I left before dawn.

  Wei slept. The fire was ash. The air was cold — lowland chill, the temperature that bodies notice and qi-bodies don't.

  I walked east. Away from the camp. Away from him.

  Not far. Not permanently. This was a test — hypothesis, method, predicted outcome. Distance: if proximity was the conduit, then distance should reduce the flow.

  I walked. Counted paces. My qi-sense remained extended behind me — a thread of awareness connecting me to Wei's sleeping form. I could feel his core. His breathing. His qi-field, warm and oversaturated.

  One hundred meters. The stream was unchanged. Full density.

  Two hundred meters. Unchanged.

  Three hundred meters. The camp was behind a rise — out of sight. The stream thinned. Marginally. Present but reduced.

  Five hundred meters. Thinner. The inverse-square law of qi-propagation applying itself with mathematical reliability.

  Eight hundred meters. Weak. A fraction of baseline — ten percent, maybe less.

  One thousand meters.

  Almost nothing. The stream was a whisper. At one thousand meters, my contribution to Wei's cultivation was functionally zero.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  Distance works.

  Clean. Clinical. One kilometer of air, maintained continuously, would slow his acceleration. Would give his core time to consolidate.

  One kilometer. In a world that was hunting us. Leaving a thirteen-year-old alone at a distance that would take me seconds to cross at full speed and minutes at any speed that wouldn't level the landscape between us.

  I turned back.

  At six hundred meters, the stream strengthened. At four hundred, half-baseline. At two hundred, full. At one hundred — stronger than full. The compensation effect: the qi denied during my absence was returning augmented. My qi making up for lost output with the overproductive enthusiasm of a mechanism that resented the attempt to stop it.

  By the time I reached the camp, the stream was flowing at what felt like a hundred and twenty percent. More than before I'd left. The distance hadn't reduced the net flow. It had deferred it. Created a debt that my qi was paying with interest.

  Wei was stirring. Semi-conscious.

  "You went somewhere."

  "Stretching my legs."

  He opened one eye. The look. The one that said I know that's not true and I'm letting it go.

  "Your qi feels different."

  I went still. "Different how?"

  "Stronger. Like you... opened something. Or stopped holding something."

  His perception. Always his perception. Reading my energy state the way most people read facial expressions — automatically, accurately, without understanding the mechanism.

  "Go back to sleep."

  "Yun."

  "What."

  "Whatever it was. It didn't work, did it."

  The silence lasted three seconds. Three seconds of a thirteen-year-old boy, half-asleep, diagnosing my failure with the precision of someone whose qi-channels were tuned to my output like a radio to a station.

  "Go back to sleep, Wei."

  He closed his eye. Slept. Or pretended to.

  The stream flowed. Stronger than before. Hungry.

  You'd recognize that word.

  The word arrived without permission. As though the qi had a quality that exceeded physics and entered something adjacent to will.

  Not my will. The qi's own. Autonomous. Independent. Following instructions given by something other than me.

  I sat. The morning came.