One Beat came easier now.
That should have comforted Minh.
It did not.
Before Hạ Yên's pills, the first breath always felt stolen. Minh had to drag air into his ribs, fight the panic, and force his body to obey while Gomboc hammered at the walls of his skull. Now the breath arrived cleanly. Too cleanly. Like a door opened before he touched it.
Lãnh Phong struck from the left. Minh breathed once, stepped inside, and stopped the wrist before impact.
Clean.
Too clean.
Lãnh Phong attacked again.
Minh moved before thought arrived. Shoulder loose. Breath smooth. Palm rising like it had been waiting under his skin for years.
The strike stopped against Lãnh Phong's forearm.
Then Minh's fingers went cold.
Not numb from fear.
Cold.
As if ice water had entered the bones.
Gomboc stirred.
"Something is touching us."
Minh stepped back, shaking his hand.
Lãnh Phong's eyes narrowed. "Again."
"My hand--"
"Again."
Minh obeyed.
The third exchange broke wrong. Heat surged from his chest while cold gathered in his fingertips. His breath became too smooth, sliding past control into something prepared.
He struck.
Lãnh Phong caught the palm and twisted him to the mat.
Minh hit hard.
The cold vanished.
Pain returned first. Then sound. The slap of his shoulder against the mat, the buzz of the old light above the ring, the pulse behind his teeth. Normal pain felt honest compared with that cold.
Lãnh Phong crouched beside him. "What did Hạ Yên give you?"
Minh looked up.
"Medicine."
"Try a better lie."
"Pills. After the last episodes. She said they stabilized the backlash."
Lãnh Phong's expression went quiet.
Minh hated that more than anger.
"What?"
"Stability has texture," Lãnh Phong said. "Yours feels polished."
"Is that bad?"
"Polished things show fingerprints."
Minh flexed his hand. The fingers moved, but the memory of the cold stayed between the bones.
"Can someone use that?"
Lãnh Phong did not answer quickly enough.
That was answer enough.
Minh sat up slowly.
Lãnh Phong picked up a training stick and tapped Minh's wrist. "Your body is answering faster because something taught it to accept flow. That does not mean you own the flow."
"Hạ Yên said I would have broken without them."
"She may be right."
That answer did not help.
Lãnh Phong stood.
"Artificial stability always has a price. We find the price before someone else collects it."
"And if the price is already inside me?"
Lãnh Phong looked down at him. "Then you learn the receipt."
It sounded almost like a joke. It was not one.
Outside the gym, a motorbike slowed, then continued down the street.
Lãnh Phong did not turn.
Minh did.
Too late.
Only the exhaust remained.
Hạ Yên carried the sample to a rented clinic room that had no sign outside and no patient files in its cabinets. She locked the door, covered the narrow window, and placed the residue beneath a portable lamp.
The powder separated badly in solution. Her original compound had been designed to dissolve at body temperature under controlled dosage. This version clumped, then released all at once. Whoever made it had removed the stabilizer because the stabilizer cost money and delayed the effect.
She wrote three figures on a receipt because receipts attracted less attention than laboratory paper. The first estimated the concentration. The second estimated how many doses could come from one production batch. The third was the number of damaged bodies required to refine it cheaply.
She crossed out the third figure until the paper tore.
Minh stood near the door, trying not to watch her hands. "Can it make someone stronger?"
"For a few minutes."
"And after?"
"The body pays without being told the price."
He looked at the torn receipt. "Like mine?"
Hạ Yên could have lied with technical language. Instead she placed his pulse chart beside the sample. The peaks shared the same ugly angle.
"Close enough that I am not letting you train alone."
Outside, a motorbike idled too long beneath the window. Hạ Yên switched off the lamp. Minh moved away from the door before she told him to. They listened until the engine left.
When she turned the light back on, one drop of solution had dried into a pale star on the glass. Hạ Yên photographed it, then crushed the slide inside a folded towel. The image went to an encrypted folder. The fragments went into separate bins three streets apart.
For the first time, Minh saw fear change her procedure instead of her expression.
The following morning, Hạ Yên returned to the clinic bins and found one fragment missing. The cleaning staff had emptied the wrong container ten minutes early.
She and Minh followed the waste trolley to the loading lane. A collector wearing municipal gloves was already separating the bag from ordinary trash. He ran when Minh called out. Minh chased for three steps, then saw the man throw the bag toward moving traffic.
He stopped to pull a cyclist away from it instead.
The collector escaped. The glass broke beneath a bus tire. Hạ Yên recovered only the towel and a smear of contaminated water from the curb.
"I lost him," Minh said.
"You chose the person who had not agreed to be part of this."
She sampled the water while it was still wet. The decision cost them a suspect and preserved the difference between their investigation and the people they were chasing.
Back in the rented room, Hạ Yên relabeled the recovered curb sample with the cyclist's interruption included in the chain of custody. The contamination weakened its laboratory value and strengthened its human history. She refused to erase either fact for a cleaner report.
Minh wrote the bus route on the same label. The collector had escaped, but movement through a real street had given the sample a place and time no laboratory code could replace. The torn towel kept one tire mark. Hạ Yên sealed that too, under the correct time.
The route now had a witness.