The foothills became mountains. Not gradually. The incline steepened over a single day — foothills becoming cliffs, cliffs becoming walls, the trail switching from walking to climbing.

  Wei climbed well. His body was remarkable — not for the metrics, not the qi-throughput or meridian capacity. The remarkable thing was the integration. His muscles moved with qi-efficiency I'd seen in cultivators three times his age. He climbed as if the angle didn't concern him.

  He was also hiding from me.

  The big things were visible — the nosebleeds, the tremor, the midnight surges. What he hid were the small things. The progress.

  He'd developed three new compression techniques in four days. I could feel the shifts in his qi-signature during rest stops. Changes that took most cultivators weeks of guided practice, achieved through independent experimentation.

  He wasn't showing me. Wasn't bringing them for evaluation. He had learned — from me, by my example — that certain categories of growth were handled privately.

  On the fifth day in the mountains, I tested him.

  "Channel qi through the second meridian set. Sustained. Thirty seconds."

  He did it. Clean. Perfect. The execution was so far beyond the exercise's difficulty that the exercise became transparent.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  "That was a test," he said.

  "It was an exercise."

  "It was a test. You're checking my stability."

  "Yes."

  He sat down on a rock. Flat-topped, positioned by geological processes that had nothing to do with comfort and produced it anyway.

  "How am I?" he asked.

  "Better than expected."

  "Is 'better than expected' good or bad?"

  "That depends on what was expected."

  He gave me the look of someone running out of patience with non-answers.

  "Your stability is decreasing," I said.

  "I know."

  He knew. Had calculated it himself, from his own data, through his own observation.

  "How long have you known?"

  "Since the inn. Since the boy with the broken core showed me what 'worse' looked like."

  Xu Ran as benchmark. Xu Ran as end-state demonstration.

  "And you're still training," I said.

  "The compression helps. When I suppress the signature, the pressure drops. Like releasing a valve."

  "Temporarily."

  "Everything is temporary."

  "You're right," I said.

  He looked at me. Surprised.

  "I'm right?"

  "You're right. Everything is temporary. Including the valve."

  He understood. I saw it register — the implication that the compression technique was itself temporary and that the temporary would expire.

  He nodded. Stood. Picked up his pack.

  "More walking?" he said.

  "More walking."

  "Good. Walking helps too."

  For a while, he walked beside me. Not ahead — beside. The fifteen-step distance, briefly, was none.

  Walking really helped. Physical exertion diffused the qi-pressure. A delay, nothing more. But every single drop counts.

  We walked. Up. Into mountains that didn't care about stability counts or compression techniques or thirteen-year-old boys whose cultivation was a lighthouse.

  The mountains had their own concerns. We were not among them.