She had appeared out of nowhere.
Wang Chen stared with the particular, honest confusion of someone whose spatial awareness had registered nothing and had then registered her — the transition between absent and present having occurred in the specific, instantaneous way of movement at that cultivation level, which was not movement in any sense that the word was ordinarily used but the particular, absolute quality of someone deciding to be somewhere and the somewhere simply containing them.
He looked at her face.
Rin Luan's eyes had the specific, surface quality of a still lake — the particular, calm that exists not as the absence of depth but as the presence of something so deep that the surface has stopped responding to it, the stillness having been earned through the particular, long duration of having felt everything there was to feel about a specific set of circumstances and having arrived, through that duration, at the particular, quiet place on the other side of feeling.
