3. Borrowed Structure

The settlement thinned quickly once we left its outer structure behind.

Human gatherings were temporary by nature, no matter how much wood they nailed together or how loudly they claimed ownership of the soil. The density of bodies dropped first. Then the noise. Then the heavy, sticky web of assumptions that held their little society together. Beyond that, only paths remained: pressed earth, trampled grass, and the faint insistence that others had passed this way before and survived it.

Wei followed without asking where we were going.

That was new.

Earlier, his obedience had been reactive: fear choosing the path of least resistance. Now it was quieter. Less urgent. He walked because walking was the next step, not because stopping felt dangerous. His movement had changed, too. He no longer trudged like a beast of burden. He moved with a strange, gliding lightness, as if the gravity of this world had lost its grip on him.

Progress, of a sort.

We followed a path that curved away from the clustered buildings, moving deeper into the damp embrace of the forest. The air here was thicker, tasting of pine resin and the slow rot of fallen leaves. To my sense, it also tasted of friction, the buzzing static of a world constantly grinding against itself.

The forest gave way to a shallow basin carved into the land, its edges worn smooth by water and repeated use. Stone outcroppings ringed the clearing like broken teeth. At its centre, several figures moved through practised motions, their silhouettes rigid with repetition.

Training.

I slowed.

Wei did the same, instinctively matching my pace without conscious effort. His breath adjusted. His shoulders lowered a fraction. This place did not trigger his memory of punishment or hierarchy, only the muscle memory of effort.

We observed from the shadow of the tree line.

The cultivators, five of them, were young by mortal standards. Their bodies were lean, marked by strain rather than abundance. Each wore similar clothing, functional and unadorned, stained with sweat and soil. No insignia worth mentioning. No excess.

They moved in patterns.

One inhaled sharply, posture locking as his spine straightened. Another mirrored him half a beat later. A third lagged, his breath hitching before he forced it into rhythm. Their movements were not synchronised for beauty. They were synchronised for survival.

Interesting.

I narrowed my focus, peeling back the mundane layer of reality to see the energy beneath.

As they drew breath, the ambient pressure around them shifted, not dramatically, not visibly, but enough to register. Something was being pulled inward. Not summoned. Not created.

Taken.

The air resisted slightly, as a fabric stretched too often in the same direction. It flowed anyway, dragged into their lungs by sheer will.

Inside their bodies, the borrowed energy followed narrow paths, guided by structures that were not entirely native to their biology. I could see the train immediately. The channels flexed under load, reinforced by repetition rather than strength. Scar tissue masquerading as architecture.

Meridians, Wei would call them. I called them plumbing. And poor plumbing at that.

I had seen similar designs before. In dying worlds, where inhabitants discovered how to syphon from larger systems without understanding them. In collapsing dimensions, where survival required tapping ambient forces while pretending the source was infinite.

Borrowed structures.

They didn't generate power. They redirected it. And because redirection always incurred a loss, the entire system was built around mitigating leakage.

One of the cultivators faltered.

His breath came too fast, his shoulders tightening as the flow destabilised. The energy within him stuttered, slamming against the inner walls of his channels like water hammering in a pipe. It bled away in diffuse pulses, dissipating into the air as heat. He gritted his teeth, forcing the motion to continue, seemingly unaware that he was hurting himself.

Or perhaps he knew and simply didn't care.

The others didn't stop.

They adjusted instead, shifting their rhythm to compensate. The pattern absorbed his instability, distributing it so no single body bore the full cost.

Efficiency through collective strain.

Crude. Effective.

I compared it to Wei.

Inside him, the current remained sealed. It didn't respond to the ambient draw. It didn't leak without being asked. It sat heavy and dormant, like a foreign object the body had decided not to reject because rejection would be fatal.

He felt it now, watching them.

His awareness brushed the containment reflexively, like a tongue testing a loose tooth. His breathing slowed as his body attempted to mimic what it saw, holding habits resurfacing without instruction. He wanted to draw the breath. He wanted to join the rhythm.

I allowed it.

The sealed current didn't move.

Wei frowned faintly, confusion passing across his face before he suppressed it. He had been taught that effort produced response. That discipline yielded results.

Here, effort met silence.

Good.

The cultivators completed a cycle. Sweat dripped from their chins. One of them coughed, sharp and dry. Another pressed a palm to his abdomen, grimacing as the internal flow destabilised and then settled.

None of them looked surprised.

This was expected.

Cultivation, in this world, was not about ascent. It was about endurance. About teaching fragile bodies how to tolerate sustained theft from their environment without collapsing.

I watched their internal structures carefully.

The channels were not uniform. They varied by individual, shaped by early training, injury, and adaptation. No two were identical. And yet they were all constrained by the same limitation. The body had never been redesigned to hold what it was being forced to carry.

So the system compensated.

It taught mortals to survive leakage.

It normalised pain as progress. Instability as growth. Loss as proof of effort.

Clever.

Not in design, but in longevity.

A system like this could persist for millennia precisely because it never promised more than survival. Advancement was framed not as power gained, but as damage tolerated. Those who failed were labelled weak rather than misled.

I had seen worse systems. This one merely rationed access.

Wei shifted beside me.

His eyes tracked the cultivators, not with envy, but with something like disbelief. Recognition without belonging. His body remembered these movements, the burn in the lungs, and the strain along the spine.

But it didn't respond.

The absence unsettled him. He felt hollow, I suspected. He didn't yet understand that hollowness was simply the absence of a parasite.

"Observe," I said quietly.

He nodded, eyes fixed on the leader of the group.

I loosened the seal.

Not fully. Just enough.

The change was subtle. The containment didn't break; it flexed. A hairline adjustment, allowing the internal pressure to bleed outward in controlled increments. Not enough to empower. Enough to confuse.

Wei inhaled sharply.

The ambient energy brushed against him, testing. It didn't flow in cleanly. It hesitated, slipping along the surface of his containment before dispersing unevenly. His body reacted instinctively, attempting to guide it into familiar paths that no longer aligned.

He staggered, his foot crunching on dry leaves.

I steadied him without touching, reinforcing the seal before the instability could escalate. The current inside him settled again, heavier than before.

The cultivators paused.

One of them looked up, brow furrowing as his internal rhythm faltered. He glanced around the clearing, eyes scanning the tree line with mild irritation rather than alarm. The air in the basin had gone still, not windless, but suspended.

"Did you feel that?" he muttered, rubbing his arms.

Another shook his head, though he looked uneasy. "Probably wind. Or a beast moving nearby."

They resumed.

But their pattern had shifted. Fractionally. The collective rhythm adjusted, compensating for an anomaly they couldn't locate. Their movements became sharper and more defensive, as if the air itself had become untrustworthy.

Wei swallowed.

"What was that, Mistress?" he asked. "The air… it stopped."

"A demonstration," I replied. "You are a rock in their stream. You disrupted the flow simply by existing."

"I… I wasn't doing anything."

"Precisely," I said. "And yet the world flinched."

I withdrew the pressure completely.

His breathing steadied slowly, hands trembling as delayed sensation caught up. He didn't ask again.

We watched until the training session ended. The cultivators dispersed, some limping slightly, others pressing salves into their skin to soothe the burns of their own power. None of them looked satisfied. None looked surprised.

They had endured. That was enough.

As they left, I turned away.

Wei followed, quieter now.

The path curved along the basin's edge, leading back toward human habitation by a different route. As we walked, I adjusted the seal again, minutely this time, just enough that Wei's presence registered inconsistently.

Not absent. Indeterminate.

The effect was immediate, though subtle. The air around us didn't react uniformly. Pressure gradients shifted strangely. Insects avoided certain distances, then drifted closer again. Sound carried unevenly, as if the forest couldn't decide how far our footsteps should echo.

Wei frowned, looking down at his hands.

"I feel… wrong," he said. "Like I'm not entirely here."

"Accurate," I replied.

We passed another boundary, not marked by stone or symbol, but by behaviour. The path grew narrower. Foot traffic increased. The air grew heavier with expectation.

Wei hesitated.

I didn't slow down.

He followed.

The moment his foot crossed the threshold, something in the environment responded, not with force, not with alarm, but with uncertainty. The pressure around us fluctuated, as if the world itself had paused to reassess.

Then it continued.

Wei exhaled shakily.

"That didn't—" He stopped. "That didn't do anything."

"No," I agreed. "It did not."

Wei continued walking.

Behind us, the pressure normalised slowly, like a surface smoothing after disturbance. No pursuit followed. No reaction escalated.

The system had registered an inconsistency and elected not to resolve it.

Wise. For now.

Wei's internal state shifted again, fear giving way to something more dangerous.

Curiosity.

"Why, Mistress?" he asked.

"Because you no longer fit their assumptions," I said. "And systems built on assumptions struggle with exceptions."

He nodded, absorbing that without protest.

We reached the edge of another settlement, not this one's centre, but its outskirts. Storage sheds. Drying racks. The unimportant infrastructure that supported the visible hierarchy.

I stopped.

"This world does not create power," I said, looking back toward the basin. "It distributes tolerance."

Wei looked at me, his eyes wide in the gloom. "You mean… cultivation, Mistress?"

"I mean everything. The sects. The heavens. The breathing." I gestured to the empty air. "They take, and they suffer for it. They call the suffering 'growth'. It is a lie."

He considered that, then looked back where the cultivators had trained.

"They looked strong," he said quietly. "Stronger than I ever was."

"They looked accustomed," I corrected, my voice cold. "There is a difference between carrying a heavy load and being strong enough to crush it."

He didn't argue.

We moved on.

Behind us, the path settled. The air forgot our shape. The pressure equalised.

But somewhere deeper in the system, a discrepancy remained unresolved.

I felt it.

The world had noticed us. And it was beginning to ask questions it didn't yet have the language to answer.