It happened at the well.

  Midday. Wei stood with Lao Chen's neighbor — a farmer whose name I knew but had become irrelevant. Relevance had compressed to a single point. The flicker.

  They were talking. Normal. The ordinary conversation of a boy and a man at a well — water, weather, the quality of the recent harvest recovery. Wei was animated, bright, fourteen, recently a hero.

  Then his core pulsed.

  Not internally — externally. The visible, undeniable eruption of qi that broke through his dampening and expressed itself as a brief aura. Golden heat radiated outward from his body in a pulse that was visible to anyone with eyes, not just cultivators, not just sensitives, anyone whose visual cortex processed light.

  For one second, Wei looked like a lantern. A human-shaped light source. A boy who was broadcasting at a frequency that was visible in the mundane spectrum.

  The farmer stepped back. Involuntary. The physical retreat of someone that had been startled by something it couldn't fathom — not fear, not aggression, just: what was that?

  "what IS that? Your qi?"

  Wei blinked. The blink of someone who had felt something and was deciding whether the something was real or imagined. His hands — he looked at them. Both. The tremor was there — bilateral, fine, the vibration that I had catalogued at Stage 2 and that was now visible to someone other than me in daylight at a well.

  "Nothing. Just—"

  "That wasn't 'nothing.'"

  Wei looked at his hands again. Closed them. Opened them. Closed them. The tremor persisted through the first close but diminished through the second and stopped.

  "I'm just tired," he said.

  The farmer looked at him. The look of someone who didn't believe but lacked information to contradict. Forgotten until it happens again.

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  Wei moved on. Toward the market stall.

  I stayed at my position at wall with my cold tea. The observation post that I had occupied for the entire morning and that provided the angle of everything visible with no interference.

  The flicker had been visible to at least four people. The farmer. A woman at the nearest stall, a child and Fang Liang.

  Fang Liang was there too.

  He appeared in the afternoon, at the settlement's edge. He dressed differently this time. Simpler clothes and a satchel of herbs. The presentation of a traveling merchant rather than a sect disciple. The disguise was competent. The disguise was also irrelevant because his qi-signature was the same and I already knew his qi-signature.

  He was distributing salves and herbal remedies. Helping settlers. Genuine benevolence and strategic positioning at once — he could do both, which was what made him dangerous.

  Wei saw him. I watched recognition cross Wei's face — surprise, recalibration, then decision. He approached.

  They spoke.

  I was too far to hear the words. But I could read Wei's body language — the posture of attention, the listening that Wei performed when someone was telling him something he didn't want to hear but couldn't dismiss.

  Fang Liang handed Wei something small. A jar with healing salve, probably. For the shoulder. The kindness of a handler maintaining contact through care.

  Then the wind blew a sentence over. Or maybe I read it on Fang Liang's lips. It was a skill I possessed but rarely needed and which came in handy now.

  "You have to decide, boy. Soon no wall will be enough."

  The smile was gone from his face. For the first time since I'd seen him, the infrastructure of friendliness was not operational. His expression was naked. Not cold like the jade-tablet report. But also not warm like the market encounter either. There. Present. Unmediated.

  Worried? Maybe. Or pragmatic — the pragmatism of someone losing a resource. His concern looked like worry but might have been investment protection.

  Or maybe he was a man in his twenties who had met a boy and recognized something in him and was now watching said boy walk toward something coming. The warning was the truth. An unsmiling truth.

  No wall will be enough.

  Ambiguous. The walls of the settlement — against the sect. Or the walls of Wei's body — against his core. Both readings valid. Both true.

  Wei stood in the afternoon light after Fang Liang left, holding a jar of healing salve and looking at the road east toward the sect gate. The door he had closed that was now being opened from the other side.

  When he finally came back for the evening meal, sitting across the table with rice and tea, he didn't tell me about the conversation.

  "Long day," I said.

  "Mm."

  "How is your shoulder?"

  "Fine."

  The first thing Wei didn't share. The first information he kept.

  The symmetry was perfect and terrible. I was keeping information from him. He was keeping information from me. We were sitting across a table from each other with our separate secrets and the table was the space between us and measured the width of unsaid things.

  I drank my tea. He drank his.

  The table held.