The mountain was necessary, because steep terrain shed pursuers passively, through geometry. A searcher with Qi Gathering cultivation could track on flat ground indefinitely, but vertical gain cost energy and energy cost time and time was the distance between us and the three qi-signatures that had appeared at our previous campsite yesterday morning.

  So — mountains. Path was a charitable word for the scratch of exposed stone and twisted roots that game animals had carved into the cliff face. It rose at an angle that made progress a negotiation between gravity and stubbornness. Mist wrapped everything above the treeline in gauze.

  Wei climbed below me. His hands found holds with increasing competence — roots, ledges, cracks in the stone. Six months ago he wouldn't have attempted this grade. Now he climbed with a fluid economy that belonged on someone with years of conditioning, not just weeks.

  His qi was doing most of the work. I could see it — routing to his arms when he pulled, to his legs when he pushed, adjusting load distribution with an efficiency that was sophisticated for any cultivator and absurd for a thirteen-year-old. The channels that had been raw and new after the flood were smoothing out rapidly. Three degrees of refinement in the past week alone.

  It was going too fast.

  He stopped on a ledge, breathing hard, sweat on his face despite the cold. His hands on his knees — pushed past reasonable limits, waiting for his body to forgive him. Wei's cough was nearly gone. Three days under a roof had done what qi-regulation couldn't — let his lungs dry out, let his body remember what warmth felt like when it wasn't rationed. A residual rasp on the deep inhales, nothing more.

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  The air around his hands shimmered.

  I saw it from four meters above. Qi venting through his skin — the overflow of channels running at capacity and leaking excess. Like heat above summer stone. Barely visible, barely there. A passing observer would blame altitude and mist.

  He flexed his fingers. The shimmer intensified. He relaxed and it faded.

  Then the fatigue hit him. Sudden, total — his knees buckling, his body dropping from vertical to seated in the graceless collapse of a body that had been running on credit and had exhausted the account.

  "Why am I so tired? I was just breathing."

  I climbed down to his ledge. Sat on the rock beside him.

  "Stop practicing while you climb."

  "I wasn't—" He stopped. His face changed. His qi-circulation had been running a full cycle the entire climb. Double-tasking. Something he couldn't manage three weeks ago. Something he apparently couldn't stop doing now.

  "I wasn't doing it on purpose."

  His body was training itself without his permission, the channels pulling qi through their circuitry because the path existed. Because the gradient demanded flow. Because the infrastructure, once built, doesn't wait for authorization.

  "I know."

  I looked at him. His hands rubbing together, hiding the tremor in the friction. Tired. Confused. A body doing things his mind hadn't sanctioned and the gap widening.

  "Does it stop?"

  "Yes."

  "When?"

  "When you learn to control it."

  "And if I don't?"

  I turned. And started climbing again. Below me, Wei followed, rubbing warmth into hands that weren't cold.