Wei trained differently now.

  I noticed on the third morning after we left the main road. We'd moved into the foothills — pine forests, the kind of terrain that punished everyone with elevation changes that turned walking into a war with gravity.

  He woke before dawn. Was in the clearing by the time I'd catalogued his absence.

  He was training. But the focus had shifted.

  The old training: maximization. More force. More speed. More range. He had trained like fire — in all directions, consuming available fuel.

  The new training: subtraction.

  He was compressing his core. Drawing his qi-signature inward, down, under, into the territory below perception. He was practicing invisibility.

  The techniques were his. Not mine. Adaptations. Extensions. Some movements I recognized — fragments of Xu Ran's form, observed during their tension-filled mornings at the inn. Wei had watched. Catalogued. Translated. Taking the principles from a broken cultivator's muscle memory and integrating them into his own practice.

  I stood at the treeline. Watched. Saying nothing.

  His compression technique was producing results: his qi-signature dimmed, flickered, nearly vanished. For three breaths, standing in a clearing in the predawn gray, Wei was invisible to qi-sense. Not hidden. Not dampened. Gone.

  Three breaths. Then the compression failed. His signature snapped back — louder for having been suppressed.

  He stumbled. Gasped. Hands on knees. The tremor was there — both hands, the right worse than the left.

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  He straightened. Looked at his hands. Clinical. Then he did it again.

  I watched him do it twelve times. Twelve compressions. Twelve periods of near-invisibility, ranging from one breath to five. Twelve rebounds. Twelve tremors.

  On the thirteenth attempt, his nose bled.

  A thin line, left nostril. He wiped it. Backhanded.

  He stopped. Sat. Breathed. His qi settled.

  Then he saw me.

  He didn't startle. He'd known I was there. Or decided that being observed was acceptable because the training was more important.

  "How long?" he asked.

  "Long enough."

  "The third one — five breaths. Did you count?"

  "I counted."

  He was pleased. Trying not to show it. The effort produced a face that showed it more.

  "Getting better," he said.

  "Getting more costly."

  His hand went to his nose. The check had become reflex. Clean this time. He wiped his fingers on his trousers anyway, the ghost of previous blood.

  "Cost is acceptable."

  It wasn't acceptable. The nosebleed was pressure finding exits. The tremor was structure objecting. But I'd taught him what I could — the basics, the framework, the principles that worked for anyone with a core and patience. My own techniques went further, deeper, cleaner. They also required being what I was. A hole doesn't compress. It simply is.

  I had nothing better to offer him. So I said nothing.

  "Xu Ran's technique," I said. "The second position. You've changed it."

  Wei looked at his hands. Opened and closed them. "He had good form. Stable. Like someone who built the house before he lit the fire."

  "Show me."

  He showed me. The integration — Xu Ran's stability principles merged with his own expansive tendencies. A framework simultaneously rigid and flexible, that compressed without constraining.

  "Good," I said.

  "Good?"

  "Good."

  "You never say 'good.'"

  "I said it now."

  He looked at me. Something I hadn't seen in weeks. Not trust — that bridge had structural concerns. But something adjacent. Recognition that the evaluation mattered because the evaluator's standards were known and high.

  He trained for another hour. I watched. Offered corrections — minor, technical, calibration rather than direction.

  Stability count: four. Out of ten. He'd gotten better, faster and the better was outpacing the body's ability to accommodate.

  Four. Where ten was healthy and one was Xu Ran.

  I didn't tell him the number.