A few days passed, like Dian said they would, and the rib thing eased up.

The projection didn’t, but the rib thing did, which Xuan chose to be grateful for on principle. You took your wins where you could get them.

Three feet had become five, five had become eight, and at some point during the second week of projection training Xuan had sent a vibration clean across the room and it had hit the wall hard enough to leave a faint crack in the plaster, which he was pretty sure was an accident but was choosing not to clarify.

Dian had looked at the crack for a long moment.

Then he looked at Xuan.

"Again," he said.

So Xuan tried to do it again, and it fizzled out at six feet, which was the most embarrassing thing that had happened to him that week, and that week had included him walking into a doorframe because he was listening to something three rooms over and not paying attention to what was directly in front of him. That had been a low point.

The awareness thing was getting harder to manage, honestly. It had been charming at first, feeling the world around him in this new low way, useful even. But it had started bleeding into everything. He’d be eating and get distracted by someone’s conversation two buildings over.

He’d be trying to sleep and the ambient noise of the sect at night, which was quieter than daytime but not actually quiet, would just sit there in his awareness like an itch he couldn’t locate. Not loud. Just present. Constantly, persistently present.

He brought this up to Dian during one of the rare moments where Dian was not actively making things worse.

"The awareness is getting wider," Xuan said. "It’s a bit much."

Dian looked unsurprised. "You need to learn to narrow it. Think of it like vision. You can see everything in a room, but you are not actively looking at everything in a room. Pick a distance. Focus there. Let the rest exist without engaging it."

Xuan tried that during the next session and managed about forty percent of it, which was better than nothing. The rest of his awareness kept snagging on things it found interesting, which was annoying, but at least he understood now that it was a controllable thing and not just a permanent side effect of having Dian ring bells at him every morning.

Progress, he supposed.

The projection improved steadily after that, which surprised him a little because he’d expected to hit a plateau somewhere in the ten to fifteen feet range where it would just die and refuse to go further. But it didn’t. It kept extending, slowly, the way all of this kept slowly doing things. Eighteen feet on a good attempt. Twenty two on one occasion that felt less like skill and more like the universe briefly cooperating. He’d take it either way.

What he hadn’t managed yet was any kind of precision.

Getting it to arrive wasn’t the issue anymore. Getting it to arrive in a way that actually did something useful was a completely separate problem that Dian had started pointing out with increasing frequency.

"You’re projecting volume," Dian said, after Xuan had sent a vibration across the room that hit the wall and did nothing notable. "You want frequency. Volume is noise. Frequency is a key. They are not the same thing."

"How do I tell the difference," Xuan said.

"Feel the difference. When you gather it, what does it feel like."

Xuan gathered it. "Like pressure."

"That’s volume. You’re compressing. Stop compressing." Dian made a vague gesture that was supposed to be helpful and wasn’t. "Let it move the way it wants to move and then shape the movement. Don’t squeeze it into something. Guide it."

Xuan let it go and tried again and it felt marginally different, like the distinction between pushing a river and redirecting it, and the vibration that came out the other end hit the wall at a slightly different angle and the crack in the plaster extended by maybe an inch.

Both of them looked at it.

"Hm," Dian said.

"That’s frequency," Xuan said.

"That’s closer to frequency. There’s a difference." He walked over to the wall and looked at the crack up close, then turned around. "But yes. Closer."

Which was, from Dian, approximately the equivalent of a standing ovation. Xuan filed it away and didn’t make a big deal of it, mostly because making a big deal of things in front of Dian tended to invite a new and worse version of whatever you’d just succeeded at.

The days kept going. Bells in the morning, projection in the afternoon, the brief outside window in between where Xuan sat and practiced narrowing his awareness down to something manageable. He was getting better at that too.

He could pull it in close now, tight enough that the sect noise faded to a background hum, and then push it out wide again when he wanted to, which felt like finally being able to close a door that had been stuck open.

He was doing exactly that one evening, sitting outside with his eyes closed and his awareness pulled in close, when he noticed something.

Or rather, he noticed the absence of something.

Usually when Dian was nearby there was a particular quality to the air, a kind of deliberate stillness that he moved inside of, the way very controlled people moved. Xuan had gotten used to it without realizing he’d gotten used to it, the same way you got used to any constant presence.

But right now, extended his awareness out slowly the way Dian had told him to, like looking around a room without rushing, he couldn’t find it.

He opened his eyes.

The courtyard was empty. Which it sometimes was. That wasn’t unusual.

He pushed his awareness further, past the courtyard, past the nearest buildings, out toward the edges of where he could comfortably reach, which was further than it had been a week ago but still not very far in the grand scheme of things.

Nothing.

Dian was either somewhere beyond his range, which was likely, or somewhere that his awareness kept sliding off of, which was also possible and slightly more interesting as a thought.

He pulled his awareness back in and sat with that for a moment.

Then the door behind him opened, and Dian stepped out holding two cups of tea, and sat down like nothing was happening, because nothing was.

"You were looking for me," Dian said.

It wasn’t a question either. Xuan was starting to find that annoying.

"Couldn’t find you," Xuan replied.

Dian handed him one of the cups. "Good."

Xuan looked at him. "Good."

"Yes. Good." He drank his tea. "If you could find me that easily, that would mean I wasn’t paying attention. I’m always paying attention."

Xuan considered that. Then he considered the fact that Dian had, apparently, noticed him looking, from wherever he had been, and had said nothing about it until now. Just came out with tea like a normal person.

"So you felt me extending my awareness," Xuan said.

"I felt you trying to locate something. You have a particular quality when you’re searching versus when you’re just listening." He set his cup down. "You’ll learn to smooth that out eventually."

Another thing to learn. Of course.

They sat there for a while after that, and Xuan drank his tea and didn’t say much, and the sect did its evening thing around them, loud and indifferent and full of the kind of sound that had started feeling less like noise and more like information.

He still couldn’t find Dian when he tried again, quietly, with what he hoped was a smoother quality than before.

But a little closer wasn’t nothing, and Xuan had learned by now to treat small margins like they meant something, because in this particular area of his life they were all he was getting.

He finished his tea. Dian finished his. Neither of them said anything else, which had become its own kind of routine, the part of the day where they just existed in the same space without one of them actively trying to improve or destroy the other. Xuan had come to appreciate it in the way you appreciated things that weren’t painful.

Eventually Dian stood, collected both cups, and went inside without ceremony.

Xuan stayed out a little longer. The evening had gone fully dark by now, the kind of dark where the sect quieted down to maybe a third of its usual volume, and his awareness in that quiet felt cleaner somehow. Easier to read. Like the difference between trying to pick out a single instrument in a crowded room versus an empty one.

He pushed it out slowly, no urgency, no searching quality, just letting it drift the way Dian had described.

He found the cups being set down in the kitchen. Found footsteps moving down a corridor. Found, at the very edge of where his awareness thinned out and became unreliable, a stillness that might have been Dian or might have been nothing at all.

He couldn’t tell.

That was probably the point.