Three weeks after the sessions with Elder Shou paused, Wei Fangs made his move.
He did it with the smoothness of someone who had considered the approach for several months and had selected the version least likely to be declined. He showed up at the outer cultivation yard during Kai's evening session, which was unusual — inner disciples rarely used the outer yards, having better facilities — and he cultivated at the adjacent formation station for forty minutes, and at the end of those forty minutes he made an observation rather than a request.
"You're running a modified void-form technique," he said. "Void-settling, but the resonance pattern is different from the standard form. Deeper anchoring, lower frequency." He said it with the tone of a musicologist describing an unusual instrument's tuning. "Where did you learn the modification?"
Kai completed his closing sequence before answering. "My father. He didn't learn it from a formal source."
"First-generation discovery?"
"More likely ancient recovery. His family had fragments of old texts."
Wei Fangs was quiet for a moment — the productive silence of someone integrating information. "I've been trying to map your output signature," he said. "For the past two months. I can't. The reading keeps shifting in ways that don't correspond to cultivation stage advancement. You're not improving in the direction the standard models would predict. You're improving in a direction the standard models don't have a category for."
"I'm an outer disciple," Kai said. "The standard models aren't very granular at this level."
"The standard models are perfectly granular at this level," Wei Fangs said, with the precision of someone who had spent considerable time with the models in question. "That's exactly the point. You should be fully predictable. You're not."
Kai looked at him. In the lantern-light, Wei Fangs' expression was the kind that gets worn by people who have been exceptional their whole lives and are now standing in front of something they can't evaluate, and the inability to evaluate it is producing something adjacent to unease.
"What do you want?" Kai asked.
Wei Fangs seemed briefly surprised to be asked directly. "Access," he said, after a moment. "Not your technique — I can't run a void-form in any variant, different root type. Access to your output data. I want to understand what I'm looking at."
"Why."
"Academic interest."
"That's not a full answer."
Wei Fangs looked at him for a long moment. And then, in a move that Kai found genuinely unexpected, he was briefly honest.
"Because I've been at the top of every cultivation assessment in this sect for three years," he said. "And I've been at the top because I've trained harder and studied better than everyone around me. I know how to identify what I'm better at and how to define the space in which I'm better. You—" he paused "—you're doing something I don't have a definition for. I'm not able to assess whether you're exceptional or doing something that shouldn't be possible, and not knowing is—"
"Uncomfortable," Kai said.
"Yes."
Kai was quiet for a moment. He thought about this. He thought about the way Wei Fangs' requests always arrived wrapped in self-interest and how the self-interest was at least honest. He thought about what it meant to be studied and whether that was worse or better than being ignored.
"You can observe," he said finally. "No recording in the sect's formal system. Personal notes only. You share what you find with me first."
Wei Fangs considered. "Agreed."
They shook hands across cultivation stations in the outer yard with the formality of two people establishing terms they were both aware might not hold.
Kai went back to his dormitory and lay on his mat and looked at the ceiling crack, which was, in the darkness, faintly, very faintly, pulsing in a slow rhythm that he had stopped trying to pretend was anything other than what it was — a heartbeat that wasn't his, coming from underneath.
He put his hand near it. Not touching. Near.
The rhythm steadied, slightly, in response to proximity.
He pulled his hand back and went to sleep.