The next morning, I stood at the window.

  Wei trained outside — the forms, the transitions, the vocabulary of motion that I had demonstrated and he had absorbed. It was now his, fully, in the way that learned things became owned things when the learner forgot the teacher.

  The hip correction was there — third to fourth position, invisible to anyone who wasn't looking for it and visible to anyone who was.

  Fang Liang had been looking for it.

  I watched Wei move through the sequence. Clean. Efficient. The body of someone trained by someone who knew what training meant — an acquaintance who was adequate.

  I could warn him.

  I could cross the room, open the door and say, that the Iron Lotus was a proxy sect. Their hierarchy is competent but predatory. Their masters teach well because teaching well produces better resources and resources are their product. Their product is bodies with qi who can fight and die in the service of agendas they will never see.

  I could tell him about recruitment. The initial generosity, the access, the belonging that was conditional on performance and whose cage was invisible until you tried to leave and discovered that leaving was not in their vocabulary.

  I could tell him what happened to young talents who entered sects at fourteen with extraordinary qi and instinctive hip corrections and brown eyes. I had the firsthand knowledge of someone who had watched sects consume talent for as long as sects existed. The pattern was predictable.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  But.

  Telling him was directing him. Directing was controlling. And controlling was the thing I'd dismantled — deliberately, methodically. If he's not free to choose, then every choice I make for him is a prison with better lighting.

  The hesitation wasn't indecision — it was philosophy made physical, the gap between what I could do and what I should do. He had to learn. If I solve everything, he learns nothing. And if he learns nothing, he dies the first time I'm not there.

  The first time I'm not there.

  That sentence went lodged between the ribs where thoughts went to calcify. Simultaneously the reason for everything I was doing and the prediction of everything I was afraid of.

  I could warn him. A good teacher would walk out there and say that Fang Liang was not his friend. His smile was infrastructure. The hip correction was a hook and the fish was Wei.

  But a good teacher also knows, that fish don't learn to identify hooks if they are warned about them every time. They learn to distrust warnings.

  Wei finished his forms and came inside, sweaty and breathing hard, the exertion flush of a body used well.

  He looked at me, standing at the window.

  "How was it?" he asked.

  A choice, right now, in the kitchen, in the morning light, with cold tea in my hand.

  "Your seventh-form exit drifts left. A centimeter."

  He nodded. Processing. A centimeter. The kind of feedback that was useful and that maintained the structure — teacher, student, the exchange of technical information when the other languages were too large and too dangerous.

  He went outside, repeated the seventh-form and corrected the drift.

  I watched from the window with my tea and my warning — unsaid, undelivered.

  The gamble was always his.