It was morning.

  The path wound through the mountains like a scar — narrow, ancient, carved by feet that had walked it for centuries before abandoning it to gravity and undergrowth. Mist hung at waist height, cold and wet, turning the forest into something half-dissolved, the trees emerging from whiteness like objects remembered rather than seen.

  Wei walked ahead. Two steps in front. His pace was steady, his footing sure — the qi in his channels was working with his body now rather than against it, the raw overflow of the first day settling into something that resembled integration. He still stumbled occasionally, when a root caught him wrong or the ground shifted under a loose stone, but the stumbles were smaller. His recovery was faster.

  He'd stopped talking. Not sullen — focused. His jaw set, muscles tight, eyes forward. A boy walking into an unknown and putting one foot in front of the other because stopping was not an option.

  He didn't look back.

  I walked behind him. My steps made no sound — not intentionally, not through any application of qi or technique, but through the accumulated habit of millennia of movement. My body had decided not to announce itself. The forest accepted my passage as something that happened without consequence.

  A bird called. Wei's head turned — quick, instinctive. A flicker crossed his face. Not quite a smile. The left corner of his mouth lifted, a reflex he didn't control and probably didn't notice.

  I saw it. The almost-smile. The boy who was frightened and displaced and walking away from everything he'd known, who could still hear a bird and find in it something worth the muscles required to lift the corner of his mouth.

  A stream crossed the path. Wei jumped — qi-enhanced, automatic, his legs pushing off with force that carried him three meters when gravity said one. He landed, caught himself, kept walking.

  "You could just step through it," he said without turning.

  "Where's the fun in that?"

  He glanced back. Half a grin. "You don't have fun."

  "I have fun. You just can't tell."

  Stolen story; please report.

  "Nobody can tell."

  He kept walking. The grin stayed a moment longer than he'd intended.

  "Yun."

  "What."

  "I'm hungry."

  "You ate two hours ago."

  "A rice ball isn't food. It's a suggestion of food." He ducked under a low branch without breaking stride. "When we find a town, I want dumplings."

  "We're not finding a town."

  "Then I want dumplings in a forest."

  I didn't answer. He took that as a promise, which was exactly the kind of logic that would get him into trouble later.

  I stepped through the stream. The water touched my ankles. I didn't feel it — sensation, at my level of existence, required a decision to notice and I hadn't decided.

  The path climbed. The mist thinned. The trees changed — broadleaf giving way to pine, the forest's acknowledgment of altitude, everything pressing toward efficiency and stripping away anything ornamental.

  Wei was ahead. Two steps. Always two.

  He didn't know where we were going. I hadn't told him and he hadn't asked again — after "everyone" and "further" and "okay," the subject had been filed. He walked because walking was the available action. He went north because north was the available direction. He followed me by walking ahead of me — his direction the right one because I was steering, a degree here, a suggestion there.

  I watched his back. His thin shoulders, his hands hanging loose at his sides now, the tremor subsided, the fingers still. Temporarily. I knew that. He was beginning to know it too.

  The mountain rose ahead. The forest thinned. The sky above was enormous — clear, depthless blue, the color altitude produces when there's nothing between you and the emptiness except diminishing air.

  Then I felt it.

  Faint. South-southeast. A qi-signature at the edge of detection — not strong, not threatening, but organized. Deliberate. Moving in a pattern that wasn't travel. It was search.

  A second signature joined the first. Weaker but faster. Flanking.

  I stopped walking.

  Wei made it three steps before he turned. "What?"

  "Nothing." I adjusted our bearing west. "Walk faster."

  He didn't move. His eyes narrowed — that look he got when he was deciding whether to be difficult. "You stopped. You never stop."

  "And now I'm walking again."

  "You're also lying."

  Thirteen years old and already better at reading me than cultivators ten times his age.

  "There are people behind us," I said. "Far away. Looking for something. Probably not us."

  "Probably?"

  "Walk faster."

  He walked faster.

  I brushed our qi trail — a minor technique, barely worth the effort, the equivalent of smoothing footprints from sand. Wei's channels flickered as the suppression touched them.

  "That felt weird," he said without slowing.

  "Don't think about it."

  The signatures faded as we crested the ridge. Still there, still searching, but the mountain between us was old stone — the kind that scattered qi readings like light through broken glass. Good enough.

  Wei didn't look back. I didn't either — but for different reasons. He didn't look back because he was choosing forward. I didn't look back because I already knew what was there.

  The path continued. We continued with it. For now, continuing was enough.