The morning was wrong.

  I woke to the weight of it — not physical weight, but qi-weight. The heaviness of qi-flows shifting in the region.

  Like a storm that wouldn't arrive. The barometric promise of violence existing as pressure rather than precipitation — atmosphere pressing down without release.

  Wei felt it too. He sat up slowly. Not the usual explosion of waking — the tentative rise of someone whose body was registering environmental data before consciousness had time to sort it.

  "It feels heavy," he said.

  He was right. It did.

  Outside, the settlement was already wrong. The wrongness of a place where things had changed overnight, which was visible in the mundane — the fields, the animals, the plants. The domestic infrastructure of a community that depended on stability encountering the instability that qi-shifts produced.

  The fields. Three of them — the barley, the root vegetables, the grain that Auntie Huang called "the good one." Brown. Wilted overnight, the cellular collapse of crops whose qi-nourished soil had been disrupted. Plants, that spoke disruption in their own vocabulary. Droop, brown, fall.

  Wei's garden. I rushed to check, before he did — standing in the doorway, looking at the three pots.

  The dock grass was wilting. The vertical stiffness of yesterday gone, the stems bending toward the earth, drooping, heavy with water they couldn't process. The nettle-cousin was even worse. Its ambiguous bloom — the small, white flower was closed. Sealed. Folded inward like something that had been open and no longer was.

  The lemongrass was holding. Barely. The accidental rightness of this plant proving marginally more resilient than the undeliberate wrongness of the others, the irony being that the one thing he'd planted correctly was the one thing that survived longest.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The animals felt it, too. Dogs were barking — the sustained, directionless barking of something wrong. Lao Chen's cat couldn't be found. Three chickens from Auntie Huang's coop huddled, quietly on the porch. Birds that should have been loud didn't make a peep. Their silence was louder than their noise ever was. Lao Chen's cat, in fairness, vanished on a biweekly basis for reasons that predated qi-disruption and likely involved the fish stall two settlements over. But the timing was suspicious.

  People had headaches and nausea. The physical symptoms of qi-pressure on uncultivated bodies. They felt the shift as discomfort, as malaise, as something hostile they couldn't name.

  Auntie Huang was out early. Loud, but not the usual loud — higher-pitched, edged with fear.

  "Something's wrong with the water," she announced to no one and yet to everyone. "It tastes like metal."

  Her methods lacked refinement. Her conclusions did not. I knew this. Wei knew this. It was like a déjà vu — the recognition of a pattern, the understanding that this had happened before, that the signs were familiar.

  I tasted it the water. The ferric quality of water whose mineral content had been altered by qi-flow disruption — shifts deep enough to reach the aquifer.

  I felt for the qi-flows themselves. I extended my perception outward, traced the energy patterns that ran beneath the settlement, the valley, the region. They were moving. Not the normal, tidal movements that qi-flows made in response to season, moon and the ambient physics of cultivation environments. These were disruptions. Structural. The qi equivalent of a river changing course — the underground energy streams that had been stable for longer, than my last visit were now rerouting. Compressing in some areas and depleting in others.

  I guided my senses to the source in the northeast. The qi-node that fed the valley — a concentration point where energy streams converged and distributed, which served as the circulatory system's heart for this corner of the world. It was destabilizing. Not collapsing but shifting. Like a bowl being tilted, the contents sliding to one side, the balance lost.

  Wei came outside. His qi-sensitivity detected the disruption, the wrongness in the ambient field. His face was serious, the grin replaced by context.

  He knelt by his garden and touched the dock grass, the wilting stem between his fingers.

  "What's happening?" he asked.

  "The qi-flows are shifting. The source northeast is destabilizing."

  He looked at me. Then at the settlement. At the brown fields. At the barking dogs. At the people holding their heads.

  He stood.

  The posture of someone who was about to act.