Her body began to take it in.
Slow. A second breathing that did not use the lungs. The energy seeped rather than poured, finding paths so fine she would have called them imagination yesterday, thread-thin channels running under skin and along bone, not quite veins, not quite nerves. She could perceive them only as faint brightness in the dark behind her eyes, a diagram drawn in sensation. All of it drifted inward and down, obedient to a gravity the technique had named for her in advance.
Dantian.
The word arrived with the structure attached. A pool in the lower abdomen, not an organ she could point to on a chart, a basin that had been empty without her knowing emptiness was an option. The Qi gathered there the way water finds a low place. At first the pool was a suggestion: a warmth that was not warmth, a fullness that did not stretch the skin. She held her attention on it because the method said to hold, and because looking away felt like dropping a cup.
