Ten days.

Soma did not return to the forest for ten days.

Not from discouragement — from calculation. The person who had just agreed to speak with a stranger needed space to decide what that meeting had meant. Coming back too soon was pressure. Pressure closed doors.

Ten days was a number he chose without any formula to support it. He recognized that about himself and noted it: this was the kind of problem that had no equation.

He used the ten days.

Every morning: bridge, wall, terrain. Every afternoon: the walk through the village that had become his second form of practice — watching the movement of people, reading posture and rhythm, building the pattern library that Kenji had recognized was the real work underneath the physical training.

By the sixth day he could tell the difference between a farmer walking home tired and a farmer walking home worried about something specific, from the way they held their shoulders on the road.

By the eighth day he had started doing something he had not planned to do: he began watching his father.

Hiroshi moved through the world in a particular way — efficient in the mechanical tasks of farming, slower and more careful in anything that involved other people. He avoided the Fujiwara samurai's compound by a specific margin that never varied. He positioned himself at the communal well in a slot that was neither first nor last. He responded to questions from neighbors with a half-second delay that Soma recognized, now, as the pause of someone checking that their answer would not draw unwanted attention.

All of it was there. All of it had always been there.

Soma had just not had the tools to read it before.

---

On the eleventh day, he went back to the forest. In the afternoon.

Ginjiro was there — not in the same spot as before but at the edge of the cleared area near the fire pit, sitting on a fallen log and sharpening a small knife. He looked up when Soma came through the trees, looked back at the knife.

"You took time," Ginjiro said.

"I thought you might need it."

Ginjiro made a short sound that was not quite a laugh. Continued sharpening.

Soma came to the cleared area and stood in the center of the space — not sitting, not positioning himself against a wall. Just standing, in the open, where Ginjiro could see him from every angle. He had thought about this specifically: it was the least defensive posture. The posture of someone with nothing to hide about their intentions.

"I am not here to ask you to teach me," he said.

Ginjiro looked up.

"I am here because I want to show you something," Soma continued. "Not to impress you. To give you information so you can evaluate me more accurately than you currently can."

Ginjiro set the knife down on the log beside him. "Show me what."

Soma looked at the trees at the edge of the cleared area. Found the one he had been thinking about — a pine, rough bark, lowest branch at slightly above three meters. He had been calculating the climb for four days.

He walked to the base of the tree.

Stood there for a moment — not hesitating, just running the final check. Surface assessment: the bark was dry and rough, significantly more friction-consistent than the earthen wall. The lowest branch would provide a solid handhold. The branch above that was accessible from there.

He began climbing.

Not fast. Deliberately measured — each grip point tested with partial weight before committing, each transfer of load done in a continuous flow rather than a sharp shift. He had practiced this specific motion until it no longer required active direction from the conscious part of his mind.

He reached the first branch, sat on it, looked down at Ginjiro.

Then climbed to the second.

Then sat on it and looked out at the forest for a moment before climbing back down.

He came down more slowly than he had gone up — controlled descent required different attention than controlled ascent — and landed with feet together, weight absorbed through bent knees.

He turned to Ginjiro.

"Self-taught," Soma said. "Two months. No teacher, no reference texts, no model to copy other than observation. I identified the physical principles involved and trained toward them."

Ginjiro looked at him for a long moment without speaking.

"Your right shoulder," he said finally. "You're loading weight toward it when you climb. If that contact point gives, you'll rotate in an uncontrolled direction. I saw it from the first reach."

Soma filed the observation immediately. "How to correct it?"

"Balance the load. Both shoulders carry equal weight, don't let one shoulder lead." Ginjiro picked up the knife again. "That's a free observation. I haven't agreed to teach you anything."

"I know."

"Why did you do that?" Ginjiro asked. Not the climb — he was asking the thing beneath it.

"Because words are easy to say and hard to verify," Soma said. "What a person has actually built with their body and time is harder to fake."

Silence.

"Who taught you to think like that?"

"No one. I came with it."

Ginjiro sharpened for another moment. Then set the knife down again — this time differently, not beside him but in front of him, as if setting something down that he had been carrying.

"I haven't taken a student," he said. "I don't intend to."

"I understand."

"But there are things I know that I observed without being taught. If you ask something I know — I'll answer. Once. If the question is worth answering."

He picked up the knife again.

"Sit down," he said. "You're making the clearing uncomfortable to be in."

---

Soma sat.

They remained in the clearing for the rest of the afternoon — Ginjiro sharpening the knife, then mending a piece of clothing with rough thread, then doing nothing in particular. Soma sat across from him and said nothing.

The silence was not uncomfortable. Soma had learned enough about silence from watching his father to understand there were different kinds. This silence was the kind between two people who had not yet decided what they were to each other and were content to leave that question unanswered for now.

When the light began to angle toward evening, Ginjiro said: "The shoulder correction. Have you tried it yet?"

"Not yet. I was waiting until I was away from you so the attempt wouldn't be performing."

Another sound from Ginjiro that was close to a laugh. "Good. Perform for yourself, not for observers."

Soma stood up to leave.

"One question," he said. "You said if the question was worth answering."

Ginjiro looked up.

"What is the most important thing I cannot discover through observation alone — something that only exists in knowledge that has to be transmitted?"

Ginjiro was quiet for a long moment.

"Real contact," he said finally. "Not technique in isolation — what happens to the body when someone real is genuinely trying to harm you. Nothing you practice alone can prepare you for it. It has to be learned by being in it."

He paused.

"You already knew that," Ginjiro said. "That was on your list, wasn't it."

Soma said nothing.

"You asked me to confirm what you already suspected," Ginjiro continued. Not accusatory. Observational. "Because you needed to know if I understood things the same way before you considered what to do next."

"Yes."

Ginjiro looked at him for a long moment.

"Come back in three days," he said. "Bring food for a full day."

Soma walked back to the village in the late afternoon light and did not allow himself to feel anything that would compromise the accuracy of his assessment of what had just happened.

It was not an agreement to teach.

But it was not a refusal either.

In a world of closed doors, a door not yet closed was already something.

He walked home.