The vibration started on the third night in the mountains.

  Wei was asleep. Deep, immediate shutdown — a body that had depleted its daily reserves. He'd trained hard. Three hours of compression, two hours of walking.

  I heard it before I felt it.

  A hum. Below sound. Below the frequency human ears registered. The kind of vibration that traveled through ground rather than air.

  His core.

  I extended my senses. Wei's core was vibrating. Steady. Rhythmic. A second heartbeat, slower than his biological one, operating in a frequency range that had no precedent. Nothing in all my years of observation.

  New. And "new" in cultivation was either innovation or malfunction. The difference was only clear retrospectively.

  His face was tense, even in sleep. Jaw clenched. Breathing regular but labored.

  And then his face began to glow.

  Literally. I need to be precise: Wei's face, in the firelight, began to emit light.

  Faintly. A warm gold. Not the reflection of the fire — his own. Generated from within, through skin and bone and the qi-structures interpenetrating all of it. His qi was surfacing. Physically manifesting. Visible the way qi became visible only at extreme densities or extreme instabilities and since his density was extreme and his instability was extreme, the manifestation was logical. Terrifying and logical.

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  I stood. Moved closer. Knelt beside him. All those years and I knelt beside a sleeping boy, watching his face produce light from the inside, warm, beautiful, wrong.

  His hair. Generating its own light. Individual strands: luminous. As if dipped in something that remembered sunlight and was returning it now, in the dark.

  I looked at the ground.

  His shadow.

  Wei's body — between the fire and the ground — should have thrown a shadow. The physics of light and obstruction was not negotiable.

  He had no shadow.

  His own light was overriding the fire's output. He was brighter, at his surface, than the flames. The shadow that should have confirmed his body as solid, as opaque, as a thing that blocked light — was absent.

  He casts no shadow.

  I stood there. Looking at the ground where his shadow should have been. The fire crackled. The mountains were dark and indifferent. And a thirteen-year-old boy glowed in his sleep, shadowless, his core humming at a frequency that had no precedent.

  In sleep, when the conscious controls disengaged — this was Wei. A signal. A lighthouse lit from within by a fuel source that didn't diminish.

  The glow faded. Slowly. Minutes of gradually dimming. The luminescence retreated inward, back through the skin, back to the core.

  His shadow returned. Faint — the fire was lower now. But present. A dark shape on stone, confirming he was solid. That he was there.

  I sat down. Across the fire. In my place.

  He murmured something in his sleep. A word. I didn't catch it. Ordinary. The ordinary sound of a boy dreaming.

  I watched. Until dawn.