Colleen came back with a large bowl. Daisy's spirits lifted at the size of it — a bowl that big had to mean a serious quantity of food.
Then she looked inside. Her spirits took a corresponding dive.
Rice porridge. Thin, clear, barely a step above hot water. The kind of meal you'd give a patient.
Daisy clicked her tongue but kept her complaints to herself. Beggars can't be choosers. She picked up the bowl — skipped the spoon — and drank.
Colleen looked like she wanted to say something. What kind of patient wakes up and just drinks their porridge straight from the bowl? But Daisy waved her off. Under two minutes, the entire bowl was gone.
Her digestive system went to work, breaking it down and pushing it into her bloodstream. And then, at approximately the same speed it took her to eat it, her body processed the rice porridge completely. Hunger returned like nothing had happened.
"Do you — by any chance — have any meat?"
Colleen Wing's mouth opened slightly. In all her experience, she had never seen a recuperating patient display this level of appetite right out of the gate. Was the porridge really that good?
She was warm and unhurried about it — no eat it or leave it — just genuine concern for Daisy's condition.
"Don't worry. I'm an Inhuman. Food converts to energy for me. I need a lot of it to heal."
Mariko had already seen the portal. Colleen had spent two days helping nurse her through the coma. No reason to hide anything at this point.
The name Colleen Wing suited her — a blade when she needed to be, but naturally gentle in ordinary life. She could see Daisy was about to faint from hunger and got up without further comment to prepare a full meal. Mariko went to help.
Wolverine came in, looked at the patient, and went back out to smoke on the porch. Daisy stretched out on the cot and played dead.
An hour later, dinner.
As it turned out, Logan could eat. He just spent most of his waking hours medicating himself with whiskey and cigars and never mentioned it. Having another bottomless pit at the table to share the burden made Daisy feel considerably less conspicuous. Unlike Logan's approach — which was closer to a locust moving through a field — Daisy ate large quantities with impeccable manners. The contrast was instructive.
To an outside observer: one table of food, one very hungry man who apparently ate it all. The other person at the table barely seemed to eat anything.
About a third of the way through the meal, she had enough breathing room to check herself over.
She had changed.
Within the vibrations of her frequency, something new was present — delicate threads of pale gold energy woven through the existing pattern. Energy strings, by her model of the world. These strings had unusual tensile strength. Her own frequency had been steadily pushing back against the foreign element, working to expel it — and it had mostly succeeded. But in the process, her frequency had absorbed a trace of the intruding quality. A stain that wouldn't fully wash out.
She didn't need to reason through it very hard. This was residue from Madame Gao's qi — left in her system from the moment Gao shattered the portal.
String theory wasn't the Absorption Art or some mystical inner technique for stealing power. The qi itself had dispersed. What remained was a faint impression of its properties, partially replicated by her own frequency.
Which meant she now had a scientific lens through which to examine qi.
Her working model: qi was a variant of strings — the same fundamental phenomenon, different expression. The practitioners who used it treated themselves as closed systems, self-contained internal circuits in which strings existed in a sealed loop.
Strings existed across every scale — galaxies at one end, quarks and electrons at the other.
Qi practitioners spent their training lives strengthening their own strings — not by acquiring more, but by refining quality. Taking strings that were baseline human and pushing them toward something resembling a higher-dimensional entity. Given a few million years, a dedicated practitioner could theoretically evolve into something indistinguishable from the universe itself. The Eastern philosophical tradition would call this becoming one with heaven and earth.
It was a beautiful goal. And completely impractical for a species with finite lifespans.
Faced with that reality, qi practitioners had redirected their work toward immediate applications. In combat, qi formed sealed channels around specific body parts — seal the arms for strength, seal the legs for speed. Internal energy surged through the closed loop, and for brief windows, the practitioner operated at a level far beyond normal human limits. In those moments, they approximated something higher-dimensional.
After the meal, Daisy kept turning this over in her mind. If she could read the underlying structure of qi completely, she might eventually be able to replicate it through frequency manipulation. That would be remarkable.
She couldn't do it yet. A half-understanding practiced carelessly would be dangerous.
Still, the trace of qi quality had produced real changes. Her old frequency-based awareness — the ability to sense the vibrations of things around her — had expanded in range and sharpened in precision. Combined with the White Tiger amulet's animal instincts, she was starting to function like a human radar system.
As for the red dragon she'd seen in the coma: that was K'un-Lun's guardian spirit. Shou-Lao the Undying. Every Iron Fist earned their power by defeating it. The force it granted — the Heart of the Dragon — sounded impressive and was in practice several leagues below the Phoenix Force. There was a female Iron Fist who had used the Heart of the Dragon at full power against a Phoenix fragment and barely managed it...
Not that any of that was immediately relevant. Even a sliver of the Heart of the Dragon could finish her. Madame Gao, a fugitive from her own organization, had already put her in a two-day coma. K'un-Lun itself was on a completely different scale.
Current priority: heal. Then find Madame Gao and end her.
She wanted to kill someone. But when Logan announced, after the meal, that he and Mariko were heading back to Tokyo to help whoever might still need it — Daisy declined to join them.
She wasn't healed enough. Going back now would be walking into a slaughterhouse. She had no intention of facing Madame Gao again in her current condition.
She did warn Logan about the old woman. Specifically about her capabilities.
Logan didn't absorb a word of it. A dried-up woman who couldn't weigh more than a hundred pounds (45 kg) soaking wet — how dangerous could she really be?
In Logan's estimation, Daisy was a SHIELD agent who'd grown up in peacetime — limited experience, limited perspective. He filed her warning under rookie caution and moved on.
"Logan. Madame Gao is over four hundred years old. She is not what she appears to be."
"I'll manage." Cigar clamped between his teeth, tone polite enough to be technically a response and nothing more.
Daisy turned to Mariko instead and told her to be careful. She promised she'd come as soon as she was healed.
She watched them disappear into the trees and exhaled slowly. Logan's whole approach — no plan, pure instinct, improvised from start to finish — she had never been able to trust it. She hoped they wouldn't lose too badly.
The forest settled back into quiet.
Daisy struck up a conversation with Colleen Wing. American father, Japanese mother — and with both of them being mixed-heritage, they had more common ground than she'd expected. The Wing turned out to be her father's surname.
The kind of late-night conversation women have when neither of them can sleep — light, a little gossipy, nothing consequential. Colleen was reserved, in her own way; Daisy's focus was still fraying at the edges. After a while, both of them simply went to sleep.