The Jade Tablet changed everything.

  We found them — or they found us, or chance produced the intersection that neither party had sought, though I suspected chance had less to do with it than methodology. A forest clearing. A gap in the canopy, a level patch of earth, the accidental architecture of vegetation that had decided, collectively, to grow somewhere else.

  Wei was eating. His rice had improved — still burned at the edges, but the center was cooked now and the herbs he'd mixed in had graduated from "medicinal" to "almost flavoring." He sat cross-legged on a fallen log, his bowl balanced on one knee, his chopsticks moving with focused intensity. Hungry enough to eat anything. Proud enough to eat it properly.

  Three figures stepped from the trees.

  Not stumbled. Not emerged. Stepped — the deliberate entrance of people who had been watching from the treeline and had chosen this moment to reveal themselves. Formation: a triangle, the lead figure slightly ahead, the flanks a half-step back. Practiced.

  The lead figure was thin. Narrow-faced, narrow-shouldered, narrow in a way that suggested efficiency rather than presence. His robes were plain. His qi-signature was Qi Gathering: competent, controlled, unremarkable. What was remarkable were his hands — long-fingered, steady, holding a jade tablet like a magistrate holds an edict.

  They knelt.

  All three. Simultaneously. Knee, fist to ground, head bowed. The movement was muscle memory and the submission it represented was as automatic as breathing.

  "Honored Elder. The Jade Path Sect requests an audience."

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Wei stopped chewing. Rice hung from his chopstick. He stared.

  I looked at them the way one looks at ants that have marched into the kitchen and formed a line to the sugar bowl. Not angry. Not threatened. Weary.

  Needle — that's what I'd call the lead figure, because his face was a needle and his voice was a needle and his entire existence had the quality of something designed to be sharp and thin and exactly precise enough to be irritating — Needle raised the jade tablet.

  I looked at it.

  The inscription was meticulous. Carved by someone with a steady hand and an organized mind and access to information that should have been impossible to compile. My height. My build. The approximate age of my appearance. The absence of a readable qi-signature. The last confirmed location — Dong valley, three months ago.

  And at the bottom, in smaller characters:

  Documented action: dissolution of a Nascent Soul Tribulation through mental exertion alone.

  They'd cataloged me. Not guessed, not rumored, not approximated — cataloged. Patiently. Thoroughly. As raw material for decisions yet to be made.

  The tablet was worse than an army. An army meant someone had decided. A catalog meant someone was still deciding.

  Wei swallowed his rice. Looked at the tablet. Looked at the three kneeling figures. Looked at me.

  "Why are you kneeling?"

  Silence. Needle's face twitched — confusion. He'd prepared for deference or hostility or even indifference and had not prepared for commentary from a thirteen-year-old with rice on his chin.

  My mouth almost moved. Almost. The smallest contraction of the muscle at the corner — the involuntary response to unexpected comedy that I'd been suppressing for centuries and that Wei, somehow, kept triggering without effort.

  The flankers exchanged glances. Needle recovered.

  "Honored Elder, please—"

  I stood up. Wei stood up. His rice bowl, abandoned on the log, tilted and dripped broth onto the bark.

  I turned. Walked toward the trees.

  "Honored Elder, the Jade Path Sect means no—"

  I was already between the trunks. Wei was behind me. Needle's voice followed us into the forest — growing fainter, more desperate, the voice of a man who had been given a mission and was failing it in real time.

  We walked. Didn't run. Running would have dignified the encounter with urgency it didn't deserve.