I waited until he slept.

  It took longer than usual.

  "You're staring," he said from his bedroll. Eyes half-closed, voice already thick with the gravity of sleep.

  "I'm thinking."

  "Doesn't mean you are not staring."

  "Go to sleep, Wei."

  A pause. The fire crackled. An owl. Distant.

  "You'll still be here when I wake up?"

  "Where would I go?"

  He considered this. His breathing changed, slower, deeper, the surrender of a body that trusted its surroundings enough to stop guarding them. Within a minute, he was gone.

  Then I tried again.

  Meditation. The deep kind: full-immersion inward focus I hadn't used in decades if not centuries because the concentration it demanded left the physical world unmonitored. A luxury I'd stopped affording whenever I'd acquired something worth protecting.

  But Wei was asleep. The ambient field was clear. The scouts were behind us, two days minimum. The window was as wide as it would get.

  I closed my eyes and pulled inward.

  Down. Past the surface flows. Past the middle channels. Past the secondary meridians and the auxiliary systems I'd built and refined across millennia. Down to the core. The source-point from which everything radiated.

  I focused on the output. That little stream of qi moving towards Wei.

  There — a thread of energy, thin as spider silk and dense as bedrock, extending from my core through my channels through the air into his. A conduit.

  Not a new one either.

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  The thread was worn smooth, embedded, the way a rope wears into the stone it rests against. I traced it backward through the timeline my qi-system recorded in strata.

  Months. Since the first week at his home village. Since the first night he'd slept within the range of my field. Since before he'd told me his name.

  I held the thread. Gripped it with the focused intention of millennia of qi-mastery, the deepest, most absolute control I could bring to bear.

  I pulled.

  The thread yielded. Slowly. My qi didn't want to let go. It protested. A deep rooted resistance that felt physical, mental and spiritual all at once. The sensation of trying to hold back a river with my bare hands, of trying to stop the wind with my body. The sensation of trying to hold back the stars with my will.

  First breath. The thread thinned. The flow to Wei's core diminished.

  Second breath. I pulled harder. My channels protested, a deep ache below the threshold of pain.

  Third breath. Sweat appeared on my forehead. On my palms. On places that hadn't produced moisture since before the current dynasty's great-grandfather was born. The body's admission that what the mind was attempting exceeded its parameters.

  Fourth breath. The thread was gossamer. Almost nothing. Wei's core vibrated uncertain, decelerating.

  One more breath. One more second.

  Fifth breath.

  The thread snapped back.

  Not gradually. BACK. Full width, full density, full flow — and more. The suppression had loaded it. Compressed. A concentrated burst that hit Wei's channels like a wave hitting a shore.

  He flinched in his sleep. His back arched for a moment — a single, involuntary spasm. His channels absorbed the burst. His core blazed — bright enough to see through his clothing and his blanket. It illuminated the four meters of dark air between us.

  Then it settled. His breathing resumed. His core dimmed. His channels balanced and he slept on, undisturbed, unaware that his teacher had just failed to save him.

  I opened my eyes.

  My hands were shaking. Actually shaking. Physical vibration — muscles under tension, released, unable to find the baseline that mastery was supposed to guarantee.

  The words came in the old tongue — the one I'd helped shape before the first sects existed.

  It doesn't work.

  The admission that I could not prevent my own qi from feeding a thirteen-year-old boy whose core would break because of it.

  "You're going to burn," I told him. The sleeping shape of him. The rise and fall of breathing that didn't know what it cost. "And I can't stop it. Why can't I stop it?"

  He didn't hear me. The stream didn't pause. The night absorbed the words the way it absorbed everything — completely, without judgment, without giving anything back.

  I put my hands in my lap. Waited for the shaking to stop. It took longer than it should have.

  The night continued. The stream flowed. And somewhere between the tremor in my hands and the glow in his chest, the word autonomous surfaced — the feeling that the qi had a direction I hadn't given it and a purpose I hadn't assigned.

  I buried the word.

  It didn't stay buried. Nothing ever did.