They assembled in ranked formation, the entire Wei Clan discipleship spread across the main courtyard in rows determined by seniority, branch affiliation, and the particular arithmetic of who mattered. Tobi stood near the rear, between two minor-branch disciples whose names he'd never learned, in the section of the formation that functioned as footnotes to the main text. Several rows ahead, Mei Ran's simple cotton robes sat among the silk like a patch on a quilt.
Elders occupied the raised platform at the courtyard's head, seated in carved chairs with the practiced stillness of people who'd spent decades turning silence into authority. Jianyu stood at the front of the disciple formation, his posture calibrated to project modesty while occupying as much visual space as possible.
"The Patriarch, in his wisdom, has authorized a formal cultivation assessment." Jianyu's voice carried with the clean projection of someone who'd rehearsed. "Every disciple will be evaluated across three domains: qi circulation, technique demonstration, and supervised sparring. This is an opportunity to demonstrate your progress and dedication to the clan's traditions."
He paused. The pause was theatrical, designed to let the gravity settle.
"Results will determine resource allocation for the coming quarter. Training privileges, medicinal stipends, and instruction access will be adjusted based on individual performance."
Another pause. Several heads in the formation turned, almost involuntarily, toward the back rows. Toward Tobi's section. The assessment wasn't a test. It was a sorting mechanism. The strong advanced. The weak were identified. And the embarrassments were given their formal justification for disappearing.
"The assessment will commence in fourteen days. Prepare accordingly."
Jianyu stepped back. The elders remained motionless. The formation held for another ten seconds of silence, then broke along invisible fault lines as disciples turned to each other in murmured clusters.
Fourteen days. Tobi ran the inventory. Qi circulation: his Heart Meridian leaked. Any examiner who checked his flow would see damage, instability, a system running on fumes. Technique demonstration: he had Qiao's diagnostic touch (medically useful, combat-irrelevant), Iron Skin (crude, limited, stolen), partial Soaring Sparrow (non-functional), and Flowing River Palm (memorized, underpowered). Sparring: he could survive thirty seconds against a competent opponent if he combined everything. Maybe forty-five if his opponent was overconfident.
Two weeks was the gap between managing and drowning. He'd lived on that margin before.
Across the formation, Mei Ran's head turned. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second. She gave a nod so small it could have been a muscle twitch, then looked away. The nod said later. The nod said not here.
=====
The medical pavilion smelled the same as it had during his first visit: herbs, clean linen, the astringent bite of something Tobi couldn't name. Qiao Luwei stood at her station with instruments laid out in a grid that suggested ritual more than necessity. She greeted him with the same formal reserve as their first meeting, identical words, identical posture. The consistency was deliberate. She was establishing a baseline so she could measure his response to consistency.
"Please sit. Sleeve."
He sat. He offered his wrist. Her fingers found his pulse with practiced precision, and her qi threaded into his meridian network like water through pipe.
The scan moved through him in a slow wave. He felt it touch each node, each junction, each channel. The sensation was clinical and intimate at the same time, a stranger reading every page of a book that belonged to him. When her technique reached his Heart Meridian, it slowed. When it touched the Iron Skin residue lodged in his forearm channels, it slowed again. When it found the fragment of Soaring Sparrow routing threaded through his leg meridians, it stopped entirely for two seconds before continuing.
Qiao's face remained neutral. Her fingers on his wrist were steady. She completed the scan, withdrew her qi, and released his hand with the same measured motion as before.
"Have you been taking any supplementary tonics or medicines?"
"No."
"Have you consulted any other practitioner regarding your meridian condition?"
"No."
"Have you been performing any cultivation exercises beyond the basic circulation drills prescribed during your orientation?"
"I've been practicing qi circulation as instructed. Basic forms. Nothing beyond what was assigned."
Technically true. Wildly incomplete. He held her gaze the way he used to hold a detective's gaze during a stop-and-question on the Wharf: cooperative, open, empty. Answer what's asked. Volunteer nothing. Let the silence belong to them.
Qiao let the silence sit for five full seconds. She picked up her journal and made three notations, her brush moving in small precise strokes.
"Your readings are interesting." She said it the way a person says the weather is interesting: flat, observational, carrying nothing. "Your Heart Meridian has stabilized fractionally since my last assessment. The damage trajectory has slowed. And there are characteristic qi patterns in your secondary channels that I associate with technique integration rather than natural development."
She looked up from the journal.
"It reminds me of a case study from my training. A cultivator whose meridian signatures shifted after prolonged proximity to a senior practitioner. Passive absorption through ambient qi exposure." She set down her brush. "The literature is inconclusive on whether such absorption occurs naturally or requires active facilitation."
The bait sat between them like a coin on a table. He recognized what she was doing because he'd done versions of it himself: offer a plausible explanation and see if the suspect reaches for it.
"That's fascinating," Xuanji said.
Two words of nothing. Qiao cataloged his non-response with the same neutral precision she cataloged everything else.
"I'd like to schedule a follow-up in one week. Given the changes I'm observing, ongoing monitoring would be prudent."
"I'll be here."
He stood. She didn't rise. At the door, her voice followed him.
"Be careful during training, Wei Xuanji. Your recovery trajectory is unusual. Overexertion in someone with your meridian profile could cause damage that no diagnostic technique could repair."
The word "unusual" carried the weight of everything she hadn't said. Xuanji nodded without turning and stepped into the corridor.
=====
The sanctuary. Dusk. Tobi drilled the Soaring Sparrow footwork in the fading light, the positions approaching automatic now, each step clean despite the absence of qi to power the jumps. Left foot, pivot, transfer, launch position. A dancer without music, rehearsing choreography he couldn't yet perform.
He heard her two seconds before she appeared. Progress. In their first meeting, she'd materialized like a ghost.
"You could announce yourself," he said without stopping the drill.
"I wanted to see what you practice when the yard is empty." Mei Ran stepped through the gap in the wall, brushing dust from her sleeve. Her eyes tracked his footwork for a few seconds before she spoke again. "That's not Flowing River Palm."
"No."
She waited. He didn't elaborate. The silence between them functioned differently than Qiao's silences. Qiao's silences were investigative. Mei Ran's were transactional, the pause before a deal.
"I've been looking into the minor branch's resource allocation," she said. "The training budgets have been cut three times in two years. The cuts correspond to increased expenditure in a specific line item in the main branch ledgers. Donations to a mountain shrine at Eastern Ridgeview."
Tobi stopped drilling.
"There is no shrine at Eastern Ridgeview," he said.
The confirmation landed between them. Mei Ran's expression didn't shift, but her weight settled forward by a fraction, the posture of someone whose bet just paid off.
"The donation trail points toward Third Aunt's household. The amounts are modest enough to avoid scrutiny. Accumulated, they exceed the minor branch's entire annual training stipend." She folded her arms. "I need someone with main-branch ledger access to verify the pattern across older records. The minor branch archive only goes back ten months."
He weighed the offer. Information was currency. He never gave currency away. But Mei Ran was offering context he couldn't generate alone. He knew the numbers were wrong. She knew who was making them wrong. Separately, they each held half a picture. Together, the picture was worth more than either half.
"The donations appear in every monthly cycle," he said. "Fifteen to twenty taels. Same sub-clerk signature. Same treasury sub-account." He stopped there. The sub-clerk's name stayed in his pocket. The exact account routing stayed in his pocket. Enough to prove mutual value. Not enough to make him expendable.
"I can access older ledgers," he added. "The clerks don't watch me. They've decided I'm too unimportant to monitor."
"The best position to be in." Something close to approval crossed her face. "For both of us."
Neither of them used words like trust, alliance, or partnership. The structure of the exchange was the agreement: shared findings, separate identities, either party free to walk. On the street, this was a crew. Temporary, practical, dissolved the moment the score was done.
"The assessment," Tobi said. "How bad is it for someone like me?"
"If you perform at Xuanji's historical level, the Patriarch uses it to strip your training access entirely. You become a clerk permanently." She let that sit. "If you overperform, half the elders will want to know how a broken meridian case suddenly acquired functional techniques."
"So the window is..."
"Narrow." Her voice was dry. "Barely there. You need to show just enough improvement to justify continued access without showing enough to trigger investigation. In your particular situation, with your particular limitations, I'd say you have approximately no margin for error."
The math was familiar. Too little and he drowned. Too much and he burned. The sweet spot was a razor's edge, and he'd been walking edges like this since the first time he'd picked a pocket at thirteen and realized that the difference between eating and jail was about two seconds of timing.
Mei Ran moved toward the gap in the wall. She paused with one hand on the stone, half in shadow.
"My name wasn't always Mei Ran." She said it lightly, the way you mention a fact about the landscape. "Minor branch children get renamed when they're transferred between households. It's administrative. The old name goes into a file somewhere."
She didn't share the old name, and didn't need to. The point was clear: everyone in this clan wore an identity that had been assigned rather than chosen. He wasn't the only person in the compound living behind a borrowed name.
She slipped through the gap and was gone.
Tobi stood in the dark sanctuary and ran the numbers. Two weeks. The assessment. Qiao's investigation. Mei Ran's corruption trail. The escaped bandit in the mountains. His crumbling meridian and the three stolen techniques he couldn't fully use. More threads than he'd ever managed on the Wharf, and the penalty for dropping any of them was worse than jail.
He didn't feel hope. Hope was a currency he'd stopped trading in years ago. What he felt was traction. Grip on the surface of something that had been frictionless since the day he'd woken up in Xuanji's body. For the first time, he had information, a partner, and a deadline. The combination was dangerous, but dangerous was an improvement over helpless.
The thief had a crew. Whether he wanted one or not.
He picked up his robe, squeezed through the gap, and walked toward the servants' quarters. Behind him, the sanctuary settled back into its silence. Ahead of him, the compound waited with its hierarchies and secrets and the fourteen-day clock ticking toward whatever came next.