The qi reached the southern slope as a breeze.

  I wasn't there for what happened next. I was at the river, picking up stones. So, what I know, I know because they told me — Wei in fragments. Mrs. Liu, in her steady voice. Elder Li, in the careful way old men describe things they wish they hadn't seen.

  For the villagers — huddled behind the ridge with their bundles and their fear and their careful, practiced patience — it was a warm gust. Nothing more. A puff of air that smelled faintly of ozone and tasted faintly of metal and passed through their bodies the way wind passes through clothes: felt, noted, forgotten. Mrs. Liu adjusted her collar. Elder Li blinked. Xiao Mei looked up from the game she'd been playing with stones in the dirt and said, "That smells funny," and went back to her stones.

  For Wei, it was an ocean.

  His body was different. Three months of training had opened channels that normal bodies don't have — qi-pathways running along his meridians, carved through breath and discipline and the third-step pattern that had become his heartbeat's echo. Second-step perception. Third-step qi-steps. A circulatory network that had been carefully, methodically, conservatively expanded by a teacher who understood that opening a door was only safe when you controlled what came through it.

  I had not controlled this.

  The dispersed qi — harmonized, gentle, distributed evenly across the upper atmosphere by a thought that had been designed to minimize harm — was harmless at its ambient concentration. For a normal body, it was nothing. For an unmodified human, the energy density was below the threshold of perception, let alone damage.

  For a twelve-year-old boy with open qi-channels and sensitivity that had been trained to register ambient energy the way an ear registers sound — it was everything.

  His channels caught the qi. Automatically. The pathways I had opened weren't selective — they were designed to absorb, process and circulate ambient energy, because that was what qi-channels did. They didn't have an off switch. They didn't have a filter. They opened and the environment flowed in and the body processed what it received.

  The environment was flowing in at a rate his body was not designed to handle.

  He felt it first as warmth. A spreading heat that started in his chest, where the primary meridian ran and moved outward along the channels — down his arms, up his neck, into his fingertips and his toes and the base of his skull where perception lived.

  "I feel —" He looked at his hands. Turned them over. "Something's happening."

  "Wei?" Elder Li reached for him. "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing's wrong. It's warm. It's —" He stopped. His eyes widened.

  Then the warmth became pressure. The channels were full. The qi kept coming — the ambient concentration wasn't decreasing, because the dispersal was still settling, the energy still finding its level across the volume of atmosphere it had been distributed into. The channels absorbed. And absorbed. And the pressure built the way pressure builds in any sealed container: steadily, mechanically, without malice, without awareness, without any mechanism by which Wei could say stop.

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  No one had taught him how to say stop because no one had expected him to need to.

  His eyes widened. His pupils dilated with perception. The qi flooding his channels reached his optical meridians, his visual cortex and for one moment — one brilliant, overwhelming, impossible moment — he SAW.

  Qi-streams in the air. Rivers of energy flowing above the ground like transparent currents, each one a different density, a different color, a different texture. The air was full of them — had always been full of them — and he was seeing them for the first time the way a person born blind would see color: all at once, all of it, without the gradual acclimatization that mercy would have provided.

  Qi in the ground. Flowing through channels beneath the soil, following the paths that I had redirected, running south along the trenches I'd dug, pooling at the nodes I'd modified. The earth was alive with it. Luminous. A map drawn in light, underneath the surface, visible through the thin skin of dirt and grass and clay.

  Qi in the people around him. Each person a network — dim, barely flickering, the minimal circulation of unawakened meridians operating at a level too low to register except to eyes that were suddenly, catastrophically open. Mrs. Liu: a steady, warm glow. Elder Li: dimmer, concentrated around his joints and his heart. The children: bright, scattered, chaotic — the undirected energy of bodies still growing.

  He saw everything. For one moment, he held it all: the sky and the ground and the people and the village and the valley and the distant, fading signature of something massive moving northwest, away from them — and then the river. Where the light stopped. Where his new perception reached and found nothing — not darkness, not emptiness, but the absence of the thing his eyes were built to see. A hole in the world made of light. A shape where a person should have been and wasn't and was.

  "It's —" His voice cracked. "I can see it. I can see everything. The light, it's everywhere, it's —"

  "Wei!" His mother was on her feet. "Wei, look at me."

  He looked at her. Through her. Past the skin and the worry and the worn hands into the dim, warm glow that was her life, her qi, the quiet fire that kept her moving through days that gave her nothing and took everything.

  "Mama," he said. "You're beautiful."

  Then the pressure exceeded capacity. His channels — full, overfull, straining — hit their structural limit. Not a failure — a safety mechanism. The body, pushed beyond its operating parameters, did what bodies do: it shut down. The channels closed. The perception collapsed. The brilliant, overwhelming, impossible vision of a world made of light folded inward and went dark.

  Wei fell.

  His eyes rolled. His body went limp. He dropped where he stood — no stagger, no warning, no gradual slide. One moment standing. The next moment on the ground, unconscious, his limbs loose and his face blank and his breathing changed — fast, shallow, the breathing of a body processing an event it hadn't been built for.

  His mother screamed.

  The sound cut the air — the only sharp sound in a landscape that had spent the morning trying to eliminate sound entirely. She lunged for him.

  "Don't move him!" Elder Li was already there — the old man's reflexes less an act of speed than of position, his arm under Wei's head before it hit the stone, his body bracing to absorb the boy's weight.

  "What happened to him?" Chen knelt beside them. "What's wrong with his skin?"

  "He's burning," his mother said. Her hands were on his face, his arms — checking the way mothers check, with touch and fear and the urgent grammar of hands that need to be doing something.

  "He's not burning." Mrs. Liu's voice cut through from behind. Calm. Steady. "But he needs her." She looked east. Toward the tree line. Toward the place where I had gone.

  Wei's skin was warm. Not fever-warm — qi-warm. And beneath the surface, along the lines of the channels I had opened: light. Faint. Barely visible. Threads of luminescence running under his skin like capillaries made of something that wasn't blood, pulsing weakly, irregularly, the residual glow of channels that had been flooded and had shut down but hadn't fully discharged their load.

  His mother held his face. His name was on her lips — "Wei, Wei, Wei" — the way names are repeated when the person they belong to has left the room and the only thing that might bring them back is the sound of what they're called.

  "Someone find her," Elder Li said. His voice had the crack of authority spent to its limit. "Find the woman."

  "She went east," Mrs. Liu said. "Into the trees."