I felt it from three li away.

  Not a sound — not at that distance, not through a landscape that was still recalibrating its relationship with vibration and air pressure and the basic physics of wave propagation. I felt it the way I felt everything about Wei: through the channels I'd opened, through the pathways I'd carved, through the architecture I'd built inside him over weeks and months of mornings and corrections and the patient, iterative process of teaching a body to do something it wasn't born knowing how to do.

  His channels filled. I felt them fill — the slow, accelerating intake of ambient qi flowing into pathways too new and too open and too unregulated to reject it. The primary meridian first, the central channel that runs from the dantian to the crown, then the secondary branches, extending outward along the arms and legs and into the fine network of tertiary channels that mapped his nerve network. Each one taking in energy the way a dry sponge takes in water: indiscriminately, hungrily, beyond its capacity.

  Full. Then overfull. Then approaching the threshold where organic tissue stops absorbing and starts failing.

  Then: shutdown. The channels closed — the body's last defensive mechanism, cutting the intake before the structure ruptured. His consciousness went with it. The perception went with it. Everything went dark, everything went offline, everything that I'd carefully built over months of incremental, conservative, controlled development was suddenly flooded and sealed and inert.

  He was unconscious. Alive. His heart was beating — fast, stressed, but beating. His lungs were working — shallow, too rapid, but working. The channels were closed but loaded, carrying a charge they weren't designed to hold, the residual qi dissipating slowly through tissues that were adapting in real time, restructuring at a cellular level to accommodate an energy density they'd never been exposed to.

  He was alive. He might stay alive. The body was young, resilient, adaptive. The channels I'd built were sound — designed for gradual expansion, not crisis intake, but structurally robust. They would hold. Probably.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Probably was not the word I wanted.

  "No."

  I moved.

  Three li. The distance between the river and the southern slope. The distance I'd have walked in forty minutes. The distance that a person covers by placing one foot in front of the other and repeating the process until the ground between departure and destination has been consumed by the simple mechanics of locomotion.

  I covered it in the time it takes to inhale.

  I was HERE — at the river, with stones in my hand and the smell of boiled water and the fading signature of a cultivator who'd run from what he couldn't measure.

  The three li between the river and the slope — I rendered them irrelevant by a will that operated on a scale where distance was a suggestion rather than a constraint — and then I was THERE. At the southern slope. Three steps from Wei.

  The camp. The bundles. The people — clustered, afraid, some kneeling, some standing, all of them focused on the center of a small circle where an old man held a boy and a mother held a boy's face and called a name that the boy couldn't hear.

  I was there.

  No one saw me arrive. One moment there was a space — empty ground, air, the absence of a person. The next moment: me. As though I'd been standing there all along and they'd simply failed to notice, which was plausible for the kind of woman I'd been pretending to be and impossible for the kind of woman I actually was.

  I looked at Wei. On the ground. Elder Li's arm under his head. His mother's hands on his cheeks. His eyes closed. His face — empty. Not peaceful, not pained. Empty. The vacancy of a mind that has been overloaded and has retreated to somewhere deep and dark and inaccessible while the body sorts out the wreckage.

  Under his skin: light. The faint, pulsing luminescence of overcharged qi-channels, glowing through the dermis like veins of phosphorescence in cave rock. Blue-white. Irregular. The light of something that had absorbed more than it could process and was leaking the excess through the only outlet available — warmth and light.

  His hands were glowing. A soft radiance, visible in daylight only because his skin was thin at the knuckles and his fingers and the qi-channels there ran close to the surface. Each finger had a line of light running through it, following the meridian path I'd mapped, pulsing in a rhythm that was almost — but not quite — the third-step pattern.

  Almost. But not quite. The rhythm was disrupted. Irregular. The qi trying to regulate itself, find its cadence, restore the pattern that had been its baseline before the flood came and pushed everything out of alignment.

  I knelt beside him.

  "Give me space."