I left before dawn again.

  The routes needed work. The western path to the spring was adequate for two adults making measured trips in good weather, but it wasn't adequate for what was coming. When Xu Ran's tribulation peaked, the qi-shockwave would travel through the ground faster than through the air — the subsurface pressure arriving first as a tremor, then as a sustained vibration that would destabilize loose earth, dislodge stones and turn a safe hillside path into an avalanche corridor.

  Five days. Xu Ran's fluctuation had bought me five days — maybe more, if his consolidation stuttered again. I wasn't going to count on a second gift. I had five days to make the western route survive a seismic event, clear a southern alternative in case the western route failed and disarm the natural qi-traps that dotted the valley's eastern edge like mines.

  The first day was the western path.

  I worked uphill, stone by stone, identifying the loose formations that would collapse under sustained vibration and removing them by hand. Some required prying — wedging a flat rock into a crack and levering until the stone released from its bed with a sound like a tooth being pulled. Some required carrying — fifty kilograms of granite, sometimes more, shoulders and legs doing the work, the physics of leverage and counterbalance replacing the qi that would have made each task trivial.

  I was halfway through a bad section when the hillside reminded me that manual solutions had margins.

  A slab I thought was anchored wasn't. It shifted when I leaned into it, rolled a fraction of a centimeter and the dirt under my left boot liquefied into motion. Pebbles rattled. A fist-sized stone bounced down the path and vanished into the brush.

  I dropped flat, fingers digging into soil and stayed there until the slope stopped thinking about taking me with it.

  When I stood again, I didn't continue. I backed down ten paces and took the section apart from below, one piece at a time, until the ground behaved.

  My hands were raw by noon. The blisters from last week had become calluses — thin, new, inadequate. They split again within an hour. The blood mixed with dirt and dried into a paste that cracked when I flexed my fingers, which I did frequently because the alternative was stiffness and stiffness was slowness and slowness was unacceptable when the timeline was measured in days.

  My breath stayed even.

  A normal body would have started bargaining by then. Mine didn't. That was an advantage I could use without explaining it.

  I reinforced the exposed sections with stacked stone — not walls this time, but retaining structures. Low barriers on the uphill side of the path at points where the soil was loose and the gradient was steep. If the ground shook, the barriers would catch the debris before it reached the path. Maybe. Probably. The margin between probably and certainly was wider than I liked, but certainty required qi and qi required revelation and revelation was — still avoidable. Not unless everything else failed.

  The second day was the southern route.

  A backup path, running from the village through the lower fields and south toward the river plain. The terrain was easier — flatter, less stone, fewer collapse points — but the qi-flow here was different. My earlier redirections had pushed the primary drainage south along this exact corridor, which meant the ground was saturated with residual qi energy. During the tribulation, this energy would discharge — not explosively, but persistently, creating zones of elevated qi-pressure that would cause nausea, disorientation and panic in anyone passing through.

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  The solution was the same as always: redirect.

  I found three qi-nodes along the southern route — natural convergence points where underground streams crossed rock formations and the energy pooled — and neutralized them. Physically. Digging. Shifting stones. Rerouting a section of stream that was barely knee-deep but sat exactly on a fault line that would amplify the tribulation's resonance.

  The second node fought.

  The water refused the new channel at first, filling it and then backing up as if the ground had decided it preferred my earlier arrangement. The soil here was denser, packed tight around old roots and stone. I widened the cut until my forearms shook, then widened it again. When the stream finally committed, it did so with a suddenness that soaked my knees and collapsed the edge of the trench.

  So I had to rebuild it.

  By evening, both routes were as secure as manual labor could make them.

  The third day was the eastern traps.

  I'd identified them weeks ago — during the initial mapping, when I'd walked the valley in concentric circles and read the qi-flow the way you read a medical chart. Three points along the eastern ridge where the geology created natural resonance chambers: underground cavities with specific dimensions that would amplify incoming qi-waves like a bell amplifying a strike. During a normal qi-fluctuation, insignificant. During a Nascent Soul tribulation: each one would generate a secondary shockwave, reflecting and amplifying the primary, sending additional pulses through the village from directions my barriers weren't designed to block.

  Disarming them was delicate work. Not physically demanding — the chambers needed only minor modifications to break the resonance. A stone placed here. A drainage channel opened there. The geometry of the cavity altered by centimeters, the acoustic (qi-acoustic, but the physics were analogous) properties shifting from amplification to dampening.

  I was finishing the third trap — the one on the steep slope where the pine had been struck by lightning years ago and the dead wood leaned at an angle that suggested it had opinions about gravity — when I heard him.

  Wei. Coming up the slope behind me. His qi-steps were better than they'd been — I could track his approach by the pattern of his weight on the ground, each step deliberate, each landing controlled: reading the terrain before committing to it.

  He reached my position and stopped. Looked at the stones I'd placed. Looked at the drainage channel. Looked at the modified cavity — though he couldn't see the cavity itself, only the surface evidence: the freshly turned earth, the repositioned stones, the trench connecting the hollow to the stream.

  He stood there for a long time. Thinking. I could almost hear it — the gears of a twelve-year-old mind processing information that exceeded its vocabulary but not its comprehension.

  "You planned this, didn't you? For weeks."

  I picked up a stone. Placed it. Tapped it into position.

  "You knew the water would go bad. You knew the earthquakes would get worse. You built the walls and the trenches and the paths — all of it. Since before he got too close."

  I picked up another stone. The wall was nearly done. Two more pieces and the resonance chamber would be deaf.

  "You're not an herb collector."

  "Herb collectors know where the good paths are."

  His voice dropped. Quieter now. Certain.

  "Herb collectors don't build — this." He gestured at the surroundings. "You did."

  I set the last stone. Stood up. Brushed the dirt from my hands — a familiar gesture, one I'd performed so often in the past weeks that the motion was becoming habitual, which was alarming in the way that any new habit is alarming after four thousand years of having none.

  "Help me with the next one," I said.

  There was no next one. The three traps were neutralized. The routes were clear. The barriers were built. Everything I could do without qi was done.

  The lie sat wrong in my mouth.

  But he didn't know that. And the offer — the invitation to participate, to work alongside me, to share the weight of something he was beginning to understand was larger than either of us described — was worth the inefficiency.

  He picked up a stone. The right one — dense, flat, granite. He'd been watching. Learning. Not the lesson I intended, but the lesson he needed.

  We walked down the hill together. The valley was quiet. The horizon pulsed.

  Two days.