He placed one hand flat against the stone, and fire arrived — not with a cultivation technique, not with a talisman, not with any process that Jingwei's training could identify as belonging to any school or method she had studied. He simply put his hand down and fire appeared, a clean, steady flame that sat in a natural depression in the stone as if it had always intended to be there, casting warm orange light across the cave walls in long, moving shapes.
Jingwei stood near the cave mouth, one arm still across her chest, watching him.
"I can — my Plum Blossom inner heat technique can regulate my body temperature," she said. "I do not need —"
"Sit down," he said, not unkindly.
He had settled back from the fire and was now sitting with his legs apart and his elbows resting on his knees, his large body occupying its space with the complete absence of self-consciousness that she found, for reasons she could not comfortably examine, more disorienting than anything else about him.
