The qi source lay about an hour's hike up the mountain slope through forest that was sick now. The trees showing the stress in their canopy. Leaves curled inward to protect against something invisible, intangible.

  Wei led. Four settlers behind him — the supply carriers, the ones he'd selected. Adults. Middle-aged. Following a boy up a mountain because the boy was the one who knew where the mountain hurt.

  I followed them. Far enough behind to not interfere, close enough to be available.

  The source was in a small cave. A fissure cracked the rock face, barely wide enough for one person, descending into darkness. And inside was the qi-source. The convergence point — the node where underground energy streams met and distributed. The valley's qi-heart. Arrhythmic now.

  Wei stopped at the entrance and looked back at the settlers.

  "Wait here."

  "Wei—"

  "It's narrow. And the qi-pressure inside is going to be strong. Anyone without cultivation will get sick."

  He was right. The corridor would be saturated — compressed qi from a destabilized source in a confined space. For ordinary bodies this meant migraine, nausea and vertigo. Even for cultivators it barely was manageable..

  He looked at me.

  A look, that didn't ask for help but for permission and trust. The permission that was not a blessing but a release, a loosening of the tie between his actions and my approval. And the trust of someone who was about to walk into danger and wanted to know that the person behind him was steady.

  I could have gone in. Walked past him, descended, identified the disruption in seconds, corrected it with a fraction of my capacity. Done. The settlers would have gone home. The fields would recover. Everything fixed, everything stable, everything: Yun handled it.

  And Wei would have stood at the entrance. Watching. Bypassed. Rendered irrelevant by the efficiency of someone whose efficiency was trained by millennia, making everyone around her unnecessary. Unnecessary was the wound. Healing required this. How could someone like him compare to someone like me?

  He couldn't. And he shouldn't. This was his moment.

  "I'll be at the entrance," I said.

  He nodded. Turned. Descended.

  The darkness swallowed him incrementally, light yielding to curvature and curvature to depth.

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  I stood at the entrance. The settlers behind me. The forest sick around us. The mountain containing the source and my boy approaching it.

  I could feel him. His qi-signature, bright, distinctive. The signature I could find in any crowd, in any cave on any continent. I tracked his progress.

  He moved deeper. Steady. Descending. Approaching the node.

  Twenty minutes.

  He reached the node. I felt a sudden increase in ambient qi-pressure as the source responded to his presence. The convergence point recognizing a cultivator in its space.

  He began.

  He channeled qi into the disrupted node and found the imbalances, the energy-tilts, the dislocations that had caused the surface symptoms. Layer by layer he probed. Methodical. For a fourteen-year-old, this was extraordinary. The kind of work trained specialists performed after years of study. Requiring sensitivity, control and the patience to correct without overcorrecting. Patience was Wei's least natural quality, which made his doing it anyway the triumph.

  I counted the twitches.

  During the stabilization, while his qi was extended into the source, while his control was at maximum. His core twitched.

  The first twitch was light. Like a stumble in the signal, his core's output flickering, catching and recovering. A foot missing a step and correcting.

  I noticed it and gripped the cave wall. Stone under my fingers. Cold.

  He continued. Deeper into the work. The source responding — slowly, the energy patterns beginning to realign.

  He was doing it.

  The second twitch was stronger. His core pulsed, the overcorrection of a system compensating for the first instability by adding force. Like bailing water with a bigger bucket, which was temporarily effective but structurally damaging.

  I felt my nails against the stone.

  He was going to make it. The source began to stabilize. The patterns aligning. Almost done. Almost—

  The third twitch was the strongest. His core FLARED, bright, hot, a full-intensity discharge from a system that had exceeded its capacity. Like a gong struck too hard. The note was correct but the vibration was excessive, lingering beyond where it should have stopped.

  The gong continued and Wei finished. The source stabilized. The patterns aligned. The valley was save.

  He emerged from the cave into the light, dusty and sweating. His face was pale with exertion. Yet he stood — with a grin on his face.

  "It's done," he said. "The qi is stable again."

  The settlers felt it immediately. The lifting of the Qi-pressure. Headaches receding. The air felt clearer. The relief that happens when the world went from wrong to right.

  They cheered. A spontaneous vocalization of relief from people whose pain had stopped. His name. Wei. The boy who'd fixed the earth.

  He stood in the middle. Surrounded by grateful adults. Old hands on his shoulders, voices thanking him, eyes looking at him with the gratitude of people who had been afraid and were no longer.

  He smiled. The quieter, deeper version. Not performance but presence. The smile of someone who had done something real. Something that mattered.

  I saw the tremors before he did — both hands, the post-exertion vibration that was not normal. Normal tremors were coarse and asymmetric. This was fine and symmetric. Core-mediated, not muscular.

  He balled his fists and the trembling stopped.

  "Just tired," he said.

  To himself. To no one. The phrase becoming a refrain.

  He didn't notice the tremor. Or he noticed it and filed it under normal — the category his fourteen-year-old psychology assigned to things that happened after effort. Sufficient, because sufficiency was what he needed.

  The settlers started down the mountain.

  I followed. Organizing my thoughts. I had counted three twitches during stabilization, each stronger than the last. The hands were trembling symmetric.

  Qi-Clock, Stage 2. Confirmed.

  The gong was still ringing.