He didn't recognize me. Not yet.

  My appearance was unremarkable by design — thousands of years of learning to seem like nothing. Normal was the most expensive disguise.

  But his broken core had sharpened certain faculties. The crack in his cultivation created a crack in his perception — a vulnerability that let in more than his intact cultivation would have permitted. Like a filter with a hole.

  He would feel me eventually. Not my qi-signature — mine registered as absence. He would feel the hole. The place where a qi-field should be and wasn't. And absence was worse than presence, because presence could be measured and absence was wrong.

  For now: he ate. Mechanically. The bowl emptied. He stared at the wall.

  Wei was watching him.

  The patient attention of someone assembling a picture from fragments.

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  "That's him," Wei said. Quiet. Under the noise. "The genius with the broken core. The one the merchants talked about."

  I said nothing. The confirmation was in the nothing.

  "He pays in pieces of himself. Core fragments." Wei paused. "That's what he left on the counter."

  He studied the hollow face across the room.

  "How old is he? Eighteen? Nineteen?" He answered himself. "He looks older."

  "He would."

  Wei turned his bowl. Noodle remnants circling ceramic — hands wanting to do something meaningful, settling for circles.

  "Is he dangerous?"

  "Not to us."

  "To whom?"

  I looked at the boy across the room. The hollow face. The steady hands — steadier than Wei's. He'd passed the point where the body still fought.

  "Himself."

  Wei looked at Xu Ran. Looked at his own hands — under the table, shaking. Looked at the space between them: five years and a core-state that might be his future.

  He saw a mirror. He didn't look away.

  The inn closed gradually. Pig Nose wiped the counter. The bard passed out. Patrons filtered to their rooms.

  Xu Ran stayed. His back to the wall.

  I walked past him on the way to the stairs. Close enough that my absence — the hole where my qi-field should be — would brush against his damaged perception.

  I felt him flinch. Internal. The body's response to something detected but not identified.

  Soon.

  I climbed the stairs. Wei followed. Xu Ran stayed.