There was no way to know that this was the last evening. No, that's a lie. I knew. The signatures, the positioning, the pattern I had seen before — in other lives, other wars, other operations that targeted and extracted and eliminated. Tomorrow.

  Wei sat on the veranda. Barefoot. Legs over the edge, hanging, the way he might have sat when he was nine and the world was large and the veranda was tall and his feet hadn't reached the ground yet.

  He was doing nothing. No training. No sword-sharpening. No bragging. No storytelling. He was just sitting there watching the sun go down — low, yellow-orange. It hit the mountains and turned them gold. The gold would turn red and the red would turn to the dark of the night.

  I sat beside him, not close — the gap deliberate, the distance two people maintained when both knew and neither wanted to.

  We were quiet. The settlement behind us hummed with pulsing barriers, protection signs below hearing and escape routes were marked. All waiting for was about to come. Everything ready, everything except—

  Wei breathed and a suddenly there was light.

  The familiar warmth at his sternum, through his shirt. I'd catalogued it a hundred times — in sleep, in surges, in the aftermath of fights and forced marches. Every time it had fadedafter seconds, sometimes a minute, then the dampening kicked in and containment resumed.

  Not this time. It didn't fade.

  Wei glanced down. Casual. He'd seen this before — the glow that came and went. He looked at it the way you look at a cough that's been lingering. Acknowledged, not alarming. He did not put it awy casually, but he had learned to live with it.

  Ten seconds. His jaw shifted. The glow was still there. He straightened, rolled his shoulders — the kind of movement that usually shook it loose. The kind that resets the dampening.

  The light held.

  Twenty seconds. His eyes widened. Both hands on his chest now, pressing flat against the glow as if he could push it back in. The light bled between his fingers, steady, round, holding at a brightness that competed with the setting sun instead of yielding to it.

  He took his hands away. Looked at them. Looked at his chest. Back at his hands.

  A minute. His breathing changed. Faster. Shallow. The first time I had ever seen Wei afraid of his own body.

  "What's—" He stood up. Sat down. Stood up again. The glow followed him. "What's happening to me?"

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Not to me. To himself. To no one. The question of a boy who had always trusted his body and whose body had just become something else.

  "Wei." Quiet. The voice I used for stabilization — level, low, the frequency that said the situation is under control regardless of whether it was. "Breathe."

  "I am breathing — it's not—"

  "Slower."

  He breathed. Faster than I'd asked. Then slower. Then something close to normal.

  "It's a qi-surge," I said. True enough. Not the whole truth. Not even close. "Your core is recalibrating after the output this week. The glow is excess energy finding a surface."

  He looked at me. The look of someone wanting to believe.

  "It'll settle," I said.

  It wouldn't.

  He sat back down. Slowly. The way you lower yourself when the ground has become uncertain. His hands gripped the edge of the veranda. The light at his sternum continued — indifferent to his panic, indifferent to his hands, indifferent to everything.

  In rest. Not combat, not training, not exertion. Sitting. Barefoot. Just sitting. And his core refused to go quiet.

  Stage 3. The stage that confirmed: the process was no longer episodic. No longer a response that triggered and resolved. Autonomous now. The degradation had become the baseline. The baseline was the countdown.

  The silence between us hung thick and heavy. The silence of two people who shared the same truth. The closest thing to honesty either of us had managed in weeks.

  "I'm not going to stop," he said.

  Not to me. To the mountains, maybe. To the light. To whatever part of himself was producing the light.

  "I know what you'll say." He picked at the wood of the veranda. Looking down, occupied with something small, avoiding the larger conversation. "That I should rest. That I should be careful. That the core—"

  "I wasn't going to say that."

  He looked at me.

  The light at his sternum — still there. No longer a symptom but a condition. A core consuming faster than it regenerated.

  "What were you going to say?"

  What would I say? The truth? That the light was the stage before the final stage. That the time between this light and the end was measured in days or weeks instead of months?

  That I could slow it? That my hands on his sternum, my qi in his pathways, could buy him time? Stabilize the cascade? That I could extend the countdown? Maybe? If the attenuation held. If the river didn't break the reed. If I didn't—.

  So I was choosing not to?

  That the risk was real? Yet that risk was not the reason? Not the real reason.

  "That I know," I said.

  A pause.

  "This time I fight," he said.

  The same words as in the forge. The fight was his choice. Non-negotiable.

  "I know," I said.

  The sun set and the mountains went dark. The light at his sternum remained — faint, steady, burning with its own fuel. Finite as it was.

  Stars came out.

  And today would become tomorrow.

  Neither of us moved. Neither of us went inside. Neither of us made the decision normal people make at the end of normal evenings.

  We stayed.

  The veranda. The dark. The stars. The light through his shirt like a second heartbeat.

  Tomorrow would be battle. Battle was what he wanted. Wanting it was what made him Wei. Being Wei was what was killing him.

  And the killing was what I could have stopped.

  The stars moved. The night deepened. His light continued.

  Somewhere in the darkness waited eight signatures, a commander and a plan.

  Somewhere closer, a sharpened sword leaned against a bed.

  And between all of it — between the signatures and the sword, between the plan and the boy, between the barrier-protected walls and the unprotected core — me. Sitting. Watching.

  Morning would come.