I saw it the next morning.

  Wei trained the stabilization exercises I'd substituted for power cultivation by the river. Breathe. Circulate. Stabilize. Another three-step pattern that was supposed to reduce pressure rather than build it.

  I watched. Sitting still. My qi-perception extended past him into the air itself. Routine. Automated.

  I looked closer. Not at him. At the space between us.

  Invisible to anyone whose perception ran on human parameters. But at my resolution, the air between us was occupied. Imperceptible unless you had the instruments to detect it.

  There was Qi. My qi. Present. Distributed. Flowing from me to him. It flowed continuously, autonomously. It moved without my direction or my intention.

  It looked like sunlight through glass.

  The stream pulsed. Not in my rhythm — in his. His core pulled and my qi responded. His channels opened and my qi filled them. Synchronized. Adapted. As though the stream knew what he needed before he needed it.

  His hands shook.

  Deeper than yesterday's fine tremor. Structural. His right hand spasmed mid-form, fingers locking open and the stabilization pattern collapsed. Qi pressure spiked through his meridians in a visible pulse that scattered the surface of the water a meter from shore.

  Wei caught himself. Reset. Started the form again from the second position.

  His hands shook again. Worse.

  "Stop," I said.

  He didn't. His jaw set, breathing forced back into rhythm and he pushed through the third transition with the determination of someone who'd rather fracture than pause.

  "Wei. Stop."

  He stopped. Opened his eyes. Looked at his hands, the fingers still locked at wrong angles, tendons visible beneath the skin.

  "That's new," he said. Flat. Not scared. Cataloguing.

  "How long?"

  "The shaking?" He flexed his fingers until they closed. "You know my hands were shaking since we started. It got worse on the mountain with the moths, but not like this."

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

  I stood. Pulled my feet from the water. Walked to where he stood and took his right hand without asking. The qi running through his channels was dense, pressurized, three times what his meridians were designed to carry at this stage.

  My qi. Not his. Mine.

  Oh.

  Not his talent. Talent explained why he was good. Talent did not explain why he was impossible.

  Me. My proximity. My qi, radiating outward like a sun that doesn't know it's burning what orbits it.

  And 47%, the number from the dark, arrived with context. The qi driving him toward fracture wasn't ambient. Wasn't environmental.

  It was mine.

  I'm breaking him.

  I dropped his hand.

  "What?" he said.

  "Your channels are overpressurized."

  "I know. The exercises are supposed to—"

  "The exercises aren't enough."

  Silence. The river filled it. Wei looked at me with the evaluating expression he'd been refining since the first week — the one that said he was filing information he'd use later.

  "Something changed," he said. "Between yesterday and now."

  "Nothing changed."

  "You touched my hand. You never touch my hand."

  True. Diagnostic reflex: millennia of clinical assessment overriding millennia of maintained distance. I hadn't thought about it.

  "Sit," I said. "I need to recalibrate the exercises."

  He sat. Cross-legged, hands on knees. Patient as a stone.

  I knelt across from him. Extended my perception into his meridian network. The damage was precise, systematic — pressure fractures forming along the tertiary channels where my qi had been forcing expansion faster than his body could reinforce.

  I tried to pull the stream back. Consciously. Deliberately. The way I contracted my qi-field when passing through populated areas, the way I dimmed my presence to avoid detection.

  Nothing happened.

  The stream continued. Steady. Indifferent to my will, flowing from me to him with the certainty of water finding its level.

  I tried again. Harder. Forced my qi-field into compression, sealed the boundaries, cut the flow.

  For three seconds, it worked.

  Then his core pulled and the stream resumed. Stronger. As if my resistance had pressurized the flow and the release came with interest.

  "Yun?" Wei's eyes were still closed. "Your qi just did something."

  "Hold still."

  "It spiked. Then settled. What are you—"

  "Hold. Still."

  He held still. I sat back on my heels. Breathing. The motion created an illusion of normalcy and illusions were all I had.

  I couldn't stop it. My own qi, flowing from my body into his and I couldn't stop it.

  "New exercises," I said. "Starting tomorrow. Pressure-relief focus. Two sessions instead of three."

  "Fewer sessions?" He opened his eyes. "My progress—"

  "Your progress will adjust."

  He watched me. The evaluating look. "You're scared."

  "I don't get scared."

  "You're standing differently."

  I wasn't. I was standing exactly as I always stood. But his perception, enhanced by the very qi that was destroying him, could read micro-tensions that even millennia of discipline couldn't eliminate.

  "Eat," I said. "Then we walk. No more training for today."

  "Yun—"

  "That's not a suggestion."

  He went. Slowly. Looking back twice.

  I turned. Walked to the treeline. Stood with my back to the river.

  Behind me, his qi-cycle wound down from active to passive. It didn't matter. I could feel it — the pull, the intake, my energy flowing into his channels regardless. Active, passive, sleeping, waking. My poison. Flowing with the quiet efficiency of something that would continue whether he trained or not.

  The willows moved. The river ran. A boy ate cold rice with the energy of a woman who had just realized she was killing him.

  And the sunlight came through the canopy and didn't care.