He didn't know.

  Morning came. Wei woke. Stretched. Made the sound of a boy whose body was simultaneously thirteen years of growth and millennia of cultivation spillover — somewhere between a yawn and a structural assessment.

  "Sleep well?" I asked.

  "Better than lately. No dreams."

  No dreams. No awareness of the light, the hum, the shadowless minutes.

  "Good," I said.

  He ate. Rice from yesterday, cold, augmented with dried herbs and mountain water. He ate quickly — meals were fuel, not events.

  Halfway through, he pushed the tin toward me. Didn't look up. Didn't speak. Just the rice, crossing the gap between us.

  "Your hands," I said, shaking my head in a polite gesture of dismission.

  He held them out. The tremor: both hands. The right consistent, small-amplitude. The left intermittent, appearing now without stress, which meant the baseline had shifted and the shift was permanent.

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  "Same as yesterday," he said.

  "Worse than yesterday."

  He shrugged. Filed it.

  He trained. Compression exercises improving — five-breath holds now, consistent. Qi-suppression clean. His signature virtually disappeared during the holds.

  But the rebounds. After each compression, the release produced a qi-flare larger than the previous day's. The signal wasn't diminishing — it was growing. The compression was pressing on a spring. The spring was getting stronger.

  "Enough," I said.

  "I can do more."

  "That's the problem."

  He looked at me. The look of someone told that their competence was a liability.

  "Rest," I said.

  He rested. Sat on a rock. Drank water. Hands trembling, pressed between his knees.

  "Yun."

  "What?"

  "Xu Ran. His tremor. Was it like this?"

  "Similar."

  "How similar?"

  "Same mechanism. Different stage."

  "What stage am I?"

  Silence.

  "Earlier," I said. "Earlier than he was."

  "How much earlier?"

  "Early enough."

  The non-answer. He heard it. The micro-expression of recognition, the brief assessment of whether to challenge, the decision to table — placing the question on the pile.

  He stood. Picked up his pack and started walking.

  The mountains accepted us with the indifference that was itself a form of welcome. The mountains cared about geology and weather and the slow project of erosion.

  I envied the mountains.

  I suspected I always would.