Just pressed — flat palm, steady pressure, and the warmth that came through the fabric was not ordinary warmth, it was the specific, dense, cultivator's qi warmth of energy being transferred deliberately through skin and silk into the meridian network below.
She flinched.
The specific, full-body quality of a flinch that comes not from pain but from the body encountering something it was not expecting and responding before the mind could edit the response — and then the warmth spread, and she stopped flinching, and her breath caught.
"'—Oh—'"
The fractured meridians — the ones that cycled wrong, that caught and stumbled and reversed in the pattern she had been fighting for three months — received the external qi the way a locked door receives a key, the specific, click-and-give quality of resistance resolving.
One channel.
Then a second.
