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Six days.
He had estimated eight days before the entity's active cycle restarted. The pursuit had cost two. He had six — maybe seven if the cycle was slightly delayed.
Six days in the blind spot.
He used them with the same systematic intensity he had used everything else.
Morning: cultivation. The blind spot allowed sustained integration that was impossible in open terrain. He ran the Pale Flame and Question Fist simultaneously for hours at a time, River Stone's transferred awareness guiding the precise calibration. The combination deepened — not in power but in resolution. The way a blurred image becomes clear without becoming larger.
Afternoon: River Stone's residue from the ruins cloth. He had been running low-level analysis on the cloth since he collected it. In the blind spot's quiet, with sustained integration possible, he could access the deeper layers.
She had spent years at those ruins working on one specific problem: how to ask the entity a question it couldn't refuse to engage with. Not forcibly. Genuinely. The difference between a question that demands an answer and a question that makes answering feel natural.
She had concluded: the question had to be something the entity itself wanted to answer. Not because the entity was cooperative. Because the entity was, in its own mechanical way, a function of the world examining itself. And the world, at a deep structural level, wanted to know what its own ceiling was protecting.
The question that would make the entity answer was the question the entity had been waiting for too.
He sat with that for three days.
Evening: practical work. Li Qing sparring — limited in the blind spot because full combat-level qi exchange would produce signatures that might bleed past the shadow's edge. They sparred at reduced intensity. The limitation made them both more precise, since power was unavailable as a tool.
Li Qing was developing something new. The forty-two plateau stones she'd read included a practitioner's documentation of a technique Li Qing had been independently working toward — a sustained qi reading ability that was different from the Pale Flame. Where the Pale Flame read internal architecture, this technique read intent. What an opponent would do next, based on their qi's organizational direction rather than their physical preparation.
"How far along is it?" he asked, after she demonstrated it on him during the fourth day's session.
"Inconsistent," she said. "I read you correctly twice and incorrectly once in that exchange."
"The incorrect read—"
"You were going to do something and then decided against it. The decision-change produced a qi-pattern change that looked like a different action."
He thought about that. "So the technique reads committed intent. Not considered intent."
"Yes." She looked at him. "Which means—"
"Against someone who makes fewer committed decisions and more rapid adaptations—"
"The technique becomes less reliable. Yes." She shook her head slightly. "I've been building something that works on most opponents and fails on the style that you use."
"Not fails," he said. "Requires a different application. If you're reading intent and the opponent doesn't commit—"
"Then I read the moment they begin to commit, which is earlier information than surface-reading gives."
He looked at her.
"You figured that out in thirty seconds," she said.
"It's your technique. You built the foundation. I just adjusted the framing."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "This is why you learn faster than everyone else."
"What is?"
"You don't treat incoming information as separate from what you already know. Everything connects to everything else. You're not learning new things — you're expanding an existing structure." She met his eyes. "Most people learn in isolated pieces. You build."
He had no response to that.
She had described something he did without thinking about it. He'd been doing it since Athens.
On the fifth day, Long Shen came.
He had not entered the blind spot with the group — he had stayed outside, at the depression's edge. He could not enter without triggering the same detection problems as before. His Pale Flame circulation, without the Question Fist, produced a slightly wrong signature for the blind spot's geometry.
He appeared at the rim on the fifth morning and waited.
Wen Dao climbed out to meet him.
Long Shen looked at him. "You're growing faster than I expected."
"The relay transfer helped."
"River Stone's awareness."
"Yes." He looked at the older man. "Why did you really follow us north?"
Long Shen was quiet for a moment.
"Because I destroyed what Shao Wei built," he said. "His sect. His life's work. I didn't intend to — I went into stasis to hide from the Zhao family, and while I was gone the sect fell." He looked at his hands. "When I emerged and found what had happened — found that Shao Wei had died, that his inheritance had passed to a stranger—" He paused. "I told myself I was protecting the legacy. But I was trying to correct a mistake I'd made."
"By taking back what he gave away."
"Yes." He met Wen Dao's eyes. "I was wrong. The Tiger confirmed it. And the relay opening confirmed it again."
"What do you want now?"
"To see it finished," Long Shen said. "Whatever Shao Wei was preparing for. I want to see it arrive." He paused. "I can't enter the blind spot. But I can watch the perimeter. If Xuan Bing moves—"
"You'll send warning."
"Yes."
He looked at Long Shen for a moment.
"Six hundred years ago," he said, "the original practitioner was destroyed before completing the path. River Stone got further — Soul Ascension — and then her time ran out naturally. The world has been waiting for someone to finish what Broken Dawn started."
"Yes," Long Shen said.
"And you want to see it."
"Yes."
He looked north. Then back.
"Watch the perimeter," he said. "If Xuan Bing moves — two pulses on the depression rim. I'll feel it."
Long Shen nodded.
He went back into the blind spot.
On the sixth day, he reached the edge of Level Seven.
Not a breakthrough. The approach to it. The density building in his dantian with the particular pressure that meant the next threshold was within reach. Given the integration depth he'd achieved in six days of sustained practice—
Days. Not weeks.
He looked at the sky above the depression.
Tomorrow they would need to move. The entity's cycle would restart. The blind spot would buy nothing against an active detection sweep — the natural qi-shadow worked against passive detection, not an active entity-level scan.
He spent the sixth night in continuous cultivation.
Not forcing the Level Seven breakthrough. Building toward it. The question from Broken Dawn's path was clearer in him now than it had ever been. He could feel it organizing itself in the combination's deep structure — the Pale Flame and the Question Fist pointing at the same direction from opposite sides.
The question was forming.
He didn't know what it was yet.
He would know when it was ready.
At dawn, Long Shen's two pulses on the depression rim reached him through the stone.
The Pale Flame sense confirmed.
Xuan Bing had arrived at the relay site.
Not the elder. The Dao Saint himself.
The perimeter had held for six days. It would not hold for a seventh.
He stood.
"Move," he said.