They expelled him on the twelfth day, which he considered reasonable under the circumstances.
He left with what he had arrived with: a travel pack, a single change of clothes, the small notebook in which he had been recording his observations since childhood. The notebook was almost full now. The last three pages were dense with diagrams — not the standard qi-flow charts that the outer disciples copied from official texts, but something stranger, something he was still working out the language for. The still place, mapped as best he could map it. Annotated with guesses.
The road south was empty at that hour. Wei Jianlong walked it with no particular destination, which was less a plan than an acknowledgment that plans required more information than he currently had. The mountains of the Jade Pavilion rose behind him. He did not look back. He had found, in his twelve days of unofficial residence, that backward-looking was an expensive habit for someone with no resources to spare.
Three li from the sect gates, he sat down beside a stream and opened the notebook to the diagram page.
He had, in twelve days, moved something. Not qi. Not what the texts called qi. Something older than the texts' vocabulary, or stranger, or both. He had moved it once, briefly, and it had felt less like power than like rightness — a correction, a thing settling into its proper position after a long time in the wrong one.
He picked up a stone from the stream bank. He set it on his palm. He looked at the still place, and he asked, with the particular quality of attention he had been practicing, a single question.
Can you show me?