She pressed her lips together.
Her cultivation base was unsuppressed for three seconds—the Nascent Soul Late Stage output of a woman who had been hiding it since her grandmother had first told her, at age twelve, that her true stage was not information she distributed freely. The stone-cedar registered the pressure and stayed very still, the way trees stay still when something very large is near them.
She suppressed it again.
She looked east, then back toward the rune faces.
He was going to build something in those mountains. She had read the atmospheric formation energy—the Grade 4 token, the dormant seed, the three-practitioner array that the two women with him were clearly going to constitute. She had been in this mountain range for three days and she had read the site's potential the same way he had.
She had a different set of options than most people.
She looked at her hands.
"'Interesting man,'" she said. Very quietly.
The morning air moved.
"'Should I test him more?'"
