The Torrent hit them like a wall made of light.

  Chen Xi had prepared for increased Qi density.

  He had read Wu Zheng's descriptions, modelled the differential, calculated the adaptation curve. He had prepared for discomfort, disorientation, perhaps nausea.

  Not for drowning.

  The Qi here was not the thin, diffuse energy of the First Stratum. It was a river: dense, fast, turbulent, pressing against every surface of his body with the intimate insistence of deep water.

  His meridians, designed for a trickle, became firehoses.

  The vortex screamed.

  Not metaphorically. The rotation produced a sound, a high thin whine like a turbine pushed past its rated RPM. Intake exceeding capacity.

  For the first time since he'd built it in the Silted Bones, the Vortex Core was failing.

  He dropped to his knees on grass that was too green. A colour that didn't exist in the Silt. A green that vibrated with the energy saturating every blade.

  Beside him, Wu Zheng leaned on a tree with his eyes closed and his jaw clenched. The old man's rebuilt meridians protesting the pressure like pipes reconnected to the mains after decades.

  Su Yiran had assumed a lotus position, eyes closed, breathing in controlled rhythms. Adapting with the systematic discipline of someone who had trained for this.

  Little Abacus was on his back in the grass, staring at the sky.

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  "The sky is BLUE," the boy said. "Actually blue. Not brown. Not grey. Blue."

  "Noted," Chen Xi managed, through the effort of not letting his vortex tear itself apart.

  "And the grass. The grass has a colour I don't have a word for. Is there a word for green that is more green than green?"

  "Verdant," Su Yiran said, without opening her eyes.

  "VERDANT. I'm writing that down. As soon as my arms work."

  Chen Xi closed his eyes and focused.

  The vortex was over-spinning. Intake exceeded processing by a factor of eleven. If he didn't throttle it, the fourth meridian would rupture.

  In the Silt, that meant pain. In the Torrent, with a hundred times the energy, it meant death.

  He needed a governor. A constriction point to limit intake speed, the way a turbine's governor prevents over-rotation in high-flow conditions.

  He designed one in his head and implemented it with the desperate precision of a man adjusting a machine that is currently on fire.

  The whine dropped. The vortex slowed. The world stopped trying to force itself inside him.

  He opened his eyes.

  It was beautiful. It was also far more dangerous than the Silt had ever been. Not because of monsters or politics. Because of physics. The energy density changed everything.

  His models, his calculations, his hard-won understanding. All calibrated for conditions that no longer applied.

  He was a deep-sea diver who had trained in a swimming pool.

  And the Vortex Core's parasitic effect, seven percent from Li Wei at thirty metres in the Silt, would scale with density.

  In the Torrent, his vortex would drain anyone nearby with the gentleness of a riptide.

  He had promised to fix it. He had not fixed it.

  The fix could no longer wait. But first, they had to survive.

  He ran the numbers while he walked. He always ran the numbers.

  The Torrent's cultivation tiers ran from Foundation through Resonance, Core Formation, Nascent Soul, and Spirit Severing.

  He was Foundation Gate 9, roughly equivalent to his Silt level, adjusted for the denser environment.

  His efficiency had settled at fifty-four percent after the governor redesign. The Torrent average was twelve to eighteen.

  Impressive, on paper.

  But the Torrent's weakest gate guard was Foundation Peak. The floor of this world was his ceiling. He was below the baseline here, and every cultivator who glanced at him knew it.

  And that was before accounting for the drain, the invisible radius that made close combat suicidal for anyone standing next to him.