Wei checked the neighboring ward before the next practice. He placed an independent sensor on its unused anchor and confirmed that the marker had not been connected to the observation room.
Yan practiced the minor Meridian-Rot sequence again under Qinghe’s guidance. Its ordinary reinforcement appeared as the harmful pathway turned within his own channels. The boundary sensor detected no transfer, and the neighboring anchor remained unchanged.
Gu asked the crew to test the equipment with a known pulse from a spirit stone. The boundary and neighboring sensors responded normally. They repeated the measurement during Yan’s practice, and the outside readings stayed flat.
“No change,” Deyan said. “The instruments are responding, but nothing outside the room is losing anything.”
Qinghe wrote that the evidence supported an internal reversal in the practitioner, with no observed extraction from nearby people. She did not claim this proved every unknown method harmless to others. The scope of the result was clear and testable.
Yan watched her write. “Does it change your view of me?”
Qinghe looked up from the report. “It changes the explanation. It doesn’t change my affection.”
She had trusted that he was not secretly feeding on people. The readings gave that trust something firmer than her own belief. She had stood beside him through long days of injury and rescue; she had not needed a sensor to decide who he was.
