The clearing where Wei trained was at the forest edge, one li from the settlement — through the tree line, past the stream that was too small for a name.

  He moved barefoot on moss. The green compression of ancient organic matter under the feet of a boy who knew this ground now — every root, every depression, every patch of stone that interrupted the softness with the hardness of geological fact. He'd trained here every morning for three weeks. The ground bore the marks of his practice — compressed moss, scuffed stone, the worn track of repeated stances.

  His qi flowed clean and fast — the kind of fast that was efficient, that was the velocity of a body operating at high capacity without strain, the rhythm of someone whose body had been tuned by practice and proximity to competence.

  I was sitting on a branch three meters up and observed.

  His forms was his completely now. Not longer mine. Not anymore. The foundation was mine — the stances, the transitions, the structural grammar of movement that I had demonstrated and that he had absorbed. But layered over that foundation was something that was only his — the adaptations, the flourishes, the dialect of combat that emerged when a student spent enough time with a teacher's language to begin speaking their own. The way he extended the third position a centimeter past orthodox. The compression of the sixth-form exit. His hip correction.

  I sat on the branch with my legs hanging, tea cold and forgotten at the habitual temperature of inattention, my perception split between two tasks. Half on his form — assessing, comparing to yesterday's data, to last week's, to the trajectory model that I maintained and updated and that told me what I didn't want to know. Half on the forest — ambient, scanning, the sentinel function that operated whether I wanted it to or not.

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  His qi was faster than yesterday. The acceleration was subtle — measurable only by someone who had been measuring for months. The measurement was precise enough to detect the delta between 97 and 99 percent of his theoretical maximum output. Yesterday it had been 97. Today it was 99.

  For a normal observing cultivator this would be impressive. A talented fourteen-year-old whose qi-flow approached his ceiling with the grace that training produced. They would nod. They would say that he was well-taught.

  But for me, those 99 was the concern. Not because 99 was dangerous — 99 was fine. Because 99 at fourteen meant 100 at fourteen and a month and 100 was the ceiling and ceilings were the things that broke when the force beneath them exceeded structural tolerance.

  He finished, stood with his eyes closed, breathing even and controlled — the measured respiration of someone whose post-exercise protocol was disciplined.

  He opened his eyes, looked up at me and grinned.

  The grin of someone who knew he was being watched. Who knew I was here. Always here.

  "How was it?" he called up.

  "Your sixth-form exit is rushing."

  "It's supposed to be fast."

  "Fast and rushing are different."

  He considered this. He heard the difference between velocity-as-design and velocity-as-impatience.

  "I'll fix it."

  He would. He always did.

  The sun broke through the leaves, warm and green — the quality of morning forest light that was filtered, dappled and gentle. The kind that made a clearing feel contained, private — separate from whatever existed beyond the tree line. A good place. A safe place. A place for training, birds, cold tea on branches and the persistent trickle of an unnamed stream.

  It was the last morning like this.

  I didn't know that yet. Or I did — in the way that I knew everything, the ambient knowledge beneath conscious processing.

  Something was coming.

  Wei went back to training. Repeated the sixth-form. Slower this time. The correction a gift I gave without moving.

  I drank my cold tea and watched the sun move through the leaves.

  Peace.