The ancient beings below the civilization had been asleep for sixty thousand years and were now awake and moving toward the surface.
Míng Xīn noted this alongside the equally important fact that he had not eaten breakfast.
One of these problems was solvable immediately.
He was sitting in the east wing corridor outside the healing chamber at the first hour of morning, waiting for Elder Sòng to finish her third consecutive daily assessment of his left arm. She had explained that unprecedented bloodline combinations required unprecedented monitoring frequency. He had not argued. He had simply started bringing a book to the sessions.
Today he had forgotten the book.
He sat in the corridor with nothing to occupy his hands and found that having nothing to do was considerably louder than it sounded. His mind moved through its usual inventory with the automatic efficiency of someone who had been doing this since before he could write the observations down.
Elder Fang. The access log. The name sitting in his memory like a blade. Nothing new to think about there until he had something actionable. Filed.
The ancient beings moving toward the surface. Everything in the archive essentially said very old, very powerful, unknown, do not investigate. Genuinely helpful. Filed.
The phenomenon across five worlds. Five children feeling something that did not belong to their current lives. He had thought about this more than anything else over the past three days, turning it over carefully, examining it from every angle, and arriving each time at the same conclusion.
He was not alone in whatever he was.
He did not know what to do with that yet so he filed it alongside everything else and returned to the breakfast problem.
The door to the healing chamber opened and Elder Sòng looked out at him with the expression she had developed specifically for these morning sessions, which combined professional composure with the slightly overwhelmed quality of someone who had agreed to measure something that kept exceeding the measuring.
"You may come in," she said.
He came in.
His father was already there.
This was not unusual. His father had been present for every assessment since the incident, arriving before Míng Xīn each morning with the punctuality of someone who had decided that being present was the most useful thing he could do and was going to be very thorough about it. He was sitting in his corner with a document in his hands that he was definitely not reading.
"You forgot your book," his father said without looking up from the document he was not reading.
"I am aware," Míng Xīn said.
"I brought you one." His father produced a text from beside his chair and held it out. Míng Xīn took it and looked at the title.
Advanced Dual Bloodline Theory: Hypothetical Frameworks and Speculative Applications.
He looked at his father.
His father was still looking at the document he was not reading. But the corner of his mouth had done something.
"This book," Míng Xīn said carefully, "is about a situation that has never existed. It is entirely speculative."
"Yes," his father agreed.
"You are giving me a book about myself."
"I thought you might find it interesting," his father said, "to read what people imagined you might be like before you existed."
Míng Xīn looked at the book. Then at his father. His father was now fully looking at the document he was not reading with the complete concentration of someone winning an argument by pretending the argument was not happening.
He sat down and opened the book.
The first page said, in the confident tone of academic speculation: A dual bloodline activation of this nature would, in theory, be immediately fatal to the host.
He turned to the next page.
His father made a sound that was not quite a laugh and returned to his document.
Elder Sòng began the assessment with her instruments and her careful notes and her expression of professional composure, and the compound outside continued its changed movement, and somewhere below the civilization something ancient moved through the deep dark with the patient certainty of something that had waited sixty thousand years and was not troubled by a few more days.
Míng Xīn read his book and held his arm still and thought, in the specific unbothered way he thought about large things, that the world had become considerably more complicated in the past three days.
He also thought that nobody had brought him breakfast yet.
He would address this after the assessment.
Priorities.