Wei found the barriers by mid-morning.

  I'd underestimated him — or, more accurately, I'd underestimated what second-step sensitivity looked like in a boy who'd spent his entire life navigating a world that didn't explain itself. He didn't find them by searching. He found them by walking the perimeter I'd walked and feeling for the places where the qi-flow changed direction.

  "Here," he said, standing on the ridge beside the first stone wall. "It goes that way now." He pointed south. "It used to go—" He turned, frowning. "Toward the village?"

  "Yes."

  "You moved the river."

  "I moved the qi. The river follows."

  He crouched beside the wall. Touched the stones. Ran his fingers along the seams where I'd fitted granite against granite, each piece chosen for density and mineral composition, each angle calculated to deflect rather than absorb. His fingers stopped at a spot where two stones met imperfectly — a gap I'd known about and accepted because perfection in fieldwork was the enemy of completion.

  "Can I practice here?"

  I hadn't anticipated that. The barriers were defensive infrastructure, not training equipment. But the question wasn't unreasonable — the walls were low enough to run along, the terrain was uneven enough to challenge balance and the qi-flow patterns I'd created made the area a natural obstacle course for anyone sensitive enough to feel the currents.

  "Don't break anything."

  He grinned. The grin of a twelve-year-old who had just been given permission to climb on something adults had built.

  He started with the walls. Qi-steps along the narrow stone surface — the same pattern as the river exercise, but harder. The stones were uneven, each one a different height and angle and the qi flowing around them created eddies that pushed at his feet like invisible hands. He fell off within ten steps. Stood up. Restarted. Fell at twelve. Restarted. Fell at eight — regression, frustration, the temporary worsening that comes before adaptation.

  I sat on the hillside and watched.

  He found his rhythm on the fourth attempt. No mastery yet — not even competence — but the beginning of a relationship between his body and the terrain. His feet started reading the stones before landing on them, adjusting angle and pressure in the fraction of a second between intention and contact. His breathing steadied. The count held.

  By noon, he was running.

  Not gracefully. Not quietly. He crashed through the qi-eddies with the subtlety of a thrown brick and his footwork was still raw and he nearly broke his ankle on the second wall's corner. But he was running on a surface that wasn't designed for running, in a qi-environment that actively resisted his passage and he was keeping the count while he did it.

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  "Left foot," I called.

  "I know!"

  "Then fix it."

  He fixed it. Mostly.

  The afternoon he spent on the trenches — jumping across, landing on the far side, turning, jumping back. The trench was narrow enough that the jump was easy in physical terms but tricky in qi terms: the flow through the channel acted as a barrier he had to push through mid-air, a resistance that slowed him just enough to make the landing unpredictable.

  "This is harder than the river."

  "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "Because the river's flow is natural. This is redirected. The qi moves in patterns it doesn't want to move in. It resists."

  He thought about that. Jumped again. Landed cleaner.

  "Like training someone who doesn't want to learn?"

  "I wouldn't know anything about that."

  He missed the landing on the next jump. I was almost certain it was deliberate.

  The evening brought the villagers together.

  Elder Li had called a gathering — a congregation of people who shared a problem and needed to discuss it in the way that small communities discuss things: standing in someone's yard, talking over each other, reaching consensus through volume rather than vote.

  The well was still producing yellow water. The stream filter worked — Wei's design, my instructions — but the output was slow, a trickle where the village needed a flow. The dried fish stocks were holding, thanks to Gao's paranoid preparation habits. The grain reserves were adequate for a month, maybe six weeks if they rationed.

  But the water.

  I watched from the edge of the gathering, close enough to hear, distant enough to not participate. The water was the problem. The drought had cracked the soil in patterns that followed the qi-drainage lines — deep fissures running northeast to southwest, pulling moisture out of the earth faster than the melting snow could replace it. And there hadn't been snow in nine days. The sky was clear and blue and merciless, the kind of sky that mocks farmers.

  "We dig the well deeper," Mrs. Liu said. She had the practical authority of a woman who had survived three bad harvests and learned that sentiment was a luxury. "The water's still there — below the cracks. We just have to go further down."

  Elder Li nodded. Slowly. The nod of a man who knew the suggestion was correct and hated that it was necessary.

  "And if it's yellow down there too?"

  "Then we boil it and strain it and complain about the taste."

  There was a laugh. Thin, tired, but real. The village's survival mechanism — the brand of pragmatic humor that develops in places where bad years are measured in frequency rather than possibility.

  I watched them assign tasks. The young men would dig the well deeper — by hand, the way their fathers had, the way people had dug wells since before cultivation was a word. The women would build more filters. The children would help carry water from the stream.

  They didn't ask me. They didn't look at me. I was the odd woman who lived at the edge of the forest and took care of someone's boy and my contribution was the water filter and the occasional herb identification and that was the extent of my relevance.

  Which was exactly right.

  The village didn't need a god. It needed deeper wells and cleaner water and the stubborn, collective refusal to lie down because the ground was shaking and the water was yellow and the sky wouldn't snow.

  "Odd," I said to no one. "The weakest survive the longest."

  Wei was beside me. He'd been helping Mrs. Liu stack the filtered water barrels and had come back with wet sleeves and the exhaustion of a boy who'd been doing the work of three.

  "That's not odd," he said. "That's the point."

  I looked at him.

  "We don't have anything to fall back on," he said. "No power. No shortcuts. So we just — keep going. What else are we going to do?"

  I didn't answer. There was nothing to add.