engagement. The second bandit was already running.

  I was faster.

  The same tap. The same meridian. He folded next to the first, the fourth body in a neat arrangement that the clearing had not requested.

  I stood in the clearing. Two beasts unconscious. Two bandits disabled. My sleeve was torn, my blood drying and the pain already fading.

  The fading was the loss. The pain had been present and now it was leaving, which was a subtraction I had tried to delay. The pain that was the only thing that had been completely real.

  Gone again.

  You stood at the clearing's edge. Notebook open. Your face was pale, the pale of someone whose data had expanded beyond your framework for the third time this week.

  "You let him hit you on purpose," you said.

  "Yes," I said, nodding slowly. "I did."

  You wrote it down.