The egg would hatch soon.
Wang Chen could feel it with the particular, direct quality of someone whose connection to the Garden of Eternity had developed into the specific, sensitive awareness of someone reading a space they have been inhabiting long enough to have learned its particular rhythms — the egg carrying the specific, imminent quality of something that has been building toward a threshold and has arrived at the particular, pressurized state immediately preceding the threshold's crossing. Fang Zhirou had been teaching it every day with the honest, patient quality of someone who has been given a responsibility and has taken the responsibility seriously in the specific, complete way that only certain people do.
Three disciples.
