Wei knew something had changed.

  He didn't know what. But he knew. The non-cognitive recognition of a shift in the person he'd been walking beside for months.

  It happened on the second day after the failed suppression.

  We walked. The hills had flattened into rolling terrain — farmland in theory, abandoned in practice. Fields gone to seed. Stone walls half-collapsed. The occasional foundation of a building that no longer existed above the level of its own ambition.

  Wei walked beside me. Closer than usual, the proximity that tightened when he sensed something.

  He stopped.

  His training, not walking. He stopped the cultivation cycle mid-breath and stood still. A vertical line between his eyebrows — the one that appeared when he was processing something without vocabulary.

  He looked at his hands. Turned them over. Palm up, palm down.

  Then he looked at me.

  "Yun?"

  "What?"

  He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

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  "Nothing."

  He turned. Resumed walking.

  I let him.

  The road bent south around a collapsed grain shed. Roof beams jutted from the wreckage like broken ribs. Wei kicked a shard of roof tile, watched it skitter across packed dirt.

  "Was this a village?"

  "Once."

  "What happened?"

  "People left. Buildings didn't."

  He nodded once, the way he did when he was filing something away for later.

  We walked through the afternoon. The terrain gave us a stream — real water, cold, running between the abandoned fields. Wei knelt. Drank. Washed his face.

  "My hands feel different."

  I waited.

  "Heavier. Like they're — full of something."

  "Your channels are developing."

  "Is that what it is?"

  "That's what it is."

  Half-truth. His channels were developing. Because I was developing them.

  I filled the waterskin while he sat on the bank, flexing his fingers open and closed. The water ran cold enough to numb — deep-rock water, not runoff.

  "Can you feel yours?" he asked. "Your channels."

  "Not the way you mean."

  "What way, then?"

  "The way you feel your skeleton. You know it's there. You don't think about it."

  He frowned. "That sounds boring."

  "It is."

  By the time the light turned amber, we'd found a spot — flat ground between two low walls, sheltered enough. Wei gathered wood without being asked. Stop, perimeter, fire, water — routine as safety. He was good at that.

  I set wards. He arranged kindling. Neither of us spoke for a while.

  "Yun?"

  "Yes?"

  "You look tired."

  "I don't get tired."

  "You look tired."

  I almost laughed. The fire caught. Wei fed it a branch, then another. Sparks rose and vanished against the darkening sky.

  "The hands thing," he said. "It's not bad, is it?"

  "No."

  "Just different."

  "Just different."

  He accepted that. Lay back against his pack and watched the sky lose its color, one shade at a time.

  By evening, the vertical line between his eyebrows had faded. But the question hadn't. It sat between us — quiet, patient, keeping pace.