Days. An indeterminate number that you probably tracked in your notebook and that I registered as repetitions of the light-dark cycle rather than as units of human-relevant time.

  You talked.

  Not to me, specifically. Or to me, but in the manner of someone who addressed a wall or a mountain or any surface that was present and solid and that would receive the words regardless of whether it processed them. You talked about the weather. About the terrain. About the quality of the soil in this region and how it compared to the soil in the eastern provinces, how soil quality correlated with qi density, how qi density correlated with cultivation potential. You talked because talking was the thing you did.

  You talked and I did not respond but that did not deter you.

  "The temperature dropped three degrees since yesterday," you said, on a morning that was indistinguishable from the previous morning. "Your radius seems tighter in cold weather. Have you noticed that?"

  I had not noticed that. Noticing required the kind of directed attention that the disconnection impaired. But the information was received: radius tighter in cold.

  "Or maybe it's not the cold," you said, writing. "Maybe it's the humidity. The correlation isn't clear yet."

  You were studying me.

  Openly, with the transparency of a researcher who had no need for subtlety because the subject was not going to object. You measured. You observed. You noted. You compared morning readings to evening readings, weather to radius, activity to output.

  "I will understand what you are," you said once, to the notebook more than to me. "And if you wish, I will leave afterwards. Not before."

  I did not care whether you stayed or left. Caring required preference and will. And will was the disconnected cable. You existed. You were present. You were the human-shaped fact at ten paces that remained a fact regardless of my engagement with it.

  But you were not Wei.

  The observation arrived without the wound that such observations should have produced. You were not Wei the way the forest was not a building and the sky was not the ground. All recognized without the emotional loading that comparison usually carried. You were angular where Wei had been compact. Precise where Wei had been raw. You asked questions that Wei would never have thought to ask. You studied where Wei had simply existed.

  And your core was broken.

  I could still feel it. Had felt it since the mountain inn with Wei. The signature of a core that had healed wrong, the way a bone heals wrong when it's not set properly. Your cultivation was technically at the Nascent Soul stage, still legible in the wreckage but stunted. Not absent — functioning, compensating and managing with less. Stunted. The break had calcified the damage into permanence.

  The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  You cultivated anyway. Every night. The loud meditation: the audible breathing, the murmured mantras, the sound of someone pushing qi through channels that did not fully cooperate. You did it louder than necessary, by design. For you, silence was the enemy.

  "You can hear it, can't you," you said one night, between breaths. "The break?"

  Yes, the break was audible. Like a wrong note was audible in a piece of music one had heard correctly a thousand times. Not loud. Not dramatic. But present and noticeable.

  I said nothing.

  "Did you know," you said, opening the notebook, "that a broken core produces a resonance pattern? Different from an intact core. The harmonic is shifted — about a quarter-tone flat, consistently. Every broken core I've studied shows the same shift."

  A quarter-tone flat. So you had studied broken cores. Plural. Did you study them as you studied my death-radius? With the same patience of someone who believed all phenomena were explainable.

  "Yours isn't broken," you said. "But it isn't normal either."

  You wrote something. Three lines. Closed the notebook.

  "I don't know what it is yet."

  The yet was the word that contained everything about you — the assumption of eventual understanding, the confidence that time and observation would produce the answer, the refusal to accept not-knowing as a permanent state.

  Yet.

  Which meant, that it was currently unresolved but resolvable, that patience plus method eventually would lead to answers. And it also meant, that you would stay.

  The food appeared daily. Set at six paces, in the transition zone where the grass was yellow. Rice. Dried fruit. Strips of preserved meat. The provisions of a traveler who had packed for months.

  I did not eat.

  The food remained untouched. The rice dried. The fruit darkened. The meat stiffened in the air. Small transformations, daily, in a row of rejected offerings that you replaced without comment, without emotion. The reset of an experiment.

  You set food. I did not eat. You noted this. You set food again.

  "Still nothing," you said, to the notebook. "She doesn't eat. Consistent. No variation."

  You were writing about me in clinical terms, which was the most honest description I had received in recent memory. Clinical was accurate. Clinical was the mode that matched the condition. I was a phenomenon and you were the observer. The observation itself was the only relationship available when one party had disconnected from the machinery of wanting.

  The notebook filled. Pages. You wrote small, the handwriting of someone conserving space, miniature letters that said this record matters more than comfort. You wrote fast. You wrote always. You wrote like other people breathed.

  Silence is forgetting. I did not know this about you yet. But the evidence was there, in the compulsive notation, in the audible meditation, in the refusal of quiet. You filled space with record because the alternative was the disappearance of everything you had observed. And that, you feared.

  You did not tell me this. You did not need to. Your pen told it. Your breath told it. The notebook — rain-stained, dog-eared, filled from the first page with handwriting so small it required effort to read — told it.

  You were still here.

  I stood. I walked. I stopped. I stood. The cycle repeated and you repeated with it, the ten-pace shadow that catalogued the cycle without attempting to change it.

  On some day — five or seven or nine — you asked me something.

  "Does it bother you? That I'm here?"

  I was not bothered. I was not not-bothered. I did not care. I was unaffected.

  I did not answer.

  You wrote.