The explosion happened at two in the morning.

  I'd been sitting in the dark beside a dead fire, running calculations that I ran every night and ignored every morning.

  Wei had left the camp. I'd let him go — felt his weight shift, heard the careful placement of each foot, tracked his qi-signature moving northeast through the trees. He wanted to train alone. Without the "hm." Without the corrections. Without my eyes measuring him.

  I understood. The understanding didn't make me comfortable.

  He was two hundred meters northeast. A clearing. Flat ground. He'd chosen well. He sat, breathed, circulated. The pattern was correct, always correct now, his body having memorized the sequence so thoroughly that deviation would have required conscious effort.

  Then he pushed.

  More qi. Faster. Denser. Everything I'd prescribed, bypassed in a single breath. The accumulated frustration of weeks of "slow down" and "basics" channeled into a single decision: I want to know what I can do.

  The answer arrived explosively.

  The qi-pressure exceeded containment. The excess vented — not through his hands, not through controlled leak. Through everything. A spherical discharge that expanded from his center and struck ground, air and trees within a three-meter radius.

  The earth ripped. Soil, stone, root systems torn upward. A young pine, two arm-widths thick, uprooted. A crater, shallow but definitive, centered on the spot where a thirteen-year-old had decided to find out what "more" felt like.

  Silence.

  I was there in a second. He was standing in the center of his own destruction, covered in dirt and leaf matter and fine dust.

  He was grinning.

  "Happens to everyone."

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  It did not happen to everyone.

  His hands were shaking. Badly. He reached for his carving stick and began to whittle. Fast, precise strokes that channeled the excess through fine motor control. The tremor migrated from his hands into the motion of the blade. Hidden. Functional.

  His internal counter. Three days without an outburst, his self-imposed rule, his measure of stability. Reset.

  "How much of that did you see?"

  "All of it."

  "Were you going to stop me?"

  "Would you have let me?"

  He considered. Carved another piece away. "No."

  "Then no."

  I looked at the crater. Three meters of evidence that screamed, to anyone with qi-perception within twenty li, that something extraordinary had occurred here.

  I looked at the boy. The grin fading. His fingers opened and closed around nothing — testing whether his hands still listened.

  Back at the fire, I remembered another young cultivator. Brilliant. Obsessive. Talent and ambition producing results at a rate that exceeded every natural parameter and impressed every observer and concerned absolutely no one.

  I'd watched him. Not taught — watched. He wasn't mine.

  His core glowed. Literally — visible through his skin like a lamp through paper. Not the subtle shimmer that Wei produced but frank, undeniable luminescence. A core generating energy faster than the body could regulate.

  Wei's breathing hitched. A single missed beat in the third-step pattern, then it resumed.

  The memory didn't stop.

  Three days. The glow persisted. His footsteps left qi-traces on the ground. The air around him vibrated. The other students maintained distance, not from instruction but from instinct.

  On the fourth day, the glow stopped.

  On the fifth day, they found his body.

  The core had imploded. Collapsed inward, consuming its own energy. A body that looked intact from outside and was empty from within.

  I hadn't intervened. He wasn't mine.

  A stone shifted in the crater. The settling sound pulled me back to the clearing, to the present, to the boy sitting three meters from the hole he'd made.

  You would have. He wasn't yours either and you would have.

  His core glowed three days. On the fourth, it was cold.

  I looked at Wei. At his hands — still trembling, still carving. At his core — vibrating, always vibrating, the hum I monitored nightly. Not yet glowing visibly. But trending.

  He wasn't that boy. Different circumstances. Different training. Different foundation — one I'd built with thousands of years of knowing what happened when foundations were hasty.

  Different. Probably.

  I stepped into the clearing.

  "Sleep."

  He looked at me. At the crater. At his hands, beginning to still.

  "It really does happen to everyone."

  "Sleep."

  He slept. Or pretended to. I sat beside the crater and watched his core vibrate and told myself the numbers were fine.

  They were not.

  In the morning, we would need to move faster. There were things I couldn't teach him out here — and materials I'd need before the numbers got worse.