The cough got worse in the following days.

  Not yet dangerous. But the thin, persistent hack of a body protesting cold air and altitude and a robe that was adequate for village life and inadequate for mountain travel. Wei didn't complain. He coughed, wiped his mouth, kept walking. The resilience of a boy who had grown up hungry and had learned, before he was old enough to articulate the lesson, that discomfort wasn't a condition to be solved but a baseline to be endured.

  I noticed. His breathing was shallower than optimal, the cough interrupting the third-step pattern every few minutes. His channels were compensating — routing qi to his lungs, warming the tissue — but the compensation was instinctive rather than controlled and the energy drain was adding to the strain.

  We walked through high country. The trees were sparse here — scrubby pines that clung to the ridges like things that had been told to leave and refused. Wind came from the north, steady, cold, carrying the smell of stone and ice.

  "How much further up?"

  "Until it levels out."

  "When does it level out?"

  I didn't answer. He interpreted the silence correctly.

  Wei's training continued. He couldn't stop — the qi in his channels demanded movement, demanded circulation, demanded the continuous cycle of input and output that kept the energy from pooling and producing the tremors that occurred when he stood still. Walking was training. Breathing was training. Existing, for Wei, had become a full-time exercise in managing an amount of qi that was too much for its container.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  His hands shook when he rested. He'd developed techniques to hide it — picking up sticks, adjusting his pack, clasping his hands behind his back as if stretching. Small deceptions. Effective enough for an audience of one and the audience was me and I saw through them completely, immediately and without the kindness of pretending otherwise.

  I let him hide it. Some things needed to be carried alone — not because they were light, but because the carrying was the point.

  Afternoon. A ledge overlooking a valley. Wei sat on a rock, legs dangling, his face tipped toward a sun that was warm enough at this altitude to feel like generosity. His breathing steadied. The cough receded. The left corner of his mouth softened — not a smile, but the place where one would start. His hands, resting on his knees, were still.

  Almost still.

  The tremor was there — visible in the fine muscles of his fingers, the slight irregularity where the nerves beneath were firing without authorization. He looked at his hands. Held them up. Studied them the way a craftsman studies a tool that's developed a fault — not with alarm, but with practical attention.

  "They're fine when I'm doing stuff."

  "I know."

  "Does it go away?"

  "It's manageable."

  He picked up a stick. Started peeling bark. Methodical, precise movements — the knife work that he'd used for herb preparation, repurposed for distraction. His hands steadied when they had something to do. The work channeled the excess energy through fine motor control, bleeding the overpressure into deliberate muscle contractions.

  He whittled the stick into nothing. Picked up another.

  By evening, there was a pile of wood shavings at his feet. His hands were steady and neither of us mentioned it.