The number stopped moving.
For three weeks, the curve had been slow but visible. Eighteen percent dispersal became seventeen. Seventeen became sixteen. Sixteen became fifteen.
Then, six weeks before the Minor Assessment, it went backward.
Xu Qian noticed it during the morning drill before Instructor Fan confirmed it. The qi moved through his channels with the same resistance it always carried, but the output at the end of each circuit was fractionally less than it had been the week before.
Fifteen had become sixteen.
He stood in the yard, breath clouding in the cold air, and waited for Instructor Fan to walk the grid. The old man's Realm 3 spiritual sense swept the rows in a single pass. When he reached Xu Qian, his gaze lingered for half a breath longer than usual.
He did not stop. He did not offer a correction. He simply marked the degradation in his mind and moved on.
After the drill, Xu Qian stood in the yard and examined the problem.
His body had not changed. His channels had not narrowed. The scarring was the same. The friction was the same.
The regression was not caused by damage. It was caused by fatigue.
Six weeks of sustained drilling without adequate recovery had pushed his meridian tissue past the point of productive stress. The channels were not healing between sessions. The micro-improvements he had earned each day were being eroded overnight by inflammation he could not see until it showed up in the numbers.
He was overtraining.
The realization arrived with the same flat weight as everything else the sect taught. A fact. A measurement. A wall.
He could push harder and watch the number climb further. Or he could rest and watch the weeks disappear.
He found Zhao Wen near the water troughs.
The other boy looked worse than he had a week ago. The bruise on his face had faded to a sickly yellow, but his eyes were rimmed with red. He was splashing cold water onto his face, gasping as it hit his skin.
"Zhao Wen," Xu Qian said.
Zhao Wen looked up, water dripping from his chin. "Xu Qian. Did you see the notice?"
"Which notice?"
"Task Hall. Special rotation. Herbal collection in the Gray Spine fog zone."
Xu Qian stiffened. "That's inner disciple territory."
"Support roles," Zhao Wen said quickly, the words tumbling out. "Carrying baskets. Processing on site. It pays thirty points. Thirty."
"It pays thirty because the fog rots your lungs if the filtration seals fail," Xu Qian said.
"I can buy better seals with the advance."
"You can't buy lungs," Xu Qian said.
Zhao Wen wiped his face with his sleeve. "I'm at sixteen percent, Xu Qian. I haven't moved in ten days. I need Spirit Crystals. The low-grade ones. If I can flood the channels, maybe I can force an expansion."
"Spirit Crystals aren't for Flesh Tempering," Xu Qian said, keeping his voice low. "The energy is too volatile. You'll rupture."
"Some people do it," Zhao Wen insisted. "I heard..."
"You heard rumors," Xu Qian cut him off. "Rumors are how the desperate kill themselves."
Zhao Wen stared at him. The desperation in his eyes was not frantic anymore. It was hardened. It was the look of a gambler who had already placed the bet and was just waiting for the dice to stop rolling.
"You have a token," Zhao Wen said softly. "You have a floor. I don't. If I don't cross the threshold, I'm back to the rice paddies. I won't go back."
He turned and walked away toward the Task Hall.
Xu Qian watched him go. He wanted to call him back. He wanted to tell him that running on a broken leg only meant you fell harder when the bone finally snapped.
He said nothing.
Everyone made their own math. Zhao Wen had calculated that the risk of lung rot was lower than the certainty of failure.
That evening, Xu Qian found Sun Liang.
The broker was sitting on a stone bench near the perimeter of the archives, peeling an orange with a small knife. He peeled it in a single, continuous strip. Efficiency.
He looked up as Xu Qian approached.
"Sixteen percent?" Sun Liang guessed.
Xu Qian paused. "Is it written on my forehead?"
"It's written in your walk," Sun Liang said. He popped a segment of orange into his mouth. "You're walking like you're carrying a stone you can't put down. That's the regression walk. The 'I worked hard and got worse' walk."
Xu Qian sat on the other end of the bench. "Is there a way past it?"
"Time," Sun Liang said. "Six months. Maybe a year. Your body adjusts eventually."
"I don't have a year. The Assessment is in six weeks."
"No one has a year," Sun Liang agreed. "That's why it's a filter."
He gestured with the knife toward the training yards below them.
"Look at them. Four thousand people in this sect. Maybe three hundred in the inner court. Do you think the rest failed because they were lazy?"
Sun Liang shook his head.
"They failed because they hit the limit of their natural recovery speed, and they didn't have the resources to cheat it. Flesh Tempering isn't hard. It's just honest. It tells you exactly what your body is worth."
"My body is worth fifteen percent," Xu Qian said. "Sixteen, today."
"Then that is your ceiling," Sun Liang said comfortably. "Unless you change the terms."
"Zhao Wen is taking the Gray Spine rotation."
Sun Liang paused in his eating. He chewed slowly. "Then Zhao Wen has made his last calculation. Whether it kills him depends on the seals. I wouldn't bet on the seals."
He turned fully to Xu Qian.
"You aren't going with him."
"No."
"Good. Then you have one option left. But it's boring. And it hurts."
"I'm listening," Xu Qian said.
"Starve the wall," Sun Liang said. "You're regressing because you're leaking. You're holding tension because you're panicked. Tension burns qi. It creates heat. That heat prevents your channels from healing."
He pointed the knife at Xu Qian's chest.
"You stop caring about the number. You stop trying to force it down. You turn your life into a closed loop. You sleep exactly enough. You eat exactly enough. You move only when necessary. You become a miser with your own life force."
"Rest," Xu Qian said.
"Active retention," Sun Liang corrected. "Rest sounds nice. This isn't nice. It feels like dying. It feels like turning yourself into a stone while everyone else is running."
He tossed the orange peel into the grass.
"Most people can't do it. It requires a kind of coldness they don't have. They'd rather fight a beast in the fog than sit still and starve themselves into perfection."
Sun Liang stood up.
"This is as far as most get, Xu Qian. This is the wall. You don't climb it. You wait until it crumbles."
Xu Qian took the advice.
For three days, he did not enter the practice court. He attended the morning circulation drill because attendance was mandatory, but he ran the pattern at seventy percent intensity. Instructor Fan noticed. The old man's eyes found Xu Qian briefly across the yard, the particular attention he reserved for disciples who were doing something deliberate.
He said nothing.
Xu Qian spent the rest periods in his room. He sat on his bed and breathed. He did not attempt full circuits. He let the qi settle in his dantian and held it there, still and warm, allowing the channels above to cool.
It was excruciating.
Every instinct in his body screamed to move, to train, to do something that felt like progress. Sitting still felt like surrendering.
But on the second day, the ache in his meridians shifted. The persistent heat behind his sternum loosened by a degree.
On the third day, he returned to the practice court.
He ran the fourth form thirty times. On the seventh cut, qi transferred into the blade. On the fifteenth, it transferred again. On the twenty-ninth, a third time.
Three in thirty.
The number had doubled from his best previous session. The rest had done what the drilling could not.
He understood then what the sect was actually teaching. Not the circulation pattern. Not the sword form. It was teaching patience as a technical skill.
He resumed the cycle. Three days of drilling. One day of active retention. The pattern was inefficient by the sect's standard schedule. His body could not sustain the standard schedule. So he built his own rhythm and accepted the cost.
The cost was time.
Four weeks before the assessment, his dispersal was at fourteen and a half.
The number was not on the ledger. But Xu Qian could feel the half-point in his channels.
Fourteen and a half. He needed twelve.
Two and a half points in four weeks. The math was possible but narrow. It assumed his current adaptation rate held. It assumed no new injuries.
Three weeks before the assessment, the margin for error vanished.
It happened during the morning drill.
Xu Qian did not see it start. He heard the sound. A wet thud, like a sack of grain hitting the packed earth.
He turned his head.
Wei Tong, a disciple from the third row, was on the ground. He was curled around his own center, hands clawing at his chest.
Instructor Fan was there in two steps.
He stood over the fallen disciple, his gaze fixed on Wei Tong's chest for two breaths. His spiritual sense pressed outward once, a brief pulse that Xu Qian felt as a flicker of pressure against his own channels.
"Meridian rupture," Instructor Fan said. "Seventh channel."
The steward standing at the edge of the yard wrote it down.
Two disciples were instructed to carry Wei Tong to the infirmary. They lifted him carefully. Wei Tong's eyes were open but unfocused. His breathing was shallow and fast. His hands were still pressed against his chest, as though holding something in that was trying to escape.
The drill resumed.
Instructor Fan did not explain what had happened. He did not offer a warning. He turned back to the remaining disciples and said, "Continue."
Xu Qian continued.
He ran the pattern. He felt the qi move through his channels with the same imperfect flow. He felt the seventh junction, the same junction that had ruptured in Wei Tong's body, and he felt the narrowing there, the scar tissue pressing against the qi thread.
He understood with perfect clarity that the difference between his seventh junction and Wei Tong's was not talent.
It was margin.
Wei Tong had pushed his circuit at full intensity without adequate rest. He had tried to force the number down. The channel walls had thinned from sustained stress. At some point during the drill, the pressure exceeded the tissue's tolerance by a fraction, and the wall had torn.
After the drill, Xu Qian walked past the infirmary. He saw Wei Tong lying on a cot, his robe cut open. A sect physician was pressing glowing hands against his sternum. The physician looked annoyed. He was performing a repair, not offering comfort.
The cost of the repair would be logged against Wei Tong's merit account. The debt would exceed anything a sequence of delivery tasks could repay. Wei Tong would owe the sect more than he could earn.
The infirmary was not a hospital. It was a creditor.
Xu Qian walked on.
That night, he sat in his room and did not practice.
His dispersal was at fourteen and a half. The threshold was twelve. He had three weeks.
The urgency was real. The Minor Assessment was a filter. Disciples who did not meet the threshold would be moved from "developing asset" to "diminishing return."
He thought of Zhao Wen, somewhere in the Gray Spine fog, gambling his lungs for crystals. He thought of Wei Tong, owing his life to a ledger. He thought of the men walking away from the sect, peaceful in their failure.
This was as far as most got.
Not because they lacked effort. Because the gap between effort and result widened at a rate they could not sustain.
Xu Qian lay down.
He closed his eyes.
He did not practice. He did not run the circuit. He scanned his body for tension, the jaw, the shoulders, the hip, and released it. He hoarded his energy. He starved the wall.
Four weeks. Two and a half points. One body that changed at the speed it chose and not the speed he needed.
He slept.
In the morning, the bell rang. The air was the same cold. The yard was the same stone.
He got up.
He cut.