The floorboards were smoking and Wei was screaming without sound, and for exactly one heartbeat Xuan crouched there with the spent vial in his fist and seriously entertained the idea that he had just murdered the finest disciple he’d ever stolen.
’Mira. Mira, talk to , you said one swallow and a nice glow, what is this.’
[ Wei does not have an ordinary root. I have been saying so since Yuncheng, Xuan. You recruited the candidate. And the candidate’s foundation just took a key cut for a cottage door and used it to open a vault. ]
’So in normal words. Is he dying?’
[ Trending that way, yes. ] A clipped beat. [ But you’re going to stop him. Hands on his back. Now. Both palms, between the shoulder blades, flat over the spine. ]
He was already down, knees on the smoldering boards, both hands pressed to Wei’s convulsing back, the heat off the boy’s skin gusting like an open furnace door.
[ Listen close, because I’m only going to be this brilliant once. ] Even mid-crisis she couldn’t fully holster the smirk. [ His ridians are flooding faster than they can widen. The root is shoving through more essence than his channels were built to carry, and in roughly nine seconds his Third Gate tears and he hemorrhages on the inside in a way no pill nds. So you’re going to feed your own qi in behind it. Slow. Broad. Like you’re banking up a riverbank, not racing the river. Widen the channel ahead of the flood. Guide it Xuan, do not shove it. ]
’Guide. Got it.’ He poured his qi into Wei’s spine in a long, patient sheet and felt the chaos waiting on the far side of it — a torrent with no banks, clawing at everything it tore through. ’There’s so much of it. This is not adequate-talent volu, Mira.’
[ No. It is not. (I did tell you.) Third Gate inbound — ease it left, his flow runs clockwise, match the spin or you’ll boil him from the marrow. ]
He matched it. The surge slamd the gate and his qi was already cupped beneath it, a palm under a breaking wave, splaying the pressure wide instead of letting it punch a hole. Wei spasd.
His soundless scream found a voice and climbed an octave. The boards at the edges gave up smoke for small, earnest flas, and Xuan stamped them dead with one heel without losing the rhythm.
[ He’ll crash before the root finishes seating. Pill, now. The recovery pills you were going to hand him anyway — his body’s burning fuel it can’t make fast enough. Left cuff, since you are physically incapable of not hoarding. ]
He did, as it happened, have a sleeve packed with them, being physically incapable of not hoarding.
One palm stayed buried against Wei’s spine; the other shook a pill loose, crushed it under the boy’s nose, and pushed the powder past his teeth on the next ragged inhale. Wei swallowed on the sa traitor reflex that had dood him ten minutes earlier, and the crash rushing up to flatten him stumbled, slowed, lost its feet.
The torrent began to find its banks.
It dragged on longer than Xuan would have liked and ended sooner than it had any right to. Inch by inch the wild essence quit tearing and started pooling, sinking into the dantian it had been straining toward all along, the ridians stretched but holding, scorched but whole. The white-gold light bleeding from Wei’s eyes dimd to a low amber ember, and guttered out.
The smoke thinned. The room gave up on burning down.
Wei pitched forward into Xuan’s arm, soaked through, breathing like a man hauled out of a river a half-second before it would have mattered to the coroner.
He stayed bowed there a long stretch, forehead near the boards, shaking, and Xuan let him — one hand resting between his shoulders, reading the new pulse thrumming under the skin. A good pulse. Far deeper than it had any business being. The pulse of a body that had spent its whole life running a marathon on a cracked engine and had just, violently, been handed the real one.
"...What did you do to ," Wei rasped into the floor. Not an accusation. Sothing nearer awe.
"Gave you a gift." Xuan’s voice ca out rougher than he intended. "You’re welco. You absolute coward."
Wei lifted his head. His eyes, that sa pale startling blue, carried sothing new behind them now, a depth that hadn’t been there over breakfast. He stared at his own hands as though they’d been swapped overnight for a stranger’s, a stranger with a far better life. "I feel — Young Master, the whole world went quiet. Like everything had been shouting my entire life and I never noticed, and now it’s just—" His voice cracked straight down the middle. "What is this. What did you give ."
[ Permission to be brilliant again? ] Mira brightened, fully herself once more. [ Because I have your appraisal, and it is going to wreck your week in the very best way. ]
’Go.’
[ His root woke up sword-aligned. ] She laid the words down like a winning tile. [ Single-spectrum. Edge-tuned. It doesn’t squander itself spreading thin across five elents — it funnels everything into one, and that one is the blade. Do you grasp what you’re kneeling over, Xuan? This is the reason a sectless village boy taught himself the sword off a stolen manual and still climbed high enough that Frostmoon mailed an elder out to watch him. It was never only grit. Well. It was grit. But the grit was riding on top of this, fast asleep, waiting for soone reckless enough to whale on a stranger’s mystery box and pour the winnings down his throat. ]
Xuan looked down at Wei — drenched, wrecked, faintly luminous at the edges, gawking at his hands like they’d co back from the forge upgraded — and the laugh climbed up out of him despite all of it.
"You tried to run," he said. "You told your talent was adequate. You made your peace with adequate."
"I—" Wei’s ruined face cycled through four kinds of remorse at once. "Young Master, I’m so sorry, I’ll never doubt you ag—"
"Save the oath." Xuan hauled him half-upright by the collar, the way you right a tipped-over chair. "When your legs rember their job, you and I are going to go find out exactly what the sect just—"
The door swung open.
Neither of them had heard a footstep, and neither had a lie loaded.
Lian stood in the gap, a covered dish balanced in both palms, her lesson-day robe dusted with furnace ash — reading the charred floorboards, the haze hanging in the air, her Young Master crouched over a half-conscious Wei who was, all at once, weeping and steaming and glowing.
The dish tipped. One dumpling slid off the rim and t the floor with a soft, damning plop.
"...Xuan," she said, with enormous care, "what did you do."
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