He went into the deep forest without telling me.

  I knew, of course. I knew the moment his footsteps diverged from the village path — when he turned right instead of left at the creek fork, heading uphill toward the third ridge and beyond, into territory where the trees grew old and the qi concentration was still high enough to support the kind of wildlife that a twelve-year-old should not encounter without an escort or a death wish.

  I could have stopped him. A word, a glance, a redirect — any of the small, casual interventions that had become so natural over the past weeks that I'd stopped noticing I was making them. I did not stop him.

  I told myself it was because he needed to learn. That was true. It was also insufficient.

  He was gone for most of the day.

  The morning passed with the stretched, elastic quality that time assumes when you are waiting for something you refuse to admit you're waiting for. I sat by the river. The river murmured. The silence of the depleted forest hung over everything like a ceiling built too low.

  He returned in the late afternoon. I heard him coming before I saw him — crashing through undergrowth with the graceless urgency of someone who had been running and had recently decided that walking was more dignified. His clothes were torn at the shoulder, a horizontal rip that suggested close proximity to something with claws. A scratch on his left cheek — shallow, already crusted with dried blood, the kind of wound that looked dramatic and wasn't.

  And in his hand: a tooth.

  Spirit beast tooth. Large — maybe fifteen centimeters, curved like a sickle, yellowed with age and stained at the root where it had been anchored in a jaw powerful enough to crush stone. It pulsed. Not visibly — the light didn't change, the air didn't shimmer — but I could feel it from ten paces: qi, dense and hot, radiating from the calcified enamel like heat from a coal. A beacon. A signal fire, broadcasting in frequencies that every qi-sensitive creature within three li could read.

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

  He held it up. Grinning. The grin of conquest, of the successful hunt, of a boy who had gone into the dark and come back with proof that the dark was not as dark as it seemed.

  "Look what I found!"

  I looked at the tooth. Then at him. Then at the tooth.

  "Put it down."

  "What? No, listen — I found a den. Abandoned. The beasts had already fled, but this was left behind — wedged in a tree trunk, like it got stuck during a fight. It's still warm. Can you feel it? It's like holding a small fire."

  "Put. It. Down."

  His grin faltered. Not at the words — he'd grown resistant to my monosyllabic commands in the way that water grows resistant to being told not to flow downhill. It was the tone. Something in the flatness of my voice had acquired an edge that cut through his enthusiasm like a wire through soap.

  "Why? This is valuable. Old Chen says spirit beast parts can be sold at the city market for—"

  "I am aware of the market value of spirit beast components. Put it down."

  He looked at the tooth. At me. At the tooth. The internal calculus was visible on his face — pride against obedience, discovery against trust. The tooth pulsed in his hand, warm and bright and full of the kind of energy that a boy from a poor village could convert into rice, into medicine, into the difference between his father living through winter and his father not living through winter.

  He clutched it tighter.

  I turned around and walked away.

  Behind me, his footsteps followed. Quicker than usual, lighter — he was carrying the tooth close to his chest, protective, the way a child carries something stolen. Not because he'd taken it dishonestly, but because he knew, in the subverbal way that children know these things, that he was making a choice I didn't approve of and that my disapproval had weight.

  I should have explained. I should have told him: the tooth is a qi beacon and in a forest emptied of spirit beasts by an ascending cultivator, a beacon of concentrated qi is an invitation to every displaced predator for li around. I should have sat him down and described, in detail, what happens when a qi-hungry animal follows a signal to its source and finds not a spirit beast but a village full of slow, fragile, non-cultivating humans.

  I said nothing. Because saying something would have meant teaching and teaching would have meant caring and caring was a door I was still pretending was locked. I know how that sounds. But at the time, it was the only way I could maintain the distance I thought I needed to keep.

  The night was warm. The moon was a crescent. The tooth sat in Wei's house, on the shelf by the window where his mother kept the ceramic jar with the dried flowers and the chipped cup that had belonged to Wei's grandmother.

  It pulsed.