The technique exchange sat two weeks out now, close enough that Ethan could feel the shape of it pressing against everything else he needed to get done. He'd spent the days since finding the manual splitting his attention three ways, alchemy hall shifts that kept the coin coming in, herb field work that kept his name attached to something the sect could point to and call useful, and long nights with the fragile pages, trying to coax more meaning out of ink that had spent twenty years fighting a losing battle against damp stone.He'd made progress. Not much, but real.The breathing method he'd cobbled together from a peasant recruit's manual had gotten him one open meridian and not much further, the kind of plateau that came from using a tool built for a floor, not a ceiling. Bo Rin's fragment offered something sharper, a method for widening the channel itself rather than simply forcing qi through it, faster and more stable, assuming Ethan could reconstruct enough of the damaged nota