The spirit-beast came from the east.

  Large. The size of a horse, maybe larger — swollen with decades of qi. Armored with plates of hardened skin that covered the shoulders and spine.

  It entered the radius. Unlike the ants, unlike the bird — this one came in. Too territorial or too qi-heavy to care.

  It charged.

  Fast. Heavy. The ground shaking under its weight.

  I moved.

  The body had reflexes older than decisions — responses that lived in the spine and the muscles, trained so deep that training was the wrong word. It was just nature, to preserve myself.

  My hand. Open. Rising. Meeting the charge at the shoulder joint where the plate was thinnest. Qi — mine, not the beast's. A pulse. Targeted.

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  The plate cracked. A sound like splitting stone. The beast's momentum redirected — its body angling sideways, rotation instead of impact. It slid past me. Three meters. Four. Claws scoring dirt.

  It turned. Snarled.

  I was already there. Beside it. Two steps — slow and measured, the casual displacement of someone who did not need speed because speed implied effort and effort implied engagement.

  My hand found its skull. Between the plates. The junction where qi-channels converged — the node that maintained everything.

  I pressed. The channel collapsed. Violently.

  The beast dropped. Mid-snarl. The sound cutting off — a silence where sound had been. Abrupt, like snuffing a candle.

  It lay on the ground. Large and dead.

  I looked at my hand, smeared with the beast's blood, from the cracked plate. It was on my fingers and between the knuckles. Darker than human blood, slightly iridescent.

  I wiped it on my thigh. The way someone wiped dirt from their hands after gardening.

  The equivalent of turning over a stone. The stone was there, now it was turned. The beast was there, now it was dead.

  I walked. Past the body. The brown circle continuing, indifferent to the addition of a corpse.

  Behind me lay the spirit-beast. Motionless. The forest already patiently accepting the body with insects and the slow conversion of dead into soil.

  I walked. More forest. More path.

  The blood dried.