The splint came off on the fourth day instead of the fifth.
The physician who'd wrapped Wei's wrist hadn't said anything when he came to check it. She'd just unwound the linen, pressed her thumb along the joint line, looked at the skin where the bruising had already gone yellow-green instead of the deep purple it should have been, and then looked at Wei for a long moment without speaking.
"Remarkable recovery," she finally said.
"Thank you," Wei said.
She wrote something in her notes. He didn't ask what.
He walked back to Kang's quarters with both hands free and told himself not to roll the wrist, not to test it, not to do anything that might draw another look from another physician. The wrist felt fine. He knew it was fine because he'd opened the Body tab that morning and the fracture indicator had dropped from amber to a pale yellow with a note that said healing ahead of projected timeline and left it at that. His ribs were a different matter. They were still cracked. The system flagged them every twelve hours with the same notation: stress fractures, left rib cage, monitor. He knew they should hurt. He knew, in an abstract way, that two cracked ribs were the kind of thing that made people wince when they breathed.
He just couldn't feel any of it.
That was the part he was still working on. Not faking pain, not exactly. More like remembering to account for it. The way a man with a wooden leg has to think about where he's stepping.
* * *
Kang was already in the courtyard when Wei arrived. It was early enough that the compound was mostly quiet, just the distant sound of the outer disciples doing their morning forms in the east wing and the smell of something frying from the kitchens two buildings over.
"You're late," Kang said.
"I was at the physician."
"She let you out?"
"She didn't stop me."
Kang looked at his wrist. "You took the splint off early."
"She took it off."
"Did she say it was healed?"
Wei thought about the look she'd given him. "She said it was a remarkable recovery."
Kang was quiet for a second. Then he picked up a short practice staff from the ground and tossed it at Wei. Wei caught it wrong, too high on the grip, and had to readjust. Kang didn't say anything about that either.
"Stance," Kang said. "Same as yesterday."
Wei settled into what he thought was the right position. Left foot forward, weight back, staff held at mid-length.
Kang walked around him twice. "Your left shoulder is up."
Wei dropped it.
"Your right knee is locked."
Wei bent it.
"You're leaning forward."
"Am I?"
"You're leaning forward like you're waiting for something to happen instead of being ready for it to happen. Those are different things."
Wei tried to fix it. He wasn't sure he succeeded. His body had spent seventeen years learning how to be small and still, how to take up as little space as possible, how to be the kind of person who stood in hallways and listened instead of the kind of person who stood in courtyards and fought. That kind of learning went deep. Two days of Kang correcting his stance had not yet reached it.
"Move," Kang said, and came at him.
Wei telegraphed everything. He knew he telegraphed it because Kang had told him, twice, that a good opponent could read his next move from his shoulders before his feet even started moving, and Wei had been trying to fix it and not fixing it. Kang slipped past his first swing without effort, got inside his guard, and shoved him. Wei stumbled. Caught himself. Turned.
"Again," Kang said.
They went for about forty minutes like that. Wei made mistakes in clusters. He'd correct one thing and let three others slip. He'd get his grip right and forget his footwork. He dropped the staff once, picked it up, and immediately took a hit to his forearm that he felt as pressure but not pain. The bruise would show up later. He'd check it on the tab.
The thing that was working, the only thing, was that he didn't stop.
Kang threw a strike that should have made Wei's whole body want to fold away from it. Wei didn't fold. He stepped into it wrong and ate the impact across his shoulder and then swung back before Kang had fully recovered, and it was a terrible swing, wide and slow, but Kang still had to move to avoid it.
"That was better," Kang said. He did not sound like he meant it as a compliment entirely.
Then he came in low and hit Wei in the ribs. Left side.
Wei didn't react. He felt the contact, the force of it, the push of air from his own lungs, and he stepped back and brought the staff around and that was all. No intake of breath. No pause. Nothing.
Kang lowered his staff.
"Stop," he said.
Wei stopped.
Kang was looking at him in the way he'd started looking at him in the last two days, like he was trying to figure out if he was seeing something normal and just didn't recognize it, or if he was seeing something that he should be more worried about than he currently was.
"Did that hurt?" Kang asked.
Wei thought about it. He thought about it the way you think about whether you locked a door, trying to remember whether the feeling was there and you just didn't register it, or whether it simply wasn't. "I don't know," he said. "Let me check."
He opened the Body tab.
**[Impact detected. Left rib cage. Cracked rib #2 stressed. No additional fracture. Minor tissue bruising.]**
"Apparently it should have," Wei said.
Kang set his staff down on the ground with a careful, deliberate kind of care, the way you set something down when what you actually want to do is throw it.
"Wei."
"I know."
"That's a cracked rib."
"Two, actually."
"I just hit you in two cracked ribs and you didn't even blink."
"I blinked," Wei said, which was true, he was pretty sure he'd blinked at some point during the exchange. "I just didn't flinch."
Kang sat down on the low wall at the edge of the courtyard and put his hands on his knees. He looked tired, and not from the training. "This isn't about fighting," he said. "Is it."
"It's about fighting."
"I mean it's not just about fighting. You're going to get yourself killed because you can't feel what's breaking." He said it flatly. Not dramatically. Like it was something he'd been working out for two days and had finally finished working out.
Wei didn't answer right away. The kitchen smell had changed, something sweet burning on a pan. He could hear the distant forms-practice winding down, the cadence of the instructor's count gone quiet.
He said, "I'll manage."
"You always say that."
"And I always have."
A beat. Kang looked at him.
"So far," Wei added.
The honest part. Kang knew it was honest, which was probably why he didn't push it further.
* * *
The servant who brought the midday food mentioned Elder Tao in passing, the way people mention things they think you already know. Something about the elder visiting the Patriarch's hall twice this morning, very early the first time, before most of the compound was awake. The servant said it like it was interesting gossip. Wei listened with his face doing nothing particular and ate his rice and noted it in the back of his head where he kept a running count of things that mattered.
Twice in one day. Before breakfast on the first visit.
Tao didn't move without reason. Nobody who'd survived Shen Clan politics long enough to become an elder moved without reason. Wei had been watching him for three years from the outside edge of clan events, which was the best place to watch anyone. From the outside edge you saw what people did when they weren't thinking about you.
The three junior disciples in the east corridor were thinking about him, though. He passed them going toward the baths and all three of them found something to look at that wasn't Wei. One studied the wall. One developed an interest in the courtyard gate. The third, a girl Wei half-recognized from one of the outer training divisions, turned around entirely and walked back the direction she'd come. Not fast enough to be obvious. Fast enough to be clear.
They'd been warned off him, or warned about him, which amounted to the same thing from the outside.
He finished his bath, changed, came back to Kang's quarters, and found the document.
It was folded and sealed with the clan's formal wax, the kind they used for legal notices and official correspondence, not for internal memos. His name was written on the outside in the careful, impersonal hand of a clerk who'd written the same kind of notice many times and felt nothing about it. The formal seal was pressed so hard into the wax that the edges were sharp. Whoever had approved this had approved it with some intention behind the stamp.
He broke the seal and read it.
The language was what it always was in official clan documents. Measured. Specific. Polite in the way that clan language is polite when the person writing it knows you have no recourse and wants to make sure you know it too. It informed him that in accordance with standard preparation protocol for the Patriarch Summit, all clan members scheduled to attend would be subject to a formal cultivation assessment, administered by the Elder Council, to be completed no fewer than four days prior to the Summit itself.
The assessment date was three days from now.
The notice was signed by Elder Shen Tao. Countersigned by two names Wei didn't recognize, which meant they were either outer elders or borrowed authority from a different branch, both of which were possible and neither of which was an accident.
His father's name was not on it.
Wei read it twice. Folded it. Set it on the table and looked at it for a while.
His father not signing could mean he didn't know. It could mean he'd been kept out of it, which would tell Wei one thing about the internal clan dynamics right now. Or it could mean he'd arranged the whole thing and wanted distance from it, which would tell Wei something different. There was no way to know from the paper itself. The paper was just paper. It only said what it was permitted to say.
What it was permitted to say was: we want to measure you.
The formal assessment used a grade-stone formation, a standard Dao tool. You channeled qi through the stone and the stone measured the output, ass