The first splint cost more than he expected.
Shen sat across from Fei Liling in the cracked house. Nira was beside him, within arm's reach, her fire energy running warm. Zhao Mingde and the assessment team observed from the doorway. Grandmother Chen stood behind her granddaughter, one hand on the girl's shoulder.
He opened the channel. The diagnostic thread connected. Fei Liling received the image — she was getting faster at accepting it, her spatial perception adapting to the framework with the speed that only children's minds could manage.
"Same fracture as yesterday," Shen said. "The smallest one. I'm going to reinforce it from outside. You'll feel pressure — that's me holding the crack closed. Don't fight it."
"I won't."
He reached for the fracture with his spiritual energy. Not the Remnant Eye — this was raw cultivation power, Sea Expansion reserves channeled through precise control. The Emperor's Art made the difference. A technique designed for energy density and fine manipulation, perfect for work that required threading power through a living soul without damaging the tissue around the target.
The fracture resisted. Not actively — passively, the way all damage resisted repair. The crack had existed for two years. It had settled. The soul had adapted around it, building compensatory structures the way a tree grows around a nail. Closing the crack meant pushing against the adaptation.
Shen pushed. Carefully. The energy wrapped around the fracture like a bandage, compressing the edges together. The leaked dimensional energy reduced. The corresponding tear outside — delta-seven, the small one near the eastern wall — began contracting.
"Holding," Deng Hao reported from the doorway. "Delta-seven contraction at eighteen percent. Twenty. Twenty-four."
The object memory hit.
*Yellow flowers. A garden. The old woman's hands in soil, digging around the root of a chrysanthemum that had survived the winter frost. The satisfaction of finding it alive — something she'd planted had endured.*
Not his memory. The child's recursion memories, bleeding through the spiritual contact. By touching Fei Liling's soul with his energy, he'd opened a direct channel for the old woman's life to flood into his perception.
The compound helped. The memory came through filtered, distant, like hearing a conversation in another room. But it was there. Constant. A running commentary of someone else's existence playing underneath his own consciousness while he tried to perform spiritual surgery on a child's fractured soul.
"Status?" Nira's voice. Close. Real. Warm.
"Functional. The memories are manageable." He held the splint. The fracture compressed further. "Locking the reinforcement now."
He crystallized the energy around the fracture. Turned the flowing bandage into a rigid splint — a structure of compressed spiritual energy that held the crack closed without requiring his continuous attention. The technique was improvised. He'd never done it before. But the principle was the same as formation work — converting active energy into a stable, self-sustaining structure.
The splint locked. He released his direct control. The fracture stayed closed.
"Delta-seven holding at thirty-one percent contraction," Deng Hao said. His voice had changed. The skepticism from two days ago was gone. "The reinforcement is stable. I'm reading a self-sustaining energy structure around the fracture."
One down. Thirteen to go. One daily charge spent.
Shen opened his eyes. The room came back — the cracked walls, the drifting tears, the girl across from him with her hands flat on the mat and her eyes wide.
"Did it work?" she asked.
"Look outside."
Grandmother Chen went to the door. Looked east. Came back. Her expression was complicated — hope and fear and the brittleness of someone who'd been through too much to trust easily.
"The shimmer by the wall," she said. "It's smaller."
Fei Liling's face transformed. The tired, old-eyed child was still there, but underneath — underneath was an eight-year-old who'd just seen evidence that the world could stop breaking.
"Can you do the others?" she asked.
"I can do three more today. Then I need to rest."
"Then do three more."
---
Three more fractures. Three more splints. Each one harder than the last.
The second fracture — a grief-crack from her mother's death, deep and raw — cost him memories of a woman dying in this same room, her daughter holding her hand, the smell of herbs that didn't work and the sound of breathing that was getting slower. Fei Liling flinched when Shen touched this fracture. Not from pain — from recognition. She could feel which crack it was.
"That's Mama's," she whispered.
The splint went in. The fracture held. The corresponding tear — a larger one, hanging above the house — contracted by twenty-six percent.
The third fracture was old. The recursion impact itself. The moment of rebirth, when the old woman's soul had bounced backward through time and landed in an unborn child. The deepest crack. The foundation of all the others.
Shen touched it and the garden came through at full volume.
*An entire life. Seventy-two years compressed into three seconds. Birth in a mountain village. Childhood. Marriage. Children. Grandchildren. The garden — always the garden, the constant thread, the chrysanthemums in every season. Hands that aged and thinned and spotted and never stopped planting. A cough that started at sixty-five. A decline that took seven years. The last morning, lying in bed, looking at the garden through the window, wanting to get up and tend the flowers, knowing she couldn't, the regret so sharp it—*
"Shen."
Nira's hand on his arm. Her fire cutting through the flood. The golden warmth of her spiritual energy wrapping around his consciousness like a rope thrown to a drowning man.
He came back. Three seconds. Three seconds of being a seventy-two-year-old woman who died wishing she could tend her chrysanthemums.
The splint was in. The fracture held. He hadn't lost concentration during the memory flood — the Sea Expansion cultivator's body had kept working while his mind was elsewhere. But the gap was frightening. Three seconds of complete absence. Three seconds when Nira's fire was the only thing separating him from being lost in someone else's death.
"Enough," Nira said. Not a suggestion. "No more today."
"One more—"
"Enough." The fire in her spiritual energy flared, warm and immovable. "Three splints is enough. You've been channeling for forty minutes. Your reserves are at sixty percent. The memory intrusions are getting worse with each fracture. We stop."
He stopped.
Four splints total. Four fractures held closed. Ten remaining. Four charges spent. He'd recover them overnight. Tomorrow, four more. Then three the day after. Then the last three.
The math worked. Barely.
---
Fei Liling walked him to the door. Small steps, careful, the oversized jacket dragging on the cracked floor. She stopped at the threshold and looked up at him.
"The memories you get from me," she said. "The old woman's memories. Do they hurt?"
"They're manageable."
"That's not what I asked."
Eight years old, and she'd spent her whole life listening to adults avoid answers.
"Some of them hurt," Shen said. "The garden is peaceful. The death isn't."
"I dream about the death every night. Her death. Lying in bed. Looking at the chrysanthemums through the window. Wanting to get up and knowing I can't." She paused. "I can't, because she couldn't. But I'm eight. I can get up. I just... forget which body I'm in."
Forgetting which body you're in. At eight.
"The splints will help," Shen said. "As the fractures close, the leak will slow. Fewer memories bleeding through. Quieter dreams."
"Promise?"
He knelt. Eye level again. "I don't promise things I can't control. But I'm going to work on this every day until we leave, and I'm going to teach you how to hold the images on your own, and I'm going to make sure someone keeps checking on you after we're gone."
"After you're gone." The tiredness returned. She'd heard variations of that from every adult who'd ever walked into her village and walked back out. "Everyone leaves."
"I'll leave. But the splints stay. And the people I send to check on you will stay longer than I can."
She studied him. A child evaluating an adult's reliability. She'd learned early that adults weren't always trustworthy.
"Okay," she said. Not belief. Not trust. Willingness.
Good enough for day two.
---
Evening. The compound doubled. Shen in his cot, staring at the ceiling, the archive full of yellow chrysanthemums and a dying woman's last morning.
Nira knocked. Entered. She had two cups of tea — mountain tea, local, strong enough to burn. She set one beside him and sat in the room's only chair.
"Report to Zhang sent through Nanfeng's relay. I detailed the passive memory absorption, the compound dosage adjustment, and the splinting technique." She sipped her tea. "His response will arrive in twelve hours."
"He'll say the dosage increase is insufficient."
"Probably. He'll recommend a modified formula that he can't manufacture from a continent away, followed by three paragraphs of concern disguised as clinical observation." She sipped again. "I've also updated the logistics talisman with the current schedule. Four more splints tomorrow. You'll need to rest between sessions. Two in the morning, two in the afternoon."
"Three and one. The morning sessions are more productive — the child's recursion energy is calmer after sleep."
"Three and one." She made a note on the clipboard she'd brought. "The child's name is Fei Liling."
"I know."
"You called her 'the child' three times in the briefing. You're distancing." She looked at him over the tea. "You distance when the emotional cost is higher than you expected."
He didn't answer immediately. She was right. Of course she was right. Nira's observational precision wasn't limited to logistics and schedules — she cataloged human behavior with the same thoroughness, and his behavior was a dataset she'd been building for months.
"The memories are harder than I anticipated," he said. "Not in volume — I've processed worse. The law crystal's memories were more overwhelming. But these are—"
"Ordinary."
"Yes. An ordinary woman's ordinary life. A garden. A daughter. A cough. There's no dramatic arc, no battle, no crisis. Just someone living and then dying and wishing she could have lived longer."
"And that's harder."
"That's harder." He drank the tea. Mountain strong. It burned going down. "The sword memories were violent but distant. A warrior's life. I can file that. This woman's chrysanthemums are... closer."
Nira set her cup down. "Do you need me to stay?"
Not about company. About anchoring. Her fire, his steadiness. Nira's presence as the warmth that pulled him back when the cold took him too far.
"No," he said. "I need to process. That's solo work."
"I'll be in the next room."
"I know."
She stood. Took her clipboard. Stopped at the door.
"Shen."
"Yeah."
"The girl — Fei Liling — she asked me something when you were talking to the faction leader. She asked if you always look this tired, or if it's because of her." Nira paused. "I told her you always look this tired. She said, 'Good. I'd hate to make it worse.'"
Eight years old. Already worrying about being a burden. Already trying to manage the adults' feelings along with her own shattered soul and the dead woman's garden.
"Tell her she's not making it worse," Shen said.
"Tell her yourself. Tomorrow. Three sessions in the morning." Nira left. Her fire lingered in the doorway for a moment, a warm residue that his perception held onto like hands around a cup.
He lay back. Closed his eyes. Filed the chrysanthemums. Filed the dying woman's wish. Ordinary sadness was harder to carry than the extraordinary kind — no resolution, no climax, no moment where the story turned. Just a life that ended and left behind a garden that someone else would have to tend.
The compound settled. The archive absorbed. The night moved on.
Tomorrow, three sessions in the morning. Four more splints. Ten fractures remaining.
The math worked. Barely.
