We camped at a place where the trees thinned and the sky opened. A small natural clearing — not cleared by hands or qi but by root systems that had decided to leave this circle of earth alone. It was the last night on the mountain.

  Wei lay on his bedroll. Eyes closed. Somewhere between waking and rest, too tired to move, too wired to sleep. His breathing was even. His core was not.

  It vibrated. The detuned oscillation that had been present since the outburst and that hadn't resolved.

  Forty-seven percent.

  I pushed the number down. It surfaced. Three days of this conversation, the number and I. The number was winning.

  I sat cross-legged, three meters from him. Close enough to intervene. Far enough to pretend I wasn't monitoring.

  His core pulsed. Once. Again. The rhythm was irregular — not the clean periodicity of healthy cultivation but a stuttered cadence. A heartbeat with an extra syllable.

  He had drifted into sleep. I stood and walked to him. He wouldn't wake — not in this depth of exhaustion. His body had reached the shutdown phase that cultivation stress produced: the physical body simply stopped accepting input and went dormant and left the energetic channels to run unsupervised. That was the problem.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  I knelt and placed my hand on his forehead. The skin was warm. The heat of a body generating more energy than it consumed.

  I looked at him. Round-faced still, despite the travel, despite the cold rations and the altitude. Slack and unbothered, sleep making him, briefly, the person he was before the world started happening to him.

  His qi met my palm.

  A pulse. Gentle at first — a sleeping cultivator's reflex encountering a known presence. Then it became stronger. The pulse pressed against my hand. Something was reaching. Something that recognized my qi and moved toward it with the unconscious certainty of water moving downhill.

  I let it. Three seconds.

  In those three seconds, his core stabilized. The vibration smoothed. The irregular pulse resolved into rhythm. A struck bell finding its note after the initial chaos of impact.

  Three seconds of contact and his channels corrected.

  I pulled my hand back.

  The correction held. For now. A bandage — containing, not healing.

  I stepped back. His core glowed through his chest. Faintly. Warm-toned, the color of late afternoon. Visible through fabric. Through skin.

  Deadly. I mused.

  One word. The complete assessment. It came unbidden. The word that had been hovering at the edge of my awareness for three days, trying to find a way in.

  I pulled my hand into my sleeve. The hand his qi had reached for. The hand that had, for three seconds, given his channels what it was looking for.

  The dark came. Complete. Only stars above and the faint glow from the boy next to me.

  Wei stirred. Half-awake — the brief surfacing of consciousness that deep exhaustion sometimes permits.

  "Yun?"

  "I'm here."

  "...warm."

  He slept again. His core glowed softly. His breathing settled.

  I sat until dawn.

  Morning came. We descended. The mountain released us into the foothills. I didn't look back. Everything worth taking was already behind my ribs.