Xuanji had been watching Fei Luhua for four days.
From the edges of the training yard, from the shade of the supply pavilion where the junior staff ate their meals, from the corner of the courtyard where he ran Flowing River Palm forms with the competence of a man who'd learned to fake mediocrity. He watched the way a pickpocket watches a mark: timing, rhythm, pattern. When she trained. How long. Which technique she used as a warm-up, which she saved for sparring. Where her hands went, where her weight settled, how close she let anyone stand.
The Soaring Sparrow Step was the prize. She ran it every morning at the start of her warm-up, three repetitions of the basic launch pattern, each one so casual it looked like stretching. The technique was a movement art, a full-body qi-assisted evasion system that turned a practitioner into something between a dancer and a bolt of lightning. Against opponents with more raw power, which meant everyone Xuanji might face, mobility was survival. He needed it.
The problem was access. Phantom Touch required sustained skin contact. Fei Luhua didn't let people within arm's reach unless she was hitting them, and getting hit by Fei was an expensive way to learn nothing.
So he engineered the opportunity the same way he'd engineered a hundred opportunities on the Wharf. Patience first. Pattern recognition second. Then the lightest possible touch on the system's pressure points.
The sparring rotations ran on a fixed cycle, managed by a heavyset overseer with a bamboo tally board and the enthusiasm of a man counting down to retirement. Partners were assigned, rotated, and recycled. Fei drew mid-tier disciples consistently. Xuanji tracked the sequence for three mornings until the logic became transparent, and on the fourth morning, he positioned himself adjacent to her rotation slot with ten minutes left in the warm-up cycle.
"Senior Overseer." He kept his voice pitched one register below confident: earnest, slightly embarrassed. "I'm struggling with speed-based opponents. Would it be possible to rotate me against someone faster? Even for one round. I'd like to know what I'm supposed to be defending against."
The overseer looked at him over the tally board. The expression on his face traveled through several provinces of disinterest before settling on resigned tolerance.
"Slot seven. Fei Luhua's warm-up partner didn't show. Fill the gap."
Xuanji bowed and crossed the yard.
Fei stood in the seventh ring, rolling her shoulders. When she saw who the overseer had sent, her entire posture changed. Her weight shifted backward, her chin dropped a fraction, and her mouth went flat in a way that communicated exactly how she felt about the use of her time.
"Try not to bleed on the flagstones," she said. "I just cleaned my boots."
The spar was thirty seconds of controlled humiliation. Xuanji played his role with care, moving at about seventy percent of his actual capability, using the Flowing River Palm forms with the loose technique of someone who'd practiced but not drilled. He fumbled a redirect. Mis-timed a sidestep. Left his right shoulder exposed in a way that any competent fighter would read as an invitation.
Fei read it. Her patience lasted fifteen seconds before impatience got the better of her. She stepped inside his guard with a footwork transition so smooth that Xuanji's brain cataloged it even as his body failed to counter it. Her right hand landed on his shoulder, fingers pressing into the joint as she torqued his weight off-center, and her left leg swept his front ankle.
One and a half seconds of contact. Her palm flat against his shoulder. Skin through thin training fabric.
Phantom Touch opened like a floodgate.
The Soaring Sparrow Step hit him in a scalding wave, incomparably more complex than anything he'd absorbed before. This was a full-body technique: qi routing through every major meridian simultaneously, coordinated muscle-firing patterns, micro-timing calibrations measured in heartbeat fractions. The data poured in faster than he could process. His ability strained, buckled, and the connection overloaded. He got the footwork. He got the launch sequence. He got the first quarter of the qi routing pattern. Then the stream cut dead, like a fuse blowing.
His Heart Meridian screamed. The yard blurred, edges dissolving into bright smears. Fei's throw sent him to the flagstones, and he hit the ground with his back teeth clenched and his chest burning.
He lay there. One second. Two. Qiao's diagnostic technique threaded in automatically, two fingers pressed to his own wrist below the line of sight, patching the meridian leak while his lungs remembered how to work.
From above: Fei, looking down at him with an expression that mixed contempt with something almost approving.
"At least you know how to fall."
Xuanji stood, bowed the way you bow after losing a spar, and walked to the edge of the yard. His legs held. His hands shook only slightly, and he kept them at his sides.
=====
Fei rotated into her next match three minutes later. Her opponent was a mid-tier disciple she'd beaten so many times that the outcome was administrative rather than competitive. She dropped into her opening stance, launched the Soaring Sparrow Step, and the first jump was clean.
The second jump wasn't.
Her landing came a half-step wide, her weight shifting to compensate for a timing error so small that only someone watching for it would catch it. She adjusted, recovered, finished the match through raw athleticism and muscle memory. But during the break between rounds, she tried the technique again. Same micro-hesitation. The qi routing that should have flowed like water through a pipe now stuttered, as if the pipe had narrowed somewhere she couldn't locate. She shook her arms out, twisted her wrists, rolled her neck. Tried again. The hesitation persisted.
Irritation crossed her face. She stopped testing and moved to ground forms.
Xuanji watched from the yard's edge, his back against the perimeter wall. The gap in her technique was visible to him because he knew what he'd taken. The fragment he'd stolen had left an absence in the original, a missing tooth in a gear that still turned but no longer meshed perfectly. Qiao's technique had shown no degradation because it was passive, practiced thousands of times, embedded so deeply in her meridian network that losing a fragment was like removing a cup of water from a lake. The bandit's Iron Skin was crude enough that the loss probably simplified it. But Fei's Soaring Sparrow Step was precision work, and he'd torn a piece out of the machinery.
Guilt registered. He noted it, the way you note a bill you can't pay yet, and set it aside.
Across the yard, the medical pavilion's upper windows faced the training area. Physician Qiao Luwei stood at one of them, as she often did during morning drills, monitoring for injuries with the professional detachment of someone who'd spent years watching young people hurt each other in the name of cultivation. She had seen the spar. She had seen the throw, the oddly prolonged contact, and the boy lying on the flagstones a beat too long afterward.
Now she watched Fei stumble.
Qiao turned from the window. She crossed to her desk, opened a leather-bound journal, and found the page she wanted: her examination notes from Wei Xuanji's medical assessment. Meridian damage. Anomalous qi signature. The touch that had felt, for a fraction of a second, like it was pulling rather than receiving. She read the notes, looked back at the window where Fei was shaking out her arms, and made a new notation in the margin. A single line, a question without an answer.
She closed the journal.
Xuanji was crossing the yard toward the eastern corridor when a junior attendant intercepted him with the particular posture of someone delivering a message they'd been instructed to phrase exactly.
"Physician Qiao requests a follow-up examination. At your convenience."
The word "convenience" was doing a lot of heavy lifting. Xuanji recognized the construction. In his old life, "at your convenience" meant "now, or I'll find you."
"Tomorrow morning," he said. "I'll be there."
The attendant bowed and withdrew. Xuanji kept walking. Nothing in his pace or his face changed. Inside, the arithmetic was already running: Qiao had been watching. Qiao had seen the spar and the stumble and had connected the two. The woman who'd examined his meridians and felt something wrong was now collecting data points, and two data points made a line.
=====
The sanctuary received him in its usual silence.
He stripped to the waist and ran the stolen fragment. The footwork came first, each position mapped in his muscle memory with photographic precision. Left foot forward, forty-five degrees. Right foot trailing, weight on the ball. Pivot. Transfer. The launch position felt correct the way a remembered melody feels correct, each note in its place.
He added qi.
The fragment lifted him an inch and a half off the stone. His meridian clenched, the qi routing collapsed at the point where his stolen copy ended and the missing data began, and he dropped back to the ground with a jolt that traveled up through his ankles into his knees.
He stood there, staring at the space above the flagstones where Fei would have been three feet in the air.
The problem went deeper than an incomplete copy. Even with the full technique, his Heart Meridian couldn't sustain the output. The Soaring Sparrow Step demanded qi flow through every major channel simultaneously, and his primary channel leaked like a cracked main. He could steal every technique in the compound and hit the same wall. Acquisition solved nothing if the body couldn't run what it acquired.
He needed to fix himself before any of this mattered.
But fixing the meridian required medical techniques or resources beyond his reach. Earning access required demonstrating cultivation prowess. Demonstrating prowess required functioning techniques. Functioning techniques required a working meridian. The logic circled back on itself like a dog chasing its own tail, and he'd been inside this kind of trap before. In San Francisco, the version was: need a job to get an apartment, need an apartment to get a job, need money for both, have neither.
He'd survived that loop the same way he'd survive this one. One variable at a time. One day at a time. He couldn't fix the meridian tonight. He could make what he had more efficient.
He began drilling the footwork without qi. Pure muscle memory. Left foot, right foot, pivot, transfer. Again. Again. If the engine could only push a go-kart, the go-kart would be perfect. Every position. Every transition. Every angle shaved down to the minimum distance, the minimum effort, the maximum output from minimum input.
An hour passed. His joints ached. His chest throbbed where the meridian pulsed its steady leak. But the footwork was cleaner than when he'd started, the positions sharper, the transitions faster. Tomorrow he'd sit in Qiao's examination room and she'd look at him with those careful physician's eyes and he'd have to hide what he'd become.
Tonight, he had this.
He pulled his robe on and squeezed through the gap in the wall. The compound slept around him. His feet knew the path back to the servants' quarters without thought. His left hand stayed still at his side, and he was grateful for that much.