They descended below the tree line in silence, and the silence was not the comfortable kind. Wei Liang walked with the fifth branch deliberately quieted — he had learned within an hour of discovering it that it could be held still, the way a held breath could be held, and that holding it still was advisable when the thing it had just shown him was still settling into something he understood. Around him, the others carried the basin's revelation in their own ways: Tian Rong walked more lightly than she had in eighteen hours of acquaintance, a person freshly aware of weight removed from a place they had carried it so long they had forgotten it was weight. Shen Mao walked beside her without speaking, occasionally glancing at her the way a person glances at someone they have just learned is, against all expectation, going to be present for longer than anticipated.They made camp in a stand of stunted pines an hour below the basin — sheltered, defensible, the kind of location Wei Liang had

Wei Liang did not wake the others this time. He went outside alone, into the cold and the dark, and stood at the hollow's entrance with the fifth branch extended — not toward Lian's signature specifically, but outward, in the broader awareness the basin's honest Qi had clarified. He wanted to know what he was meeting before he met it.Lian's signature was tired. Not weak — tired, the specific quality of a person who had been pushing past the point where their body wanted to stop for some time, sustained by something other than physical reserve. Her cultivation, mid-mid by Wei Liang's earlier assessment, felt different now — not weaker, but worn, the way a tool feels after extended use rather than after damage.And beside her, smaller, fainter: a second signature. Young. Very young — Wei Liang's perception of age through Qi was imprecise, but the signature's underdeveloped quality suggested a child, ten or eleven years old. The signature had no root structure at all.Null root.Wei Lia

Shen Mao's home sect occupied a high valley four days east of the hollow — smaller than Qingyan, older in the way that small things sometimes were older than large ones, with stone buildings that had the worn, settled quality of architecture that had stopped changing because it had stopped needing to. Tian Rong rode beside him for the journey, and Wei Liang had watched them leave from the hollow's entrance with the fifth branch extended, tracking their signatures until distance made tracking impractical — a habit he was developing, the way a person develops the habit of checking a door is locked, not from anxiety but from the simple accumulated wisdom of having once not checked and regretted it.Behind them at the hollow, Su Yan had begun her first week of the fifth lesson's patience exercises under Ru Shen's instruction, and Wei Liang had spent two days working through the sixth tablet's description of Qi resonance applications with a focus he had not been able to give it during the

They left before dawn, Wei Liang and Lian, two horses and three days of supplies and the specific quality of silence that came from two people who understood they were doing something that mattered and had decided to not discuss it more than necessary. Shen Mao had provided the route — detailed, precise, with the annotations of a man who had traveled Hanyu's territory extensively and knew which mountain passes were navigable in winter and which ones were not. The village was called Wuhe. Three days east and slightly south, across terrain that was high and cold and mostly forested.Wei Liang read the sixth tablet on the first day's ride, in the saddle, as he had read most things — efficiently, with the part of his attention that wasn't occupied by the road. The sixth lesson described Void Core resonance in more technical detail than his brief introduction to it in the basin had allowed him to fully absorb: the specific quality of attention required, the way resonance differed from sens