The inn served breakfast. Rice, pickled vegetables, something that had once been eggs. Wei ate. I didn't. Xu Ran ate slowly, with the careful precision of someone who had been hungry recently enough that food was still a negotiation.

  Three people at a table. Two meters of scarred wood between them.

  Wei's hands were steady. He'd done something — a technique, a suppression he'd figured out in the twenty minutes between the courtyard and the table. The visible tremor was gone. The cost was in his shoulders. Rigid.

  "How long since the break?" Wei asked. Conversational.

  "Eleven months," Xu Ran said. "Give or take."

  "And before that, how long did they shake?"

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  "Two years."

  Wei processed. Two years of tremor, then a break. He was on — a few weeks? The math was simple.

  "Did you try to stop them?"

  "Everything. Meditation. Channeling exercises. A healer in Dragon Harbor who said it was spiritual misalignment and charged me three spirit stones for a diagnosis anyone with functioning observation could have provided for free."

  Wei almost smiled.

  "Did anything work?"

  "Slowing down."

  "What does that mean?"

  Xu Ran set his chopsticks on the table. Aligned them parallel. "It means doing less than you can. Deliberately. Consistently. The gap between capacity and execution — that's where the tremor lives. Close the gap and it stops."

  "By doing less."

  "By doing less."

  Wei stared at him.

  "What if you can't?" Quiet.

  Xu Ran looked at him.

  "Then it gets worse," he said. "And then it breaks."

  Silence.

  Wei leaned back. Looked at the ceiling. Beams, thatch. He looked at it anyway.

  "Thanks," he said.

  "For what?" Xu Ran asked.

  "For telling me."

  Aimed at Xu Ran. Delivered to me.

  Wei pushed his bowl aside. "We should leave today."

  "Agreed," I said, but looked away.