A bird alighted on a distant treetop. It stayed for less than half a breath before abruptly taking flight again, its wings beating in rapid flutters. Chen Wuya lightly ran a finger along the edge of his blunt blade, leaving no mark. He remained crouched beside the bluestone, his gaze resting on the wooden stake with a bronze bell hanging from it in the corner of the yard—the bell itself had not moved, yet he knew that the disturbance in the airflow just now had not been wind. Someone had been holding their breath and stopped in their tracks a hundred paces away.
Without looking up or rising, he set the knife back before his knees and pressed his palm to the ground. Misaligned Force seeped into the soil like fine sand, slowly advancing along the routes he had buried yesterday. Three zhang, seven zhang, twenty zhang... When it reached the streambank, he sensed a minute break—a current covered by dead leaves, with an underflow lurking beneath. There was a flat stone there, its back to the woods. No one should have been able to hide behind it, yet the soil beneath the stone was half a degree harder than the surrounding ground, the mark left by weight pressing on it for a long time.
That person held their breath with remarkable steadiness, exhaling once every three breaths, each breath tucked into the gaps between the pulses of the earth veins. If not for Misaligned Force's ability to sense the "intermittence of vital currents," they would have been almost impossible to catch. But in the end, they let slip a trace of a flaw: when their toe shifted slightly, it crushed a grain of sand. The sound was so faint it did not even startle the birds, but to Misaligned