The lynx charged lower still, having learned twice, having adapted.

  Wei didn't dodge, didn't roll, didn't redirect.

  He channeled.

  Everything. All of it. The qi held in reserve, the stored energy that training had taught him to maintain as backup. The emergency fund you didn't touch unless there was an emergency. And the emergency was now.

  His right hand erupted. Golden light. Not the controlled output of a trained technique but the full, unmodulated discharge of a core operating at maximum without limit.

  The qi-pulse hit the lynx mid-charge.

  The animal stopped. Not decelerated. Stopped. Seventy kilos of enhanced predator in flight, committed to the attack as the boy's pulse overwhelmed it — force meeting force and his was significantly larger.

  The lynx flew backward. Three meters, four, five — tumbling, fur rippling, its qi-lines stuttering and failing, the animal overloaded by the input.

  It landed hard on its side in the undergrowth.

  For a moment there was nothing — the forest still, the birds silent, the stream trickling, the clearing suspended between violence and aftermath.

  Then the lynx stood, slowly, shakily, its qi-lines dim, its posture different. The aggression was gone, replaced by reassessment — the adjustment a predator made when the hierarchy proved wrong.

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  The lynx turned and walked into the undergrowth — the dignity of retreat.

  Wei stood alone in the center of the clearing, in the trampled grass and the displaced earth, surrounded by his own blood from his arm, on the ground, on the shredded sleeve.

  His left shoulder was open, diagonal, deep — a wound that would scar. His hands trembled with the post-combat vibration of a body returning from beyond its capacity. His face was bloody, covered in sweat and dirt and the red smear of a hand that had touched his wound.

  And his expression — a grin.

  The radiant, undefeatable grin of a fourteen-year-old boy who had just fought a qi-enhanced rock lynx alone and won.

  "I did it!"

  Loud. At the forest. At the sky. At me.

  "I DID IT!"

  Then his breath stopped.

  Two seconds — not a gasp, not a stutter, but a full cessation. His chest went immobile, his mouth still open, mid-grin, frozen. His eyes unchanged, still victorious, still bright, still the eyes of someone who had won and didn't know that the winning had a clause.

  A warmth. I felt it from eight meters — the sudden, internal bloom of heat from his core, radiating outward through his chest, his shoulders, his arms. Not painful. Warm, pleasant, the sensation of sunshine absorbed and redistributed.

  Prickling. On his skin — goosebumps, the body's response to a qi-event it couldn't categorize.

  Two seconds and then his breath returned.

  He blinked. Rubbed his chest — casually, the way you rubbed a stitch. The gesture of someone filing an anomaly under exertion.

  "I'm tired," he said. To himself. To the forest. To the grin that was still on his face.

  I uncurled my fists. Slowly. The crescents in my palms releasing as my fingers straightened. Iron on my tongue.

  The qi-clock — it had started. The two-second stop, the warmth, the prickling — these were not exertion. These were the symptoms of a core exceeding containment, physical overflow. Stage one. The beginning of what I'd been watching for.

  Him, grinning, bloody, victorious, rubbing his chest.

  Just tired.

  "Come," I said. "Let me look at your shoulder."