The tree was Wei's fault.

  First day out. Afternoon. We'd been walking since dawn through forested hills that climbed steadily northward, the path narrowing from road to trail to something that might once have been a deer track and was now barely distinguishable from the undergrowth. Wei hadn't complained. His legs were shorter than mine and his conditioning was the conditioning of a village boy, not a traveler, but he kept pace with the stubbornness I'd learned to recognize as his most reliable characteristic.

  We stopped at a clearing. A stream ran through it — cold, clear, mountain water that tasted like stone and iron. Wei drank, washed his face and sat on a rock.

  "I want to try something."

  I didn't respond. I was refilling the water container, my back to him, my attention split between the task and the ambient qi-signatures in a two-li radius that were, at this point, entirely wildlife.

  "I'm going to try the circulation."

  The exercise. The basic one — qi routed through the primary channels, a closed loop, the cultivation equivalent of stretching before a run. He'd done it hundreds of times. In the village, on the hill, in the hut, in every posture and position and state of mind that I'd prescribed.

  But that was before. Before his channels had been torn open and rebuilt and widened and strengthened by a flood of qi that had been intended for a tribulation and had ended up in a thirteen-year-old boy who had been in the wrong place at the exactly right time.

  I should have said no. Or wait. Or "let me watch your channels first and assess the structural integrity of the rebuilding before you route energy through a foundation that was fundamentally redesigned a few days ago."

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  I said nothing. Because — and this is the part that's difficult to explain without sounding negligent — I wanted to see.

  Wei closed his eyes. Breathed. Three counts in. Three counts out.

  The qi moved.

  It moved wrong.

  Not broken-wrong, not dangerous-wrong — fast-wrong. The circulation that used to take him thirty seconds to complete one cycle finished in four. The qi hit the end of the primary loop and came back to start before he'd exhaled. Then again. Then again. Each cycle faster, the energy building on itself, the channels conducting with an efficiency that hadn't existed a week ago and that his control mechanisms hadn't been calibrated to handle.

  I turned. "Wei—"

  The tree.

  One arm-thick pine, four meters to his left. The excess qi that his channels couldn't contain had been venting — unconsciously, directionlessly — and the tree had caught. Not fire. Not heat. Something worse: the wood itself failed. Cellular structure disrupted from the inside. The bark split. The heartwood splintered. The entire trunk came apart in a sound like three bones breaking simultaneously.

  Wei fell off the rock.

  Silence.

  Wood fragments settled. Dust motes drifted. A bird screamed from the canopy and was gone.

  Wei sat on the ground, staring at the remains of the tree. Then at his hands. Then at the tree. Then at his hands.

  "I didn't mean to do that."

  His hands were shaking. He looked at them, then at the tree, then at the space where the tree had been.

  He stood. Brushed dirt from his pants. Looked at the wreckage again — really looked — and the grin that had started forming died before it reached his eyes.

  Then: stillness.

  He stood in the clearing, in the afternoon light, with the destroyed pine behind him and the stream running beside him and his hands began to shake. The tremor started at his fingertips and climbed to his wrists and settled in like something that intended to stay.

  He made fists. The shaking stopped. He let go. Back.

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked away. He didn't look at me.

  I looked at the tree. At the clean rupture lines in the wood. The bark hadn't burned or rotted — it had come apart, grain by grain, as if the wood had simply forgotten how to hold together.

  A standard qi-circulation exercise. A thirteen-year-old with four months of training. An arm-thick tree, dead.

  What I'd just seen wasn't effort. It was output that exceeded input by a margin that didn't have a natural explanation.

  I filed the observation. The list was getting long. The explanations were getting short.