After forty-seven days in the Silted Bones — where the only sounds had been wind, the occasional crack of old armour settling, and Wu Zheng's one-sided conversations with the dead — the market town of Greenwood Village was an assault.

  People shouted across streets. Chickens objected to their confinement.

  A blacksmith's hammer rang against an anvil in a rhythm Chen Xi's brain automatically decomposed into frequency components.

  Children ran in patterns that were, he noted with mild interest, not random: they clustered near food stalls and dispersed near the tanner's shop, suggesting olfactory-driven migration.

  He stood at the town's entrance and catalogued.

  Buildings: timber-frame construction, roughly equivalent to thirteenth-century European standards, with the addition of certain materials he could not identify — a blue-grey stone used in foundations that registered faintly to his Qi senses, suggesting structural reinforcement through embedded energy.

  Population: approximately four hundred, based on visible foot traffic and housing density.

  Economy: agricultural base with a modest trade component — he counted three inns and a shop whose sign depicted a book, which interested him considerably.

  Nobody noticed him. Or rather, nobody found him noteworthy.

  A young man in dusty travelling clothes, standing at the edge of town with an expression of intense concentration, was not remarkable in a world where young men regularly travelled between settlements for work, trade, or the vague hope of something better.

  Wu Zheng handled the social interactions.

  He had seventy-three years of rust to shake off, but the skills were there — the old cultivator knew how to talk to mortals, how to project harmless authority, how to turn a conversation toward the information he wanted without revealing what he was.

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  Chen Xi watched and took notes, cataloguing the social dynamics the way he catalogued energy flows: as a system with rules that could be understood and, if necessary, manipulated.

  They learned several things.

  The nearest city was Jianzhou, three days' travel east. Jianzhou was hosting the biennial Sword Conference in two months — a gathering of regional sects for competition, trade, and politics.

  Attendance was open to anyone with cultivation, and the Conference included a tournament whose top performers would be invited to join an expedition to the Second Stratum.

  The Second Stratum was referred to with the reverence and imprecision of a place most people had heard of and nobody present had visited.

  They also learned that cultivation, in the wider Silt, was exactly as rare as Wu Zheng had described: a rumour with occasional evidence.

  The people of Greenwood Village knew cultivators existed the way they knew earthquakes existed — as a natural force that was real, distant, and best avoided.

  The bookshop interested Chen Xi more than any of this.

  It was called the Wandering Sage, and it was run by an elderly woman who had accumulated, over several decades, a collection of texts that included cultivation manuals.

  Not real cultivation manuals — the genuine articles were sect-controlled and fiercely guarded — but folk compilations, oral traditions transcribed by scholars, and fragments of techniques that had leaked into the mortal world through various channels.

  To a real cultivator, they were children's books. To Chen Xi, they were a Rosetta Stone.

  He bought seven of them with spirit stones Wu Zheng provided from their Silted Bones haul.

  He sat in the inn they had rented and read them in a single night. The techniques described were crude, partial, and frequently contradictory.

  They were also, when subjected to mathematical analysis, all describing the same underlying phenomenon from different angles with different degrees of accuracy.

  Every single one of them was trying to do what his vortex did. Channel energy through the body, refine it, and use it to enhance physical and metaphysical capability.

  They just didn't know it. They didn't have the framework to see the commonality beneath the surface variation.

  He began writing. Not translating the manuals — transcribing the physics.

  An energy transport model for Qi cultivation, expressed in the mathematical notation of a dead Formation Commander from nine hundred years ago, adapted to his own framework, and explained in language that a literate non-mathematician might eventually understand.

  "What are you writing?" Wu Zheng asked, when he found Chen Xi still at the desk at dawn.

  "A textbook," Chen Xi said. "The first principles of cultivation, derived from observation and expressed in mathematical language."

  "Who is it for?"

  Chen Xi looked at the stack of folk manuals, each one a garbled, poetic, hopelessly imprecise attempt to describe what he could express in three equations.

  "Everyone," he said.