Morning brought the confrontation I'd expected.

  Wei was outside the inn before sunrise. Sitting on a wall, legs dangling, hands in his lap under his robe. He'd been awake for at least an hour.

  Xu Ran came through the door. It creaked with the reluctance of hardware that had been asked to perform the same function too many times.

  He stopped. Saw Wei. Wei saw him.

  Four meters. Mud, straw, the detritus of an establishment that prioritized function over aesthetics and achieved neither.

  I stood in the doorframe. Behind Wei. Visible to both, participant in neither.

  "He tried to kill us," Wei said.

  The sentence was directed at me but spoken into the space between him and Xu Ran.

  "He tried to ascend," I said. "The village was just close by."

  "Isn't that the same thing?"

  "It isn't."

  Wei turned back to Xu Ran. "You brought the sky down on our village. People got hurt."

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  Xu Ran stood in the doorway. Hands at his sides.

  "I know."

  "You know." Wei repeated. Testing the words. Turning them over.

  "I didn't—"

  "Know people would get hurt? You triggered a tribulation. Above a village."

  "I didn't know the village was there."

  "Does that matter?"

  Silence.

  "No," Xu Ran said. "It doesn't matter."

  Wei nodded. Small — the acknowledgment of an answer honest enough to accept and not enough to forgive.

  They sat. Not together — Wei on the wall, Xu Ran on the step. Two meters apart.

  "Your qi," Xu Ran said. Quiet. "It's—"

  "I know what it is."

  "Do you know what it means?"

  Wei's jaw. The muscle. "I have a theory."

  "What theory?"

  "That I'm growing too fast for my body."

  I heard it. The lie I'd given him. He was repeating it. Using it. Building his understanding on the foundation I'd laid and the foundation was sand.

  Xu Ran looked at Wei's hands. At the robe covering them. At the fabric that moved with rhythmic oscillation.

  "I had that," he said. "The tremor. Before."

  "Before what?"

  "Before the core cracked."

  Wei's face went still.

  He withdrew his hands from his robe. Placed them on the wall. In the sunlight. Trembling. Visibly.

  "Still here," he said. Looking at his hands. "Still working."

  He stood. Walked inside. Past me. Gone.

  Xu Ran and I were alone.

  "He's yours?" Xu Ran asked.

  "He followed me."

  "That's not an answer."

  "It's the only one I have."

  "What does it feel like?" I asked. "When it breaks."

  The question was genuine. A novelty. I hadn't asked a genuine question in a long time.

  Xu Ran looked at the courtyard. At the mud, the straw, the door Wei had walked through. He said nothing. Not evasion — the silence of someone standing inside the answer and finding no words that fit around it.

  I recognized the shape.

  He nodded. Stood. Went inside.