Bear was gone. Wei lay on his back where I'd moved him.

  I worked. Hands on his chest. Qi flowing — minimal, controlled, the dosage that healing required. The bone responded. Knitted.

  My fingers trembled.

  Not emotion. Proximity. His core pressed against my palms with warm insistence, the reaching, the wanting. My hands on his chest put my qi in direct contact with his core and the contact triggered the stream and the stream accelerated.

  So I trembled and healed.

  "Does it hurt?" he asked. Eyes closed. The question was about me, not him.

  "No."

  "Your hands are shaking."

  "Qi interaction. Normal."

  The ribs set. The bruising resolved. The cut closed. His body accepted the healing with the eager efficiency of a young body that repaired quickly and didn't ask where the energy was coming from.

  I withdrew my hands. The tremor stopped.

  Wei opened his eyes. Looked at the fire.

  "Yun."

  "Hm."

  He was quiet for a long time. The fire moved. The night pressed. Insects. Wind. Somewhere below, water over stone.

  Wei sat up. Tested the ribs with one hand, then dropped it. Pulled his knees to his chest.

  "I'm strong," he said. Not bragging. Cataloging. The tone of someone sorting evidence. "What I did back there. That wasn't normal."

  "No."

  "So I'm strong."

  "You're strong," I said. "But unstable. The two are connected."

  He looked at me. The fire moved across his face.

  "Where does it come from?"

  Three seconds.

  The answer existed in my mouth, behind my teeth. I am the reason. My proximity changes you. My qi feeds yours. If I stay, you get stronger AND more unstable. If I go, you stabilize — and you're defenseless.

  Three seconds ended.

  "You're pushing too much qi through channels that aren't mature yet," I said. "The advancement is outpacing the infrastructure. Train slower."

  Not completely a lie, but not the whole truth either.

  The fire popped. A log shifted, sending sparks upward.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Wei looked at me. Four seconds. His jaw worked once — the thing he did when weighing something he couldn't name.

  "Okay," he said. "Slower."

  Silence. The fire. The insects. The patient machinery of a forest that didn't care about cultivators or their problems.

  "Yun."

  "Hm."

  "How strong was he?"

  I looked at the fire. The question deserved a real answer. The problem was that the real answer required vocabulary I'd never needed for myself.

  "The sects have a system," I said. "Stages. Labels. They invented them — oh, eight hundred years ago? Maybe a thousand, I didn't pay much attention. Before that, people just cultivated and didn't name the rungs."

  I picked up a stick. Drew a line in the dirt.

  "You're at Foundation Establishment. That's the second stage. Above that, Core Formation. Then Nascent Soul — that's where Xu Ran was headed with his tribulation, before his core cracked. Then comes Spirit Severing and after that Dao-Seeking." I tapped the top of the line. "That's where Bear is."

  Wei counted. His lips moved.

  "Four stages above me."

  "Four stages."

  "And I hit him."

  "You hit him."

  "And he moved." The words came slowly. Not disbelief — the careful handling of a fact too large for the shelf it needed to sit on. "I pushed back a cultivator four stages above me."

  I said nothing. There was nothing to say that wouldn't lead to the question underneath the question.

  Wei stared at his fist. Opened it. Closed it. The hand that had connected with the sternum of something that should have been untouchable.

  "Where are you on that line?"

  I looked at the stick. At the line in the dirt. At the tidy progression that the sects had built to organize something that didn't want organizing.

  He waited.

  "Honest answer — I don't know exactly." I picked up a stone. Small, round, the kind the river polishes into anonymity. "The line stops. After Dao-Seeking, the sects say Immortal. After that —"

  I weighed the stone and threw it into the dark. Past the firelight, where neither of us could see it land.

  "Somewhere around there," I said.

  Wei looked at the dark where the stone had gone. At the distance between the line in the dirt and wherever the stone had landed. The gap that contained no labels, no rungs and no system that anyone had built to make it comprehensible.

  "You made him kneel. With a breath."

  I said nothing.

  "One breath and a Dao-Seeking cultivator was on his knees." Wei's voice was flat. The tone of a boy arranging facts into a shape. "So why have we been running?"

  The question was older than Bear. It had been sitting in him since the first time I'd changed course to avoid something he could barely detect.

  "Every time I act," I said, "people notice."

  He waited for more. I gave it.

  "The breath — that wasn't invisible. Every cultivator within fifty li felt it. Some of them are already calculating where it came from. Some are already moving."

  "So we run because you're too strong."

  "We run because strength has a sound. And sects have ears."

  He chewed on that. The fire chewed on wood. An ember detached, rose, joined the stars, died.

  "What if they find us anyway?"

  "Then I breathe again. And more ears hear. And more feet follow. The display that solves today gets us followed tomorrow."

  "So it never ends."

  "It ends when they lose interest."

  "Will they?"

  "Eventually."

  Another lie. Smaller this time.

  Wei pulled the blanket higher. His voice came muffled.

  "That man. He looked at me like I was — a thing. A specimen. Something to collect."

  "Yes."

  "Is that what the sects want? Me?"

  Three seconds. Again.

  "You're unusual," I said. Careful. Measured. "Your progression is faster than what most cultivators achieve. That draws attention. The sects notice talent. They collect it. Or they remove it, if they can't collect it."

  True. All of it true. Except for the reason.

  "So they want me because I'm strong."

  "Yes."

  "And I'm strong because —" He paused. The gap where the real question lived. The one I'd already answered with half-truths and channel theory and the word slower.

  "Because you are," I said.

  He was quiet for a long time.

  "Okay."

  He turned toward the fire. Drew his knees up. The sleep-position of a boy who had learned that the world contained people who looked at children and saw resources.

  I sat. In the dark. With both lies — the small one dissolving, the large one settling.

  Something locked behind my sternum. A bolt dropping into place — solid, terminal, permanent.

  I shook my head. Once. Hard.

  The bolt didn't move.