I knew the number before I knew I knew it.

  It was night. The Fire was dead — deliberately. Wei slept three meters from the ashes, his breathing locked into the third-step pattern. His body curled into the efficient fetal position that mountain travel teaches.

  His core vibrated.

  I could hear it. Not with my ears — with the awareness that registered qi automatically, continuously. His core hummed. A low-frequency pulse. Irregular in a way that deviated from healthy baselines by margins small enough to ignore and consistent enough to matter.

  I observed it. Sitting in the dark, chin on my knees, my qi-perception extended to the boundary of his body. His qi leaked. Steadily, the way a cracked vessel leaks water. Slower than the in the clearing, but constant.

  His core sat in his dantian. Bright. Developmentally, it had been active for months and performed like years.

  I watched it pulse. Watched the meridional flow, qi circuiting from core to channels to extremities and back.

  Then —

  Forty-seven percent.

  The number arrived complete. Not deduction. Not experience. Not millennia of watching cores. It arrived the way a document arrives — placed, whole, authored by something else.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  At forty-seven percent qi-saturation, when the meridional flow passes the lower dantian knot, the core will generate a feedback loop. Duration: point-three seconds. The core will fracture.

  A taste of metal. Behind my tongue, underneath, in the place where the body stores what the mind refuses to process. My fingers twitched — involuntary, disconnected from any intention.

  Forty-seven. Not "around fifty." Not "somewhere near half." A number with the specificity of measurement rather than estimation. A number that belonged in a diagnostic report, not in a human mind observing a sleeping boy in the dark.

  The calculation required — the modeling of his core geometry, the prediction of his saturation trajectory, the simulation of feedback dynamics at the lower dantian intersection — was beyond any practitioner. Beyond me. The math required didn't exist in any school of cultivation I'd studied.

  "No."

  One word. Whispered. Not to Wei. Not to the dark. To whatever had placed the number in my head without my permission and without my understanding.

  I pushed it down. Quickly, deeply. The number didn't go away. Forty-seven. Present. Patient.

  Dawn arrived and I hadn't slept, which was nothing special in itself. But I had spent six hours with a number in my head and a boy breathing three meters away.

  Wei woke. Packed. Ate cold rice. The routine that had become ritual.

  We walked. West, then north. The terrain cooperated — downhill sections, intermittent treeline.

  At the first crossroads, where two trails met at a stone marker nobody had maintained in decades, I stopped and crouched.

  Qi-traces. Fresh. Scouts — the energetic footprint of professionals who specialized in tracking and who left traces only because complete erasure was physically impossible.

  They'd come for Wei's crater. The burst had propagated through the ambient field like a shout in a quiet room. And each of his outbursts narrowed the gap between their search radius and our path.

  I erased the traces. Changed our heading — northeast, into denser forest.

  "Why?"

  "Scouts."

  He didn't ask whose. He'd stopped asking whose.

  We walked. Northeast. Into trees that closed around us.