Ginjiro started without ceremony.

Soma arrived at the temple before full light — as instructed: bring food for a full day, come early. Ginjiro was already standing in the courtyard when he arrived, not waiting in the obvious sense, just present, the way he was always present in a space: occupying it without announcing himself.

He looked at Soma when he entered.

"Stand in the center."

Soma walked to the center of the courtyard and stood.

Ginjiro moved to the opposite side — about six steps away. Stood in the posture Soma had studied for weeks: relaxed on the surface, weight evenly distributed, ready beneath. Eyes not fixed on Soma's face but on the middle distance — chest level, peripheral vision fully open.

Soma mirrored it: same focal distance, same weight distribution, same peripheral awareness.

Ginjiro said: "You're evaluating me."

"Yes."

"Finished?"

"Not finished."

"You're never finished," Ginjiro said. Not a criticism. An observation. "That's the first thing. The person in front of you changes every second — how they distribute weight, where they look, how they breathe. Reading static is reading a corpse."

He paused.

"Second thing: you don't need to beat me today. You need to survive long enough to learn something."

Soma noted the framing. Not win — survive. Not long enough to succeed — long enough to learn.

"Third thing," Ginjiro said. "You're going to fall. A lot of times. The question isn't whether you fall — it's whether you fall correctly."

He looked down at the stone courtyard floor.

"Stone. Not paddy earth. Wrong landing on stone breaks things."

Soma looked at the stone floor — flat but hard, moss at the edges where drainage was slow, one section where two stones had shifted slightly and created an uneven surface.

"Falling correctly," he said. "You'll show me?"

"I'll push you and you'll figure it out," Ginjiro said. "That's faster than showing."

He walked toward Soma.

Not fast — normal walking pace — and placed one hand on Soma's right shoulder and pushed.

Not hard. But at the right angle.

Soma fell.

---

Not a slow fall — sudden unbalancing in a direction his body had not been braced for. The reflex to put a hand out — any person's instinct — and his right elbow hitting the stone first.

Pain. Not severe, but real. The stone did not negotiate.

He lay on his back and looked up at the pale morning sky visible through the broken roof section.

"Hand out to catch yourself," Ginjiro said from above him. "Wrist breaks most often at that movement in this kind of situation. You've seen the result. That's the lesson."

Soma sat up and looked at his elbow — scraped lightly, not bleeding significantly. Noted.

"The correct method?"

"When you feel the fall beginning, turn with it. Don't resist — commit to the direction. Shoulder contacts first, roll across the back, force distributed across the whole surface rather than absorbed at one point." Ginjiro looked at the stone. "On earth it's easy. On stone it's unpleasant but survivable. The learning is faster when it's unpleasant."

Soma stood up. "Again."

---

The morning consisted of seventeen falls.

Not seventeen identical falls — Ginjiro changed the angle, the force, the timing. A push from the side. A pull at the wrist. A foot hooked behind his ankle that sent him down differently than a straight push. Once — the ninth attempt — he simply shifted to one side at the last moment when Soma was mid-step, and Soma fell entirely because he had lost his spatial reference.

Soma analyzed each fall as it happened and after it happened.

First attempt: hand out, elbow contact. Wrong. Second: tried to turn, turned too late, shoulder glanced instead of rolling cleanly. Better than the first but incomplete. Third: better shoulder contact, started to roll, stopped mid-roll because his instinct said stop. Shoulder and hip both absorbed some force rather than distributing it through the full line. Fourth through seventh: variations on the same problem. The intellectual understanding of what was required was clear by the fourth attempt. The body was not executing the intellectual understanding at the speed the fall demanded. Eighth: the first one that didn't hurt significantly. Not perfect — but the shoulder contacted cleanly and the roll completed. Kenji noticed something: the difference was timing of the breath. Ninth: lost spatial reference, fell in an entirely unfamiliar direction. Pure reflex had taken over — and pure reflex put the hand out again. Pain returned. Tenth through fourteen: working on the spatial reference problem. The instinct that panicked when the body lost its orientation had to be overridden not by fighting it but by training it to a different response before the panic started. Fifteenth: the pattern held for the first time across a complete fall. Shoulder, roll, distribution, recovery. No significant pain. Sixteenth and seventeenth: inconsistent — fifteenth had been real, the other two varied.

When Ginjiro said rest after the seventeenth, Soma sat down in the courtyard and did not speak for a moment.

Ginjiro sat against the wall across from him — his right knee extended straight rather than bent. The knee that did not work correctly, that Soma had been careful not to look at directly.

"You noticed something at the eighth attempt," Ginjiro said.

"The breath timing. Exhale on the rotation."

"Yes." Ginjiro looked at the sky through the broken section of roof. "You told me you understood this already."

"I understood it for climbing. I hadn't applied it to falling."

"The same principle applies to everything the body does under physical stress. The people who were trained to teach me spent three months on breath alone before they allowed me to do anything else." He paused. "I thought there was a better way."

"And?"

"There is a better way for people who know why the breath matters." Ginjiro looked at him. "I'm trying that way on you. I don't know if it will work."

"The data is insufficient after one morning," Soma said.

For the second time, Ginjiro made the sound that was close to a laugh.

---

The afternoon Soma practiced alone in the courtyard.

No one pushing him — he created his own imbalance by starting from one foot, allowing the body to tip in a controlled direction, then committing to the fall and rolling through it. Deliberate, repetitive, no audience.

Ginjiro sat in the covered section of the temple and did not watch — or watched without appearing to, which Soma had come to understand was the same thing.

The stone was hard. The repetition was what it needed to be.

Around the middle of the afternoon, he stopped and sat in the center of the courtyard.

His body was genuinely tired now — the kind of tired that went deeper than the farming exhaustion he was used to. His nervous system and his muscles had both been working hard and they had both been working at things they were not accustomed to.

This was good tired, Kenji thought. The kind that meant something was changing.

Ginjiro came out of the covered section and sat near him — not instruction now, just presence.

"Who taught you?" Soma asked after a while. "The person who was trained to teach you."

"Someone who died long ago."

"The same way they taught you?"

"No." Ginjiro looked at the wall. "The same way I told you — I nearly died three times before I learned what I needed to learn. I thought there was a better way." He was quiet. "I didn't understand there was a better way until I saw how you climbed the tree. Without a teacher. Understanding why before learning how."

Soma sat with that.

"You're trying a different method with me than you were trained with."

"I'm trying the method that might work for someone who learns the way you learn." He stood up, slowly as always, the right knee compensating. "Go back before dark. Come back the day after tomorrow."

---

Soma descended the hillside in the late afternoon light.

His body catalogued the day's information without being directed to: three clean falls out of seventeen. Four with partial correctness. Ten failures of varying degrees. The shoulder technique was clearer now in the body than in the head, which was the direction he needed it to travel.

He thought about the day but not in the analyzing way.

Just walked down the hillside with all of it present and none of it being worked on actively.

When he came out of the trees and saw the farmland below, he noticed his hands were slightly shaking — not from cold, from the sustained physical demand of the day. He had not noticed during the practice. The body had been too occupied.

For the first time since waking up in the paddy bank with two sets of memories — for the first time since the beginning of all of this — Soma felt tired the way a person who had genuinely worked felt tired. Not the exhaustion of holding everything together alone. Just the physical fact of a body that had done real things.

Hiroshi was already inside when he came home.

Looking up, reading his face — the face-reading that Hiroshi did that Soma only now understood was its own kind of skill, developed over nine years of watching this child — then back to whatever he had been doing.

"Firewood?" Hiroshi asked.

"I'll go further next time."

Hiroshi nodded once. "Rice is on."

Soma sat down at the table.

His elbows hurt. His shoulders were sore in specific places. Three of his knuckles had scrapes from where he had not quite completed the roll on one of the worse falls.

The next day he would let his body absorb what had happened. The day after that: back to the temple.

Nothing more.

He ate his rice.