I saw him from the hilltop.

  The hill was unremarkable — a bald crown of grass and exposed stone rising above the canopy line, offering a view of the valley that stretched northwest toward the old growth and the mountains beyond. I had climbed it for the view the way a person rearranges furniture: something to do with the hands while the mind worked on something else.

  The view worked on something else instead.

  Six li away, where the forest thickened into the kind of old growth that sunlight visited by appointment only, the air was wrong. Not visibly — no smoke, no fire, no theatrical display. But the space above the canopy shimmered, the way heat shimmers above stone in summer, except this wasn't heat. This was qi displacement: ambient energy being pulled toward a single point so rapidly that the air itself warped around the vacuum.

  Leaves spiraled upward from the canopy in a slow vortex. Dust followed. Then smaller things — seedpods, insects, fragments of bark torn loose by the suction. The vortex was quiet from this distance, almost elegant, like a whirlpool viewed from shore. Beautiful, if you didn't know what a whirlpool did to things caught inside it.

  At the center, a figure.

  Young. Male. Standing in a clearing of his own making — not a natural clearing but a circle where the underbrush had been scoured away by the force of his cultivation. The ground around his feet was dry and grey, bleached of color, dead in a radius of about ten meters. Beyond that radius, the forest lived. Inside it, nothing.

  Small lightning arced between his fingers. Not real lightning — qi discharge, the excess energy sparking off his meridians as his body tried to carry more power than it was designed to contain. The sparks were blue-white, sharp, controlled. He was cycling — pulling qi from the environment, filtering it through his core, compressing it, pulling more. A greedy, efficient process. A machine designed to consume.

  His posture was upright. Rigid. Spine straight, shoulders back, chin tilted slightly upward. The posture of a young man looking at the sky and seeing only his own trajectory. His eyes were fixed on a point above the tree line — a point that existed in the future, not the present. The future was up.

  Young. Brilliant. Blind.

  I had known this posture. Worn it, once, in a body that had been smaller and more certain and less tired. The posture of ascension — the belief that climbing was the only direction, that higher was better, that the view from the top was worth whatever the climb destroyed. I had climbed higher than anyone. The view was not worth it. But you couldn't tell that to someone who was already climbing. You couldn't tell them anything. The wind up there was too loud.

  The dead earth at his feet didn't bother him. He hadn't noticed it, or he had noticed and filed it under acceptable costs. Both were the same, in the end.

  I watched him for a while. The vortex spiraled. The lightning crackled. The forest died in a circle that would be wider tomorrow.

  Then I felt it.

  A spirit beast — middle tier, panicked, displaced from its territory by the qi depletion — was moving south. Fast. Directly toward the village. It was a deer-type, which normally posed no threat, but qi-starved animals behaved unpredictably and this one was broadcasting the frantic, directionless energy of a creature that had been running for days and had nowhere left to run to.

  I released a thread of qi.

  Not much. A whisper — less than a whisper, less than the energy required to make a candle flicker. I laid it on the ground like a line drawn in invisible ink: a false trail, scented with the suggestion of dense forest and safety and the qi signature that this species associated with home. The thread ran northeast, away from the village, toward a section of valley that was still intact, still carrying enough ambient energy to sustain life.

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  The beast turned. I felt it through the earth — the shift in weight, the change in direction, the animal brain overriding its panic with the older, deeper instinct to follow the trail that smelled like survival.

  It ran northeast. Away from the village. Away from Wei.

  I dispersed the thread. It dissolved into the ambient qi like sugar into water, leaving no trace.

  It wasn't about the village. It wasn't about the boy.

  On the hill, six li away, the vortex stuttered.

  A hiccup — half a second, maybe less. The lightning between the cultivator's fingers dimmed, flickered, resumed. His head turned. Not toward me — toward the space where the thread had been, the faint crease in the air where qi had moved in a direction that ambient drift could not explain. He stood very still.

  Then the vortex spun up again. The lightning returned. The greedy, rhythmic pulling resumed and his attention swung back upward, toward the future, toward the point in the sky that he believed was waiting for him.

  But he had paused. For half a second, he had looked down.

  I filed that under things that should not have happened and did not think about it further. A beast that changed direction. Animals did that.

  Wei would notice. He noticed everything now, which was partially my fault and partially his nature. Later that day, standing by the creek with his basket — empty, because even the herbs near the village were thinning — he would say:

  "The animals are running the other way now. They used to run south, but today they went northeast."

  And I would say: "Wind."

  And he would look at me with an expression that was equal parts exasperation and understanding and say: "Sure. Wind."

  But that was later. For now, I stood on the hilltop and watched the young cultivator burn through the forest and thought about a city.

  The memory arrived with the smell: burnt grass, carried on the hilltop breeze, drifting up from the circle of dead earth where the cultivator worked. The same smell. The same distance. The same hilltop — not this one, but one that occupied the same space in the architecture of my memory, the same position of watching from above while something below was destroyed.

  Four thousand years ago. Perhaps five. The numbers blurred at that scale, the way individual waves blur into ocean.

  A city. Not large by the standards of the empire it belonged to — perhaps twenty thousand souls, perhaps thirty. Walls of clay and timber, reinforced with river stone. A market district that smelled of turmeric and cured leather and the fermented bean paste that was prepared nowhere else and would never be prepared again. Children played in the market square — a game involving stones and chalk that I had seen in fourteen different civilizations, each believing they had invented it. A temple at the city's center, its roof curved and patched with copper that had gone green with age, catching the afternoon light and throwing it back in a shade of verdigris that I could still see when I closed my eyes.

  A cultivator ascended.

  Not inside the city — outside, in the fields to the north. His breakthrough happened at dusk, when the light was the same color as the copper on the temple roof and it happened the way breakthroughs happen when too much power moves through too little wisdom: violently.

  The qi-shockwave radiated outward. The walls cracked first — clay splitting along lines that had been invisible until the pressure found them. Then the timber. The temple's copper roof bent inward, folded, collapsed. The sound was vast and organic, as if the city itself were a living thing being pressed flat.

  The market caught fire. Turmeric burned with a yellow flame that was almost beautiful. The children — the ones playing the stone game — I chose not to remember that part. I chose not to remember it every time it surfaced and it surfaced anyway.

  I stood on a hill. Like this one. I could have stopped it. A quarter of an intention and the ascending man would have paused, stabilized. The walls would have held. The copper roof would have stayed green.

  I watched. The city burned. The turmeric smelled like summer.

  Three days later, I walked through the ruins. The copper roof lay warped in the courtyard, its verdigris burned to black. I stood over it for a moment. Then I kept walking.

  I remember the smoke. Not the faces.

  The hilltop. The present. The breeze carrying the smell of burnt grass from a circle of dead earth six li away where a boy who didn't know better was reaching for something that would cost more than he could calculate.

  The memory retreated. Settled back into the sediment where I kept it, below the surface, below the reach of casual excavation. But it left its residue — the smell of turmeric, the color of verdigris, the quality of silence that a city produces when it stops being a city.

  The young cultivator continued his work. The vortex spun. The lightning crackled. The forest shrank.

  I stood on the hill until the sun set and then I went back to Wei, because that was what I did now, apparently — I went back.