Wei asked about the tablet twenty minutes later.

  We were moving fast — not the full-speed disappearance I was capable of, but the enhanced pace that put distance between us and the clearing. The forest had thickened again, the canopy closing overhead and the light filtered down in fragments that made the ground a mosaic of shadow and warmth.

  "They had your description."

  "Yes."

  "On jade. Not paper. Jade lasts."

  "Yes."

  "Someone spent months collecting information about you. Maybe years."

  I said nothing. He wasn't asking — he was constructing. Building the picture from fragments. Observation first, question second, conclusion third.

  A branch cracked overhead. We both looked up. Wind, weight, gravity. Nothing. We kept walking.

  "They'll send more."

  "Yes."

  "After these three report."

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  "Yes."

  He walked in silence for a minute. His breathing was controlled — the third-step pattern holding, each exhale timed to his footfall.

  "The tablet said 'dissolution of a Nascent Soul Tribulation through mental exertion alone.'"

  Something internal halted.

  "You read the tablet."

  "I was sitting three meters away."

  "You read classical Jade Path script at three meters."

  He paused. "I... yes. Is that unusual?"

  It was. Jade Path script was cultivator notation — compact, technical, designed for efficiency rather than legibility. The characters were small. The grammar was archaic. A literate Foundation Establishment cultivator would need to hold the tablet to read it. A thirteen-year-old village boy with four months of training should not have been able to read it at all.

  A stone turned under my foot. I corrected without looking.

  His channels. His perception. The enhancement was affecting everything — not just qi-flow but sensory acuity, cognitive processing. All of it at once. Without the graduated adjustment that allowed mind and body to integrate each upgrade before receiving the next.

  "It's fine," I said.

  He accepted it with a nod that indicated receipt rather than belief. He was learning to store my answers for later examination rather than evaluating them in real time.

  He was getting smarter about that.

  We walked. The forest held us. The scouts fell behind — their signatures dimming with distance, their triangle formation dissolving as the gap widened beyond their coordination range.

  They would reform. They would report. And the jade tablet would be supplemented with new data: direction of travel, number of companions, the boy with qi-signatures that didn't match his apparent age. Each piece added to the catalog.

  Somewhere ahead, water. The sound of it — thin, distant, a stream cutting through rock.

  I'd been invisible for millennia. That was over.