The memory came three days later — always unbidden.

  We walked. The hills were gentle, low, forested, terrain that didn't demand attention and therefore left the mind free to go where it shouldn't.

  Wei talked. About the road, about the fish he was going to catch at the next river — a real one this time, not a practice fish. About the merchant who'd tried to sell him glass as jade, about a stone shaped like a cat. The continuous monologue of a boy who understood silence and chose noise anyway because noise was his way of being present.

  "—and the cat-stone has these little lines that look like whiskers, see—"

  I didn't see. I was somewhere else. Somewhere old.

  I was in a garden. Southwest. A sect whose name I had stopped saying. Cherry trees, old ones, planted by a generation that had believed in aesthetics as spiritual practice.

  The girl was seventeen. Meditating under the largest tree. Her qi was pure. Unallocated. Fresh snowfall: undisturbed, waiting for the first foot to mark it.

  I'd stayed one day, which became three. Three days became a week and the week a pattern. I told myself I was resting. I told myself the garden was pleasant. None of these were lies. All of them were incomplete.

  She grew. Foundation to Core Formation in six months. Core Formation through its phases in another year. Breakthroughs arrived like springtime, one after another, each building on the last. Her sectmates called it genius. Her elders called it blessed. I, sitting with cherry blossoms on my shoulders, called it familiar.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  I'd seen it before. Others. Rare, scattered across centuries, someone too close to me growing too fast. The growth looking like talent. The talent looking like destiny. The destiny ending the same way. The patterns repeating over and over.

  The trail bent under my feet. Gravel shifting. The present, pulling at the edges.

  But I hadn't connected the cause. I'd thought it was them. Their potential. Their genius that happened to express in my proximity.

  The sect named her the Jade Phoenix. The elders knelt before her.

  Wei's voice surfaced — distant, muffled by the years between that garden and this trail. "—and the cat-stone has these little lines—" I heard him and didn't hear him. The present existed at the edge of my vision. But the past held my focus.

  Three years. Three years of my proximity and she became what a normal cultivator would become in thirty.

  The fourth year. Spring. Cherry trees bloomed. She reached for the last breakthrough. Her core was full. Too full. Grown too fast for her body to sustain.

  The core broke. Not violently. Quietly. A sigh. She sank to her knees under the cherry tree. The blossoms fell on her — pink on white.

  I stood three steps away. Reached out. My qi met her shattered core and passed through the space where it had been.

  She survived, but her cultivation didn't. The difference between surviving and living is a distinction that the surviving understand and the living don't.

  The strength I'd given her wasn't hers. And what isn't yours costs more to carry than what is.

  "—Yun? Yun. You stopped." Wei's voice cut through.

  I had stopped. In the middle of the trail. The past and the present occupying the same space.

  "I'm fine."

  "You were — your eyes went weird."

  "I'm fine, Wei."

  He watched me. The look that was too observant for thirteen. The look that said I see you not being fine but I'm choosing not to push.

  I started walking. He followed. The cherry tree stayed. The blossoms fell.

  Pink on white.

  The stream kept flowing.