The door stuck.

  I shouldered it open — wood swollen from rain, hinges corroded. It scraped across a stone floor worn smooth by traffic.

  The inn was small. Twenty seats. A counter, behind which stood a man whose face suggested he'd seen better decades. Pig Nose.

  We'd walked past two other inns. The first was too visible — situated on the main road, lanterns, the kind of traffic that included cultivator caravans. The second smelled wrong. Not the building itself. There was qi-residue near the entrance. Someone had been asking questions there recently.

  This one sat at the end of a side street, between a grain store and a shuttered teahouse. No lanterns. No traffic. The kind of place that survived on locals who didn't want to cook.

  "Two," I said. "And food."

  Pig Nose assessed us. Three seconds. We passed.

  He pointed to a table. We sat.

  Wei ate.

  Noodles. Thick, over-sauced, served in a bowl that had seen use. Wei ate them with the intensity of someone who hadn't had warm food in weeks.

  His face changed. The muscles around his eyes softened. His jaw loosened. His shoulders dropped to something approaching human.

  For a moment — he was thirteen. A boy. Eating noodles. In a noisy inn. With sauce on his chin.

  I reached across the table and wiped it off with my sleeve. He pulled back — half a second, a reflex — before holding still. He let me finish and went back to his noodles.

  Before, he wouldn't have flinched.

  He was suppressing his qi, too. Compressing it inward, reducing his signature to the faintest possible level. The technique was crude — self-taught and improvised. The suppression cost him. His hands, under the table, trembled harder than usual.

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  He hid them. Under the wood. Under the normality he was constructing.

  Another boy sat down. Fourteen, fifteen. Traveler's clothes. No qi.

  "These noodles are terrible," the boy said.

  "They're WARM," Wei said.

  "That's not the same thing."

  "It is tonight."

  They talked. About nothing. About noodles. About the rain. About the bard in the corner who couldn't sing.

  Wei laughed. A real one.

  I left the moment to him and walked to the corner.

  A cultivator-merchant was sitting where merchants sit — maximum visibility, minimum exposure. Middle-aged. Thin.

  I sat opposite him and signaled Pig Nose. Rice wine appeared.

  "Quiet roads lately," I said.

  "Depends on the road." He drank. Measured me over the rim. "The eastern valleys have traffic. Iron Lotus — three teams in the field. Heaven's Order is quiet, restructuring they say." He set down his cup. "And there's a hermit-master asking questions nobody can answer. Questions about someone who stopped the sky."

  He refilled his cup.

  "There's also a young man. Broken core — paying for lodging with pieces of it. Traveling this road. Asking the same questions, different register."

  I sipped the wine.

  "Which routes are safe?"

  "None. The western pass is least watched. Bad terrain, worse weather."

  I placed a coin on the table. He took it. Drank his wine. We exchanged nothing further.

  I bought supplies on the way back to the table. Rice. Dried meat. Salt. A bag of dried plums that Wei would pretend not to like and eat within two days. The merchant at the counter wrapped everything in oilcloth without conversation.

  I returned to the table. Wei was still talking to the boy. Still being thirteen. His hands were still under the table. His smile was still genuine.

  The other boy was telling a story — something about a cart, a goat and a bridge. The details didn't matter. What mattered was the rhythm. Two boys, one table, the easy back-and-forth that required nothing except proximity and a willingness to waste time.

  Wei was good at this. He'd always been. In the village where I'd found him — he'd talked to everyone. The baker, the children, the old fisher man who sat by the well, mending his nets. He collected people the way some people collected coins. Naturally, without effort.

  He'd stopped collecting me. Since the lie. Since the running. Since the world narrowed to the us both and the space between us grew three meters wide.

  But here, with a stranger who didn't know anything, who wasn't carrying anything, who was just a boy with bad noodles and a goat story — here, it came back.

  I sat. Ate nothing and watched.

  The bard sang. The room was loud. Wei was laughing at something the boy had said.

  I hadn't heard him laugh in two weeks.