The hilltop — my hilltop.

  I'd stopped pretending it wasn't mine somewhere around the second week. Ownership was an illusion I'd abandoned centuries ago — the idea that a person could claim a piece of earth, as though the earth acknowledged the transaction, as though the rock and the grass and the wind agreed to belong to someone simply because that someone stood there frequently enough to wear a path. But this hilltop had my shape in the grass. The flat stone where I sat had adapted to the angles of my weight. The view was arranged the way I preferred it: the valley below, the village to the south, the eastern ridge where Xu Ran's qi-signature pulsed with increasing urgency.

  I came here to think. Or to not think. The difference was less clear than it used to be.

  The wind was dry and warm — for winter at least. It carried the smell of baked earth and dying grass and the faint, metallic tang of qi-contaminated air. The same wind that had blown across the valley every afternoon for decades, except now it carried a weight that had nothing to do with temperature or humidity and everything to do with the young man in the forest who was compressing the equivalent of a small sun into his dantian and didn't care what leaked.

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  Xu Ran's signature was stronger today. Not just stronger — structured. The chaotic pulsing of the past weeks had organized itself into something rhythmic, intentional, the unmistakable pattern of a cultivator entering the final phase of consolidation. He was getting close.

  I watched the horizon. The light was strange above his position — a subtle distortion, like heat shimmer but wrong, the air itself bending around a density it couldn't accommodate. Invisible to normal eyes. To mine, it was a beacon.

  Then a thought came.

  He wants to touch the sky. He believes he deserves it.

  I went still. Not the stillness of concentration or meditation or the careful immobility that thousands of years of discipline had made automatic.

  The stillness of recognition.

  And I knew this thought. Yes, it was mine, but I didn't want it to be mine. Because if I was thinking about what Xu Ran thought he deserved, then I was thinking about Xu Ran himself. And if I was thinking about Xu Ran, then I was involved.

  And I — was not — involved.

  — I wasn't.

  I was just here — sitting on a hilltop, watching.

  I stood up and walked down the hill. Towards the village. Faster than necessary.

  From "Then a thought came" to the end, I wanted it to have a specific tone. My problem, I can achieve it only through formatting. Because any additional word between it and the end of the chapter would ruin the impact, this had to Yun and me by proxy. These are the most intense lines I wrote in this book and possibly the ones, that took the most time also - and not just per word.

  S

  The text describes it for itself. Stillness. Shock of recognition: "What am I thinking here?"

  Starting slowly to run. Faster with every word. No this is not true!

  And I — was not — involved.

  Very firm. Like parents talking to a child, that is very stubborn. But a little through clenched teeth.

  The kid, those parents were talking to, at the brink of tears.

  The kid justifies her actions. Tears avoided, but they could still come any moment.

  

  This is the climax of her lies. That last stomp of her feet. The last bastion, that needed to fall, before she could allow herself to see the truth. Not immediately, but she'll come around.