Morning light slipped into the cabin through thin cracks, falling over Yù Qíng where she sat in the middle of the bed, eyes closed, her shift slipping from one shoulder. She drew a deep breath, trying to pull the energy resting in her abdomen upward, but the air left between her teeth in a low hiss when the flow stopped halfway, warming her ribs without going any further.
Zhì Yuǎn stood in the doorway, blocking the light, three parchment scrolls and two leather books under his arm. He watched her for a moment, dark eyes moving over her body, then walked to the bamboo table and dropped the books and scrolls onto the wood with a dry snap.
He sat on the edge of the bed. The straw creaked under his weight. He raised his hand and pressed two fingers at the base of her left collarbone, right in the gap of the bone.
"The curve of this channel is too narrow for the amount you're trying to push at once," he said, voice low and steady. "It hits the bottleneck and scatters. Split it. Pull half into the left arm first. The rest will follow."
Yù Qíng opened her eyes slowly and tried again, adjusting the pressure as he had said. A shiver ran up her spine the moment the energy unlocked and flowed through her arms without resistance. She slid across the mattress until her knees pressed against his leg, cold hands rising to seize the front of his tunic.
"You see the points I can't," she whispered, face close to his. "You never miss."
Zhì Yuǎn lowered his hand to the center of her chest, thumb resting exactly on the spot below the sternum where, weeks ago, he had forced too much pure fire and nearly burned her from the inside. He stayed looking at that patch of skin for a few breaths.
"I nearly killed you on this bed, Qíng," he said, low and plain. "I won't trust luck with your body. If you keep forcing energy without knowing what you're touching, one day I'll break you from the inside without meaning to."
Yù Qíng fell silent. The heat of his fingers against her skin was a living reminder of that old burn.
He took his hand away and stood, walking to the table. He untied the leather cord of one scroll and unrolled it across the wood.
"The peddler came through yesterday," he said, voice settling back into its usual tone. "I ordered these from the capital merchants weeks ago. Went to fetch them this morning. There are things in here we need to know."
Yù Qíng rose and went to the table, stopping against his left arm as he tapped a finger on the parchment.
"The thing we swallowed that cleaned our flesh—the books call it Qi," he said, sliding his finger to a simple drawing of a body marked with thick lines. "And these lines are the meridians. That's where it runs."
Yù Qíng breathed deeper. The words finally gave a name to the force they had been using without understanding.
"There's more," he continued, opening one of the books. "Farther south, past the mountains, there are people who use Qi the same way we do. They gather in groups called Sects. The texts say the further they advance, the more they can move things without touching them."
He set the paper down and turned his face to her.
"We're walking blind, Qíng. If I err again, it can kill you or me. We've already seen that Qi changes the body from the inside. If we keep going like this, one day the things we don't know will kill us. We'll have to leave the village and look for answers elsewhere."
Yù Qíng stared at the scrolls on the table. What bothered her was not the existence of other people using Qi, but the cold way he spoke of the danger that ignorance posed to them.
Zhì Yuǎn rolled the parchment slowly.
"On the last day and night, I wasn't just widening our veins," he said, voice settling into that methodical tone. "I pushed the Mill past its limit. Had to rebuild it hundreds of times before I could force the eighth rotation, then the ninth. When it broke, there was no heat left and no cold either. What came out was different. Thinner, harder to hold, but golden. It felt like the root of the other energies—pure and nothing more. I call it Primordial Qi."
Yù Qíng blinked. She raised her hands and gripped his tunic hard, fingers twisting the fabric. The memory of her sister pounding on the door during cultivation returned at once, and she frowned.
"We could have done this with far less trouble if Méi stopped banging on the door all the time," she said, tone low with irritation. "She doesn't understand that a locked door means we don't want anyone near."
Zhì Yuǎn stopped moving the books and looked up, a faint surprise crossing his face.
"While she was kicking the door and you were sending her away, I looked at her through the slats," he murmured. "I expected to see her channels thin or dry. What I saw caught me off guard."
Yù Qíng raised her face, attention fixed on him.
"Méi's meridians are broken," he said, voice cold and direct again. "Whole sections are missing between her chest and her arms. The space below her sternum is like a vessel with holes. The world's Qi could enter, but it would leak out before it nourished anything. Her foundation rotted before it ever took root."
Yù Qíng stayed silent. Some of the anger she held toward her sister eased at the knowledge that the girl carried a defect like that in her body.
Zhì Yuǎn brushed his thumb along her jaw.
"Ordinary energy from the world isn't strong enough to fix this, and the ice and fire we use would burst her from the inside," he explained. "But the Primordial Qi that came from the ninth rotation doesn't expand and doesn't burn. It only builds. If I can put enough of it into her, it can mend the missing pieces."
The temperature in the cabin dropped at once. Yù Qíng's nails dug deep into his tunic, twisting the fabric so hard her fingers cracked.
"We can only pass Qi by intertwining our bodies," her voice came low and sharp. "If you pass that gold to her the same way you pass it to me, I'll break her neck. I don't care that she shares my blood."
Zhì Yuǎn did not step back. He already knew who he was holding. Instead of answering with words, he slid his large hand to the back of her neck, fingers threading into her black hair, and pulled her face against his chest.
"My flesh doesn't enter anyone else, Qíng," he said, voice heavy and final.
Yù Qíng released a breath and melted against him, cheek sinking into the tunic, eyes closed. Still holding her there, he continued in a more practical tone.
"And I won't need to touch her to treat her. The texts show Qi can be pushed outward without contact. If the southern cultivators can move things with will alone, then Qi can also be shaped through the air."
He was quiet for a moment, then finished:
"The problem is that throwing Qi into the open will dry us fast. If I miss the force or the direction, the energy scatters in the air and is lost. We'll need far more than we've already done before I can expel enough without collapsing."
Yù Qíng turned her face against his chest and smiled slowly.
"Then take whatever you want from me," she whispered, nails lightly scraping his skin beneath the tunic.
Zhì Yuǎn did not answer at once. He lowered his gaze to his own right arm. Even with his head still throbbing from the previous day's effort, he focused on the clean, smooth skin of his forearm.
"The black sludge stopped coming out at the end of the third week," he murmured, almost to himself.
Yù Qíng raised her face slowly, following his gaze, fingers tracing the muscle of his arm.
"The body already expelled what was rotting," she said.
"That's what I thought at first," he answered, jaw tightening slightly. "But the filth didn't stop because we're clean. It stopped because the exits are sealed."
He closed his eyes and looked inside his own arm. Thousands of tiny holes covered the skin. They were the natural pores, but every one was clogged by a hard crust of black sludge the body had failed to push out in the last weeks because they were closed.
He chose a single point on the back of his right hand and gathered a portion of the Qi running through the arm, forcing the energy out of the main meridian and into smaller, dry channels that had never been used. Pressure built in his head as he pushed steadily, until the energy struck the base of the clogged pore and pressed against the crust.
He gave one last push.
Crack.
The sound was dry and sharp. A small black grain leapt from the skin of his hand and fell onto the table with a soft click.
Yù Qíng held her breath. The opened hole did not bleed. Instead, the internal vacuum pulled outside air at once. A thin thread of cold air entered directly through the skin of his hand and ran down the veins without passing through throat or lung.
Zhì Yuǎn opened his eyes and turned his hand slowly, feeling the air continue to enter.
"We can breathe through the skin," he murmured, voice lower than usual. "There are millions of sealed windows on the body. If I open all of them and clear the rest of the filth, the energy in the air will enter on its own the whole time, and we won't dry so easily."
Yù Qíng gripped his wrist, eyes fixed on the open pore.
"And if the doors are open," she said, low and quick, "you can push the Qi out without needing to touch the person."
"I can," he confirmed, still looking at the grain of sludge on the table. "But we'll have to do it during cultivation. It took a fair amount of energy just to clear one small point."
Yù Qíng was quiet for a moment, then raised her face and looked at him with darker eyes.
"Then we won't stop," she said, laying her cold hand on his chest. "We'll keep going until you can."
Zhì Yuǎn nodded. They did not leave the bed for the rest of that morning. Using the continuous friction of the Mill to build pressure, he pushed the golden Qi through the secondary channels of both of them, bursting the tiny crusts from the inside out until their entire skin burned and began to breathe on its own.
------
The midday sun had already begun to sink when Zhì Yuǎn finally rose and put on the gray tunic, tying the leather belt at his waist before pulling on his boots.
"The army's time is running out and the intendant is coming tomorrow for the inspection," he said. "I'm going to take a walk and see how things are moving at the mine before it gets dark."
Yù Qíng remained lying on the bed, watching him for a few moments before answering.
"I'm not going. The noise of those people gives me a headache."
Zhì Yuǎn accepted without arguing. He returned to the edge of the bed, held the back of her neck firmly, and brushed his thumb along her tense jaw.
"Stay here then. I'll be back before nightfall."
He released her, walked to the door, removed the wooden log, and went down the steps.
Yù Qíng watched until the gray tunic disappeared among the trees, then rose from the bed. The smell in the room was still strong from the dried sludge on the floor and the used sheets. She wrinkled her nose at the sight of it dirtying the place where his body was meant to rest clean.
She took a large bucket, went down to the stream, and filled it with cold water. When she returned, she lit the clay stove in the kitchen, mixed hot water into the bucket with a piece of ash soap, then dropped to her knees in the room and began to scrub.
She scrubbed the floor hard, teeth clenched, not stopping even when the hot water turned her hands red. She worked the cloth in short, heavy strokes, scraping the dried sludge from the wood and ignoring the foul smell that rose with the steam until every stain and every remnant of filth that had come out of the two of them was gone. Once the floor was finished, she changed the dirty sheets and laid fresh straw on the mattress.
Finally, she gathered the used cloths over her shoulder and went down to the stream once more, sitting on the smooth stones of the bank to scrub the fabrics in the cold water while the sun continued its slow descent over the valley.