We settled at an inn that smelled like mold and old soup and the accumulated misery of too many bodies in too little space with too few windows.

  Wei loved it.

  Three days of rain. His cough had returned — not the mild irritation of altitude but the productive, chest-deep hack that indicated moisture in his lungs and his body fighting it with everything available, including qi-enhanced immune response and the simple, irreplaceable stubbornness of a constitution built on thirteen years of insufficient nutrition and excessive determination.

  I'd chosen the inn. The thought of walls and people and shared space made my skin feel too small for my bones — but Wei needed a roof. Needed warmth that wasn't earned by shivering. Needed to exist, briefly, in the human ecosystem that inns provide: food prepared by someone else, noise, the ambient companionship of strangers who share a space without sharing a purpose.

  Small place. A crossroads settlement — five buildings, a well, a stable that housed two mules. The inn was the largest structure by default, which meant it could accommodate perhaps twelve people if those people were all optimistic about personal space.

  The innkeeper was a woman. Round, efficient. Her hospitality consisted of feeding people and leaving them alone, which was my preferred brand and probably the reason I'd walked past three other inns in three other settlements before choosing this one.

  Wei sat at a table near the hearth. Warmth. Heat that came from a fire built by someone who understood fires and maintained it with professional attention. His face relaxed — the lines of endurance softening, the mask of constant travel dissolving in the presence of warmth and food and the temporary cessation of forward motion.

  He ate soup. It was good. His expression said so — the involuntary widening of eyes, the brief suspension of teenage composure in the face of genuinely hot food.

  I sat across from him. Ate nothing. Drank tea — the cheapest variety, served in a cup with a chip on the rim. The tea that innkeepers give to guests who take a table and don't order food and contribute to the atmosphere primarily through the absence of trouble.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  A merchant sat at the bar. Fat, loud. He filled the room with his voice because nature had given him the volume and habit had given him the audience and nobody had given him the awareness that not everyone wanted to be included. He was telling a story.

  I hadn't been listening. The noise was background — the ambient human soundtrack that inns produce, the mixture of conversation and crockery and the occasional burst of laughter that sounds exactly the same in every inn in every province in every century.

  Then Wei stopped eating.

  "...the genius from the east," the merchant was saying. "You know the one. The one whose core cracked during ascension. Wanders the provinces like a ghost. Asks in every town about a woman."

  I went still.

  "What woman?" someone asked.

  "A woman who stopped the sky, he says." The merchant laughed — the generous laugh of someone who enjoys his own stories regardless of audience. "Stopped the sky! Can you imagine? The man's core is shattered and he's chasing fairy tales."

  "Maybe it's not a fairy tale."

  "Everything's a fairy tale until someone proves it isn't. And nobody's proved anything about a woman who stops skies."

  Wei was looking at me. The steady, evaluating look.

  "After a woman?" he said. Quietly. Not to the merchant — to me.

  I stared at my tea. The surface was still. Reflective. A small, brown mirror that showed nothing useful.

  "Go to sleep."

  He didn't move.

  "Yun—"

  "Go to sleep."

  He went. Reluctantly — obeying an order he disagreed with because the cost of defiance was higher than the cost of compliance.

  I sat alone. The merchant continued — other stories, other gossip, the endless circulation of rumor and half-truth that keeps the world informed and misinformed in equal measure.

  Xu Ran. Wandering the provinces. Asking about me.

  He was looking for me. Not for revenge — the merchant's description didn't carry the tone of pursuit. And what could he do with a cracked core? Maybe he was looking for understanding? For the answer to the question that his cracked core represented: What happened? And why?

  I knew what he'd seen. I knew that he would find neither the answer he wanted nor the peace that the answer would have provided.

  He would keep looking.

  I drank my tea. Cold now. Bitter.

  The inn settled into the quieter noises of evening. I waited too. For what, I didn't specify. I'd stopped specifying a long time ago.