Xu Ran told his story to the innkeeper.

  I was upstairs, but I could hear them, as if I stood with them. My qi-perception extended through floor and walls with effortless reach. The distinction between being there and not was a question of physical location, not informational access.

  Pig Nose listened. Professional obligation.

  Xu Ran's voice was damaged. Compromised at the source: the qi-channels that supported vocal production had been partially withdrawn and the voice that had once been clear now sounded filtered through something broken.

  "I followed a lead south. A sect elder told me she'd been seen near the Jade Pass." A pause. "He lied. For the core fragment I gave him."

  Pig Nose wiped a glass.

  "Before that — another lead. A merchant near Qinzhou. Said he'd met her. Described a woman who matched — height, bearing, the way she walked." Another pause. "He'd described his aunt. She'd been dead for three years."

  Xu Ran's hands were on the counter. Steady — the steadiness of someone who had passed through the stage where hands trembled and arrived at the place where the body settled for stillness.

  "Months. Eight, I think. The counting stopped being useful. Each town — the same question. Each answer — wrong, or a lie, or a piece of truth wrapped in enough fiction to make it useless."

  He picked up his bowl. Set it down.

  "I was the strongest of my generation." Quietly. Not as boast — as eulogy. "Now I'm less than a novice."

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  You were the strongest. Your core sealed correctly — I watched it happen. The breakthrough was clean, elegant and earned. You became a Nascent Soul cultivator for approximately four minutes before the physics of what I did caught up with you.

  The shockwave was yours. The excess energy a new core can't contain. It goes outward. That's normal. That's how breakthroughs work. What's not normal is someone dissolving it mid-flight with a thought. The energy had already left your system when I stopped it, but energy doesn't forget where it came from. The disruption traveled back along the channel it had exited through and the channel led to a core that was four minutes old and still setting.

  I cracked you. Not the tribulation. Not your readiness. Me. I'm sorry, but given the same situation, I'd do it again.

  I came downstairs right after the sun rose over the horizon. Wei was already at the table, eating rice porridge. Xu Ran was across the room in the chair he'd occupied the night before, the crumpled posture of a body that had slept sitting because the wall at his back was the only thing he trusted enough to lean against.

  His eyes scanned the room. Habit. The habit was all that remained of the training that had produced it.

  His eyes found Wei and lingered.

  Wei's qi — suppressed, dampened and compressed — still leaked at the edges. Micro-fluctuations that suppression couldn't eliminate entirely. Xu Ran's damaged perception caught the anomaly: a thirteen-year-old with qi-density three stages above his level and an instability pattern that Xu Ran recognized.

  He recognized it because he'd worn it.

  The signature of cultivation that had exceeded its container. Too-much-too-fast. Growth outpacing structure.

  He'd been this. Before. And had ended with a crack.

  I saw the recognition land. The tightening of his jaw. The slight widening of his eyes. He said nothing. Lowered his gaze.

  "He looked at me," Wei said. Quiet. Under the porridge.

  "Yes."

  "Like he knew something."

  "He recognized your instability."

  Wei's jaw set. The word, instability, landed with a weight that indicated he'd heard it before and didn't like it.

  "He was the same," Wei said.

  "Similar."

  "What happened to him?"

  "His core cracked."

  Wei looked at his hands. Under the table. Trembling.

  Will that happen to me?

  The question he didn't ask. The question I couldn't answer without the lie collapsing.