The forest gave us three days.

  Dense canopy. Tall conifers that had never been logged because nothing up here was worth the labor cost — too steep, too remote, terrain that civilizations skipped over and economies forgot. The trails were animal-made. The streams were clean.

  Wei trained. The new pattern — slow, deliberate, the qi-steps-in-sand protocol. He didn't like it. This was obvious, not in complaint but in the aggressive quality of his silence. The one that occupied space through the precision of its absence.

  He drew patterns in the frozen ground. Qi-lines, barely visible, the faintest possible output — the opposite of everything his body wanted to do. His core hummed with suppressed potential. His channels were oversaturated, pressurized. A river behind a dam that existed only because the boy generating the pressure was also the boy containing it through stubbornness.

  "Again."

  He redrew. Slower. The line wobbled — not from weakness but from excess. Too much qi trying to fit through a channel calibrated for too little.

  "The left line drifts."

  "I know."

  "Then fix it."

  "I'm trying."

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  He was. That was the problem. The harder he concentrated, the more qi his core supplied and the more qi his core supplied, the less control he had over the output. A loop that doesn't resolve through effort because effort is the fuel.

  "Stop."

  He stopped. Shoulders rigid. Jaw set.

  "Eat."

  "I'm not hungry."

  "Eat anyway."

  He ate. Cold rice, dried meat, the portions getting smaller, not rationing but declining appetite.

  The afternoon went to walking. Northeast, deeper into terrain that didn't appear on any map I'd seen — and I'd seen most of them. The forest thickened. The trees grew older. The light took on the filtered quality of places that had been shaded for centuries.

  Wei walked ahead. He'd started choosing the path, making direction decisions with quiet assertion. I let him. The path was safe. His choices were reasonable. And the practice of choosing was a curriculum I couldn't teach by doing it for him.

  He turned. "How far to the next town?"

  "Two days. Maybe three."

  "We need salt."

  "I know."

  "And needle and thread. My pack's coming apart."

  "I know."

  He turned back. Walked. Naming necessities was his way of participating in the logistics that kept us alive. The participation made him feel less carried. I wasn't going to take that from him.

  Later, I sat watch. Not from necessity — nothing in this forest could threaten me and the scouts were behind us. I sat watch because lying down invited thinking and thinking invited the number.

  Forty-seven.

  Still there. Hadn't faded. Hadn't softened at the edges the way memories do. Precise. Clinical. The certainty of measurement, not cognition.

  Wei shifted in his sleep. His core pulsed — once, hard. The forces underneath larger than the surface suggested.

  Stars. The same configurations from before. Always the same. Unchanged. Indifferent.

  You never found them indifferent. That was always your mistake.

  When the light came and Wei woke and asked "Where next?" I said "Northeast" and didn't explain and he didn't ask.