He hit the water.

  Not with technique, not with purpose — with his open palm, flat against the surface of the river, producing a sound that was more petulance than percussion and a splash that soaked his trousers to the knee. The water accepted the violence with the patient indifference of something that had been hit before by things considerably more impressive than a twelve-year-old's frustration.

  He hit it again.

  This time harder. The splash was wetter, angrier. His reflection scattered into fragments and reassembled, unperturbed.

  I watched from the bank. His breathing exercise — the one he'd been practicing for weeks, the one that on good days allowed him to perceive the faint resonance of qi currents beneath the topsoil — had produced nothing today. Nothing yesterday, either. The forest's depletion had thinned the ambient qi to a level where even experienced cultivators would struggle to sense it and Wei was not an experienced cultivator. Wei was a boy sitting on a rock, trying to hear a whisper through a wall that was getting thicker by the day.

  "What's the point?" He was standing now, ankle-deep in the river, water dripping from his hand. His voice was cracked — not from adolescence but from the specific frequency that anger and helplessness produce when they occupy the same throat. "Sensing qi. Great. Super useful. I can sense that the forest is dying. Amazing. Really helping. And when the thing that's killing it gets here — what do I do? Just... breathe at it?"

  He kicked a stone. It skipped twice across the surface and sank.

  "Sit still. Listen. Feel the qi. That's it? That's what you've been teaching me? Because there's a thing out there — I can feel it, you know, I can feel it pressing, like something leaning on the air — and it's getting closer and everyone in the village is scared and Chen can barely walk and my father is worse again and all I can do is SIT ON A ROCK AND BREATHE."

  The river murmured. The trees said nothing. A fish that had been hiding under a submerged root decided that this stretch of water was no longer conducive to relaxation and relocated upstream, leaving a small wake of disagreement.

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  I knew he was right.

  Not about the uselessness of his training — the training was correct and necessary and laying the foundation for everything that would come after. But about the gap. The gap between what he was learning and what was required. Between his small, slow progress and the enormous, accelerating threat that moved through the forest six li away, collapsing the distance daily. He was learning to hear. He needed to be able to fight. And between hearing and fighting was a chasm that no amount of determination could bridge in the time he had.

  His ceiling was low. That was the kind thing to call it. The honest thing was: his meridians were narrow, his capacity small and the best he could achieve — even with perfect training, even with years — was the lowest stage of Qi Gathering. Against someone in Core Formation, that was a candle held against a furnace.

  But candles were what people used. I had learned this. Slowly, reluctantly, over more lifetimes than the metaphor deserved.

  "You're not ready," I said.

  "When will I be ready?"

  The honest answer was a cruelty I almost committed.

  "Maybe never," I said.

  The words landed on the river's surface like the stone he'd kicked — skipping once on impulse, then sinking into a silence that absorbed them completely. Wei stood in the water. His hands were at his sides, dripping. His face was turned toward me and for a moment — brief, contained, extinguished before it could fully form — something broke behind his eyes. Not hope, exactly. More like the structure that hope was built on: the assumption that effort connected to outcome, that wanting something hard enough could make it happen, that the distance between here and there was a thing you could walk if you just kept walking.

  He stood in the water. The current pushed around his ankles. The sun was behind him, turning his outline into something sharp and dark and very small.

  Then his jaw set. The motion I'd seen before — the chin lifting, the shoulders squaring, the defiance reassembling itself from parts that had momentarily scattered. He stepped out of the water. Sat down on the bank. Wrung out the fabric of his trousers.

  "Then show me how to not die anyway."

  The sentence was quiet. Spoken to the fabric, to the water, to the middle distance between his hands and the ground. Not to me — or to me, but without looking, because looking at me while saying it would have cost something he couldn't afford.

  The river moved. The fish returned, cautiously, to its root.

  "That's what I'm doing," I said.

  He looked up. Studied me. Looking for something — irony, dismissal, the specific brand of adult condescension that comes packaged as honesty. He found none of it, because I was offering none of it. The words were true. They were true in three ways and I meant all of them and two of them he couldn't know yet and one of them I couldn't know yet myself.

  He nodded.

  "Okay." He stood. Brushed his knees. Walked back to his stone. Sat. Crossed his legs. Closed his eyes.

  And listened.