Weaver woke already moving.
The desk bit into his palms as he pushed himself upright, breath sharp, eyes clear. There was no accounting this time. No disbelief. No time wasted confirming the room still existed.
He already knew where he was.
Three.
The pendant's weight was a fact, not a threat. He did not touch it.
"I need a wick," he said aloud, voice rough, immediate. "Now."
Not later. Not after another death. Now—before the footsteps, before efficiency returned to finish the job.
He closed his eyes and dove for Amos again.
Not gently.
He tore.
The fragments came—but this time they were useless.
No memory of creation. No first breath. No careful ignition. Amos's past offered only aftermath: circulation already present, Dao already answering, a wick treated not as invention but as assumption. Something that had always been there. Something he'd never questioned.
Born with it—or formed too early to remember.
Weaver hissed and pulled back, temples throbbing.
"Of course," he muttered. "Of course you don't remember building it."
Privileged answers always forgot their own foundations.
But memory wasn't the only thing Amos had left behind.
There were papers.
Diagrams.
Blueprints.
Weaver's gaze snapped to the desk.
The diagrams weren't instructions. They weren't how-to.
They were proofs.
The kind of thing you wrote after you already knew something worked—formal, precise, elegant in a way that assumed the reader was already halfway there.
Weaver felt a grin pull at his mouth despite the pain.
"Fine," he breathed.
He pushed the papers aside and sat on the floor instead, legs crossed, spine straight, palms open on his knees. Not because it was traditional.
Because it was stable.
Dao was everywhere.
That much was obvious now—not as mysticism, but as background pressure. Like air. Like radiation. Like an ocean whose surface most people never broke.
Cultivators didn't create Dao.
They shaped the space where it could return.
A wick wasn't a container.
It was a solution to a boundary problem.
Weaver closed his eyes.
First principle.
If Dao moved, it followed gradients.
If it returned, it returned to structure.
If it stayed, something had taught it to.
He began to breathe—not Amos's breathing, not the ritual imitation—but his own, stripped down to function.
In.
Down.
Hold.
Out.
Again.
He did not search for warmth.
He searched for resistance.
Nothing.
Good.
Zero-state.
He imagined the inside of himself not as organs, not as channels, but as a field—an unoccupied space where variables could be defined.
Dao density: ambient, uniform.
Self: undefined.
Wick hypothesis: a stable attractor formed through recursive intent.
His headache sharpened as he pushed further.
A wick wasn't grown like muscle.
It was trained like a concept.
You didn't carve it.
You convinced the Dao it belonged there.
Weaver began to build it the way he built arguments.
Layer by layer.
Assumption by assumption.
He imagined a point—arbitrary, chosen not for symbolism but convenience. Below the navel, yes, but only because symmetry made calculations easier.
He imposed a constraint.
Dao could pass through, but not disperse.
A loop.
No—too simple.
Loops leaked.
He added recursion.
Dao enters → recognizes pattern → returns amplified → reinforces pattern.
A positive feedback system.
Dangerous.
He added damping.
Thresholds.
Limits.
Fail-safes.
His breath grew ragged. Sweat beaded along his spine.
He adjusted the model.
The wick could not be static.
Static things shattered.
It had to grow—not in size, but in definition.
A living equation.
Intent → structure → response → refinement.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Dao brushed the edge of his awareness—not warmth, not energy, but interest.
Weaver's lips split into a grin.
"Oh," he whispered. "You're listening."
He leaned into it.
He fed the structure with focus, with refusal to let it collapse into metaphor. He treated it like engineering, like policy, like the systems he'd grown up dissecting for flaws.
The wick took shape—not as sensation, but as presence.
Something that pushed back.
Something that said here.
Weaver gasped.
Pain lanced through his skull as if something inside him had snapped into alignment that had never been meant to move this way.
He almost broke concentration.
Didn't.
He tightened the equations.
Not with numbers—numbers were a crutch—but with constraints. With relationships that could not contradict themselves without collapsing the entire model.
He stripped the construct down to essentials.
No symbolism.
No borrowed mysticism.
No metaphors about flames or rivers or enlightenment.
Those were stories people told after they succeeded.
Weaver was still before success.
He defined the boundary again—more precisely this time. Not a wall, not a container, but a decision surface: a region where Dao was permitted to recognize itself as returning rather than passing through.
Too open, and the Dao would disperse, indifferent.
Too closed, and it would rebound violently, tearing the structure apart.
He adjusted the parameters infinitesimally, breath syncing with calculation.
Intent had to be continuous.
Not emotion. Not desire.
Intent as a stable variable.
His head felt like it was being crushed inward, pressure building behind his eyes as if his brain objected to being used this way. Blood roared in his ears. His vision darkened at the edges.
He ignored it.
Pain was data.
The wick could not be placed.
Anything placed could be removed.
It had to be derived—an emergent consequence of rules so internally consistent that Dao had no alternative but to comply.
He revised the recursion.
Again.
And again.
Each pass tighter than the last.
Dao entered the imagined space.
Tested it.
Found no contradiction.
Returned.
Stronger.
The feedback loop stabilized—not explosively, but asymptotically, converging toward a centre that did not yet exist but was becoming unavoidable.
Weaver felt it then—not warmth, not energy, but resistance to absence.
Something inside him was no longer willing to be empty.
His breath stuttered.
He nearly lost the construct when a spike of disbelief cut through him—this shouldn't be possible—and for a terrifying instant the equations wavered, edges blurring, the structure threatening to dissolve back into nothing.
He clamped down on the thought with vicious discipline.
Impossibility was an opinion.
The Dao responded.
Not dramatically.
Not violently.
It didn't surge or roar or blaze.
It settled.
Like a solution precipitating out of suspension.
Like a verdict being reached.
The pressure vanished all at once—not because the strain had ended, but because it had resolved. Something clicked into place so cleanly that the absence of strain felt wrong.
Weaver gasped.
Inside him, something anchored.
A pull—subtle but absolute.
A tension that did not demand attention, only acknowledged its own existence.
A centre.
Not metaphorical.
Not imagined.
A real, internal reference point around which everything else could now be measured.
The wick ignited.
Not with heat.
Not with light.
With inevitability.
As if the universe, presented with sufficient proof, had reluctantly admitted that yes—this configuration was valid.
Weaver's eyes flew open.
He sucked in a breath that felt different from every breath he had ever taken before—not deeper, not fuller, but connected. The air no longer passed through him.
It returned.
Laughter tore out of him, raw and disbelieving, bubbling up from somewhere beneath his ribs.
Then he shouted.
"Yes!" he barked, arms flinging wide, head thrown back, voice cracking under the force of it. "Yes—that's it!"
The sound filled the chamber like a declaration.
Not prayer.
Not triumph.
A man screaming not from joy, but because he had solved the kind of proof his first life had taught him never to attempt—and reality had marked it correct.
The room felt smaller now.
Not because he was bigger.
Because something inside him had weight.
He laughed again, sharp and bright and uncontained, the sound tearing out of him, a laugh he hadn't been allowed to have in his first life.
"I did it," he said, voice shaking. "I built it."
Footsteps thundered outside the door.
Fast.
Unmeasured.
Not the careful pace of routine inspection.
The door slammed open.
The two men rushed in—and froze.
Weaver sat by the desk, arms spread wide, chest heaving, eyes alight with something wild and incandescent. Papers were scattered everywhere. Ink stained the floor. The air felt wrong—dense, charged, attentive.
Weaver grinned at them, breathless, euphoric.
"Ah," he said brightly. "You're early."
The men stared.
For the first time—
They did not smile.
This time the first thing the men saw was not a minor inconvenience.
It was a man on the floor.
Not slumped. Not wounded. Not begging. Sitting with his back half against the desk leg like it was a pillar that belonged to him, shoulders loose, hair fallen into his face, hands spread on the stone as if he'd just finished pushing the world apart and checking what it looked like inside.
He was smiling.
Not quietly. Not politely. Curving the way a mouth did when it didn't know whether it was joy or shock or the simple relief of still being here. It scraped the room. It made the lanternlight seem too still.
The two men had frozen just inside the doorway.
Same robes. Same fox-brown layers that didn't quite catch the light. Same relaxed readiness… except the readiness wasn't relaxed anymore. Their posture tightened by degrees—micro-adjustments, weight shifting onto the balls of their feet, hands hanging loose but ready.
The taller one stared at the desk, at the scattered papers, at the pendant's gold edge glinting like a wound in the air.
Then his eyes found Weaver.
"…What," he said, slowly, like he was testing the word for poison, "are you doing?"
The other man's faint smile didn't arrive this time. His expression stayed neutral, but his eyes were bright—measuring, recalculating.
Weaver looked up at them.
He was still smiling.
"Actually, no, you're right on time," Weaver said.
The sentence landed wrong. Not bravado. Not threat.
Certainty.
The taller man's gaze flicked—once—to Weaver's chest.
To the rise and fall.
To the way Weaver stood in his own body now, even sitting.
The air in the room had changed. It wasn't warmer. It wasn't colder.
It was occupied.
The smiling man's nostrils flared. He took a single breath, shallow, like he'd just smelled smoke.
"Cultivator," he murmured before he could stop himself.
Weaver's grin widened at the word as if it was a confirmation stamp.
Their puzzlement lasted one heartbeat longer.
Then it ended the way efficient men ended uncertainty.
They moved.
No warning. No negotiation. No ritual.
The taller one lunged first, closing distance with a step that didn't look fast until it was already too late to count. The other split wide, angling for Weaver's blind side like a fox circling for the throat.
Weaver rose—
—and the world opened.
It wasn't adrenaline.
It wasn't fear finally arriving.
It was like someone had turned up the resolution on reality until every edge hurt to look at.
Sound sharpened. He heard fabric breathe. He heard the leather sole whisper against stone. He heard the smallest displacement of air from the taller man's sleeve as his hand came in.
Sight widened. The men didn't blur anymore—they broke into clean, readable pieces: shoulder rotation, hip commitment, toe angle, breath timing.
Even smell changed. Ink and herbs and that faint sweet poison on the smiling man's skin—he could taste it at the back of his throat, like the room itself had become an index of information.
The attacks still had that sick familiarity.
That wrong softness.
The sense of being approached by someone you knew.
But it wasn't enough anymore.
Because the familiarity did not erase the data.
Weaver's body didn't wait for his mind to feel danger. It moved because the world was speaking in numbers now.
He slipped.
Not away—through.
The taller man's hand stabbed in toward Weaver's abdomen, the same efficient intrusion that had ended him three times.
Weaver turned his hip a fraction.
The hand passed by his ribs and met nothing.
The contact that should have been death became a brush of air.
A miss.
Weaver's eyes widened with something like disbelief.
"Oh," he breathed.
The smiling man came in from the side—knife-fast, fingers like reinforced bone aiming for the throat.
Weaver parried with his forearm, and the impact rang up his arm like a bell struck too cleanly. He felt the man's bones under skin. He felt the strength hiding in that loose posture.
They weren't guards.
They were cultivators.
They were Paper Fox.
Predators trained to make you misread the room.
Weaver didn't give them the room.
He gave them mathematics.
He moved strategically—not because he was calm, but because he'd been forced into strategy his whole life. He didn't swing for drama. He didn't chase a finish.
He managed distance. Angles. Timing.
He made the space around him expensive.
He drew them into each other's lanes, not by stepping back, but by stepping wrong—half-steps that changed the geometry of the room and forced their attack lines to overlap.
The taller one threw a knee.
Weaver caught it on his thigh and rolled with it, redirecting the force into a spin that should have left him exposed.
The smiling man went for the opening.
Weaver was already there.
Palm to wrist. Elbow to forearm. A strike that wasn't meant to break—meant to interrupt.
The smiling man's fingers missed Weaver's throat by a breath.
Weaver's own fist snapped up toward the man's jaw—
—and stopped an inch short.
His hand hovered there like a paused execution.
His body hesitated.
Weaver flinched—not from the man, from himself.
The taller one punished the hesitation immediately. A strike to Weaver's ribs—clean, precise, a hit meant to shut breath down.
Weaver absorbed it like an annoyance.
The pain registered, bright and sharp, then folded into the new tension inside him.
Weaver's mouth parted. He tasted copper.
He laughed once, under his breath.
They pressed him. Harder now. Both at once.
It became a storm of hands and joints and soft reveals—feints layered over feints; friendliness painted over murder.
And Weaver started to adapt.
Not gradually.
Violently.
He stopped trying to make the fight look like something from his first life. He stopped trying to move like a man.
The next time the taller man's hand shot in—bullet-fast, the same killing jab—
Weaver didn't retreat.
He slipped under it, bending backwards at an angle that should have snapped something if his body belonged to normal rules.
His spine held.
His balance held.
And in the same motion, he pushed off his left leg.
His right leg came up, angled at the man's head—
—and Weaver delivered three kicks in a single motion.
Not three separate strikes.
One continuous piece of violence, broken into beats only because the man's skull had to receive it in stages.
The first kick cracked the taller man's guard aside.
The second landed on the side of his jaw with a sound like stone tapped with iron.
The third hit as the head turned—clean, cruel, final.
The taller man flew.
Not stumbled.
Flew—sliding across stone, rolling, catching himself on one hand, coughing once like his body was offended by the idea of being moved without consent.
The room went quiet for half a second.
Weaver stood in the centre of it, chest rising.
The air around him felt… aligned.
The smiling man stared at him now without any humour left.
"What—" he began.
Weaver stepped forward.
He didn't run.
He didn't need to.
He was suddenly everywhere he chose to be.
The smiling man attacked—low, fast, trying to reassert control with precision.
Weaver decimated him.
Not with wild strength.
With comprehension.
He read the man's shoulders like sentences. He saw which feints belonged to Paper Fox training and which were improvisation. He broke the rhythm, forced the man to show his real timing, and then took it away.
A forearm snapped the man's strike aside.
A heel clipped the back of his knee and stole his base.
A palm strike hit his chest—not hard enough to shatter, hard enough to announce you are done.
The man hit the floor.
The taller man was already rising again, stubborn, refusing to accept that anything in his world could be rewritten by a stranger.
Weaver turned to him, walked, and ended his attempt with two movements: a step inside the guard, and a short strike to a pressure point that made the taller man's arm go numb like a lie collapsing.
He dropped again.
Breathing hard.
Weaver stood over both of them.
Both men were bleeding in small, controlled places: lips split, jaw bruised, an eye already darkening.
Not lethal.
Weaver looked down at them, and, for the first time, his smile softened into something almost human.
"Names," he said.
The taller one spat blood, eyes furious. "You don't get to—"
Weaver crouched, close enough that the man could see his eyes properly.
Silver. Starburst. Too clean to be natural.
"I do," Weaver said quietly. "Now."
The taller man glared, then finally hissed it through his teeth.
"Darro."
Weaver shifted his gaze to the other.
The smiling man—no longer smiling—watched Weaver like he was watching a problem walk.
"And you?"
A long beat.
Then, careful as a man stepping around a trap: "Lin."
Weaver nodded once, as if storing it.
Darro. Lin.
Paper Fox.
They lay there breathing like they'd run miles.
Darro's eyes narrowed. "Who are you?"
Weaver laughed.
Not triumphant. Not kind.
Something between.
Then the laugh caught halfway, and for a second Weaver's expression flickered—like a screen switching channels.
Weaver.
Amos.
A body that wasn't his. A name that wasn't his. A life that wasn't his, sitting inside him like a suit.
He inhaled.
Shallow.
Controlled.
Contained.
He looked at them and answered anyway.
"A god," Weaver said.
Lin coughed—a sound that might have been laughter if he still had the breath for it. "Gods don't—" He swallowed and winced. "Gods don't need to force themselves to breathe."
Weaver's smile returned.
He stood.
He walked to them with the calm of someone who could finish it.
He was prepared to kill them.
No—he wanted to kill them.
He could feel the wanting, clean and sharp, like a blade offered into his palm.
And then something older rose up in him.
Not morality.
Not goodness.
A question.
The same question that had plagued him since he was a child watching his father decide who deserved to remain in the world.
Who was he to choose?
He remembered his fourteenth birthday.
Not a celebration.
A lesson.
His father had called him into a courtyard that smelled of stone and incense and obedient fear. Guards stood like furniture. A man knelt in chains—trembling, face swollen, eyes too empty to contain shame properly.
"He killed his wife," his father had said, voice calm, like discussing weather. "And then lied about it for three months."
Weaver had stared at the man's bowed head and felt nothing noble.
Just the awareness of being watched.
His father had placed a blade in Weaver's hands.
"It is a leader's responsibility," his father had said
He'd paused, then added, almost gently: "If you order death, you must be able to look at it. If you cannot swing the blade, you have no right to speak the sentence."
Weaver had held the sword.
He had known the world would be better without the man.
And still—he couldn't move.
Not because he was afraid.
Not because he was kind.
Because the question had locked his joints:
Who was he to choose who lived or died, when he had never once been allowed to choose anything that mattered in his own life?
His father had punished him for it.
Not rage. Not screaming.
Just a cold correction.
A month of silence. A week of harder training. A reminder that hesitation was disobedience.
Weaver hadn't minded.
Because the question had remained.
It had been his only private possession.
Now, standing over Darro and Lin, with power in his bones, the question returned—unchanged by worlds.
He looked down at them.
He wanted to kill them.
And he didn't.
Weaver stepped back.
Lin's eyes widened—not in gratitude, in disbelief.
Darro stared at him like mercy was an insult.
Weaver turned toward the door.
Relaxed.
Happy with the decision in the way only exhausted people were happy—because something inside him had remained his.
He hadn't taken more than two steps.
Before he felt it.
That same familiar intrusion.
A hand in his lower back.
Precise. Efficient. Not dramatic.
The world punched inward.
Weaver froze mid-stride.
His breathing.
Sometime after the fight, without thinking, he had returned to the breathing method he'd used his whole first life.
His circulation had faltered.
Not stopped completely—just enough.
Just enough for Paper Fox efficiency to slide a knife in.
Blood filled his mouth.
He turned his head slowly.
Lin stood behind him, breathing hard, arm still extended.
His face was twisted—not with hatred, but with the raw strain of a man who had decided risk was infection and mercy was a mistake.
Weaver smiled.
It wasn't warm.
It was cold and eerily pleased, like a scientist seeing a result repeat and realizing the system's cruelty was consistent across universes.
Weaver's blood dripped onto the stone like punctuation.
He looked at Lin over his shoulder, eyes bright with something lucid and wrong.
"Of course," Weaver whispered, almost fond.
Lin's grip trembled.
Weaver exhaled, and his breath came out red.
"I apologise," he said softly.
Lin frowned, confused.
Weaver's smile widened.
"I'll return the favour next time."
Lin's eyes widened.
Weaver's knees loosened.
The room tilted.
And as darkness folded in, the pendant at Weaver's chest clicked—soft, metallic, patient.
Click.