The barge-line thrummed like a living thing under his hands, swollen with river slime and old sweat, each twist of hemp ingrained with the curses and coughs of men who had pulled before him. Wei Lun set his teeth and stepped backward, one heel sliding on algae-slick stone before he found purchase, the strain running from his raw palms up through his wiry arms and into the tight knots of his shoulders.
The river answered with its own slow pull, cold weight dragging at the hull, current sucking greedily at the barge’s flanks. Every heartbeat was a contest: his narrow frame against the steady insistence of the Green Serpent.
Hemp fibers bit deeper. Warm blood slicked into old grooves cut there by years of the same motion. Overseers’ shouts cracked across the water blending with creaking timbers and the dull boom of poles striking riverbed. Wei Lun kept his eyes lowered, not out of habit alone; it was easier not to meet the tally-scribe’s gaze on the pavilion, easier not to see the jade tally of office glint at Mei Rong’s belt like a small, watching eye.
He shifted his grip, fingers locking over frayed rope, and let the rhythm of labor take him. Lean, haul, half-step, brace. The world narrowed to wet stone underfoot and the line sawing his flesh. Somewhere behind him, another slave coughed a ragged, phlegmy curse that ended in a weak laugh. It washed over Wei Lun without snagging. He had learned to be a gap in the noise, a space between blows.
Beneath the din, something else beat in time with his pulse. A quieter vibration tangled in the rope, a whisper-thread of cold that was not from water or morning air. When he pulled, it pulled. When he gritted his teeth and refused to give ground, it tightened beside his heart like a second, unseen hand on the line.
He did not look toward the river’s deeper channel where mists clung thicker, where pale shapes sometimes moved against the current when no boat passed. He did not need to. The familiar pressure gathered at the nape of his neck, a chill weight draping itself like a damp shawl over his shoulders. The hairs along his forearms lifted; under the grime, faint strokes of pale-blue script shivered and then sank back into his skin before any overseer could notice.
His next breath dragged in sand-dry, and for the space of that inhalation, the ford was not the ford. He tasted ink instead of river spray, heard the soft rasp of brush on paper under the splash of water. In his mind’s eye: a tall ledger, pages fanned open, filled with crisp black columns. A name. His? not his?: scored through with a vertical slash of red so thick it seemed wet. The ghost’s agitation scraped against his thoughts like a quill with a broken tip.
Then the memory snapped. The weight of the barge came crashing back into his muscles. Rope jumped in his grip as the current caught an exposed crate; the line burned a fresh stripe across his palm. Wei Lun hissed through his teeth but did not loosen his hold. An overseer’s bamboo rod whistled somewhere to his left, finding some other back, not his. Not this time.
He leaned into the next pull, jaw locked, letting the ache anchor him to the stones under his feet and the dull, ordinary cruelty of morning labor, and tried to ignore the way the cold presence at his shoulder watched the same barge, the same rope, with a clerk’s silent, mounting impatience.
Dawn’s first light licked the river in pale gold, but the world close around him was all gray breath and damp wool, the smell of wet hemp and unwashed bodies thick in his nose. The sky above the ford held a faint blush, yet down here between water and stone everything felt rubbed raw of color, reduced to smearings of ash and stagnant blue. His own exhale came out thin and white, a ribbon of cold that did not belong in this season, coiling briefly about his shaved head before the mist swallowed it like a tongue drawing in a secret.
The chill did not bite his skin so much as sink through it, seeping into the hollows of his collarbones, the hinges of his jaw. Gooseflesh fluttered along his arms beneath the rough hemp, the faint, buried strokes of script beneath his skin tightening as if braced for a command. For an instant, the air beside his cheek grew denser, weighted, as if someone leaned close to murmur a figure, a clause, a forgotten date. Breath brushed his ear, paper-dry, ink-stained, yet only the slap of water answered, indifferent and steady.
On either flank, chains of bodies leaned into their own ropes, shoulders knotting and un-knotting, spines arched like storm-bent reeds in a wind that never freshened. Bare soles groped for the familiar rise and dip of submerged stone, the riverbed’s blind map more intimate to them than straw mats or pallet-planks. The motion had long since worn itself into tendon and bone: lean, drag, brace, draw a ragged breath; lean, drag. The overseer’s counting cracked over them, a dry metronome, and their answering grunts fell in behind it until the sound resembled some crude machine grinding at the ford’s edge. Heads stayed down. No one risked a glance toward pavilion or shrine unless a shout and a shadow forced their chin up.
The river itself pressed against them, the barge a stubborn weight that wanted to slew sideways into the deeper channel where pale foam curled over hidden hollows and the water darkened to ink. Wei Lun felt that pull through the rope. A sly, sucking resistance that threatened to wrench his arms from their sockets, a hungry tilt toward some unseen drop. He shifted his stance, angling his hips to take the strain, shoulders rolling to bleed force into his spine instead of brittle elbow and wrist. Pebbles rolled treacherously under his toes; one more shift of stone and he would lose purchase entirely: then a snapped ankle, a fall, the quick, indifferent embrace of the Green Serpent’s throat closing over his shaved head without a ripple of concern.
Yet beneath the ache and burn, he could feel where the river balked and yielded, its muscle shivering around stones and old scars in the bed. Minute hesitations in the rope told of hidden shelves and scoured pits; the pattern thrummed through his frame like a muted zither-string. As the barge’s bow slid toward one such waiting hollow, he shifted his weight a hairsbreadth, letting the strain gather cleanly through spine and hips instead of brittle wrist and ankle, readying himself to ride, and if need be, to bend the pull rather than be dragged by it.
At the river’s lip, where chill spray dampened his lashes and the taste of silt clung to the back of his tongue, he let the line slacken by the barest hair. To any watching eye it was no more than a tired misstep, a slave’s grip faltering under morning strain. He hissed softly through his teeth and turned his left hand inward, fingers worrying at the angry rope-burn striped across his wrist.
Skin rasped against hemp and callus. Beneath that ordinary friction, unseen beneath the overseer’s bored gaze and the shrine’s blind stone eyes, three fingers brushed together in the crooked, off-beat rhythm Zhi had beaten into his knuckles with a willow switch, hook, press, sweep. The pattern fit into the pause between heartbeats, into the slack between one tug and the next: crooked because straight lines drew auditors, Zhi had said; off-beat because proper meter belonged to clerks and bells, not to hedge sorcery smuggled into a slave’s joints.
Hook: thumb and middle finger caught the ghost of a line in empty air, as if snagging a loose thread from the river’s own current.
Press: forefinger pinned that invisible filament against the hot pulse at the base of his palm, driving a pinprick of cold inward until it met the slow-circling chill that marked his unseen companion’s habitual orbit.
Sweep: the smallest twist of wrist and tendon dragged that coiled cold along the meridian etched in muscle and bone, tracing the curved arc Zhi had sketched in spilled wine and river-mud: a half-moon bracket to catch and cradle wayward flow.
Between skin and water, between gesture and breath, something old and faintly ink-scented stirred. The curve of a water-binding seal, not the crisp, vermilion-edged stamp of a registered scribe, but a smudged, remembered echo, unfolded along his inner arm in pale, flickering strokes. For an instant, blue-white script ghosted up under the welted skin, characters half-formed and quickly swallowed as he flexed his fist, burying the light in tendon and shadow.
To the overseer on the bank, he was only scratching at sweat and abrasion, shoulders still braced to the load. To the river, to whatever stray clerk-spirits still haunted its undercurrents, the motion rang as a muted invocation, a furtive note threaded into the Green Serpent’s endless song.
The Green Serpent shivered in answer, a long, low convulsion that ran up the rope into Wei Lun’s bones. For the span of a single breath, the river forgot how to be bright. Its jade surface dulled from rippled glass to brushed silk, light sinking as if a veil of old paper had been laid over the water. The lurking hollow ahead swelled and smoothed, its hungry swirl losing its tooth; what had been a dark, sucking eye folded in on itself like ink blotted by a careful scribe, edges feathering, center erased.
The pull on the hemp eased by a hair. No more, no less. Enough. The barge’s bow lifted with the change, just a handspan, just enough to rise and slide along the corrected flow instead of dipping into the hidden throat that waited to twist it sideways and roll men under. The line sang a different note in his grip, taut but no longer vicious, as if the Green Serpent, for this narrow instant, consented to be led rather than claim its due.
The men strung along the rope felt only the slackening bite. Shoulders that had been knotted to breaking loosened by a fraction; boots found purchase where, an instant before, slick stones had threatened to roll them under. A murmur went up. Someone behind him barked a rasping chuckle, breath sour with overnight millet. “Heh. See? Green Serpent remembers whose backs built its damn ford,” the man panted, spitting into the veiled water. “You drag enough seasons, even a river learns to behave.”
Another hauler snarled agreement, jerking his weight as if to prove the point, taking the change in current for a whim of nature or luck. None of them looked twice at Wei Lun’s hand.
The crack landed between old scars, raising fresh welt over faded purple. Sound followed a heartbeat after the strike. Wei Lun’s vision sparked white at the edges; the barge-rope blurred into one long vein between bank and hull. He swallowed copper, swallowed rage, let the pain anchor his focus instead of scatter it, shoulders bowing in practiced submission while every tendon screamed to turn and drown the hand that held the whip.
Fire in his back, ice in his veins: the blow drove heat through muscle, and with it the answering chill rose, uncoiling along his forearm where the sigils slept. Beneath frayed hemp, pale-blue strokes crawled like rime seeking a crack of light. He flexed, turned the motion into harder pull, bowed lower so sweat and blown mist veiled the almost-formed characters, forcing the strokes to smear and blur before they could align into a name, a clause, a summons: choking the script back into numb, harmless lines. Better his own flesh sting than let ghost or watching clerks taste that flicker of disobedience.
Up by the toll pavilion, Mei Rong stood beneath the red-lacquered gate like a carved idol of ink and silk, lips moving as his brush flicked and scratched: columns of cargo, headcounts of slaves, and the faint side-notes of ritual status all marching into place beneath his hand. He did not need to look up to sense who approached; years of ruling the ford had taught him to read the river’s rhythms as clearly as any ledger.
The murmur of the queue shifted when certain banners neared, when a household guard’s boots hit the planks with drilled cadence instead of peasant shuffle. Even the creak of a barge against the pilings changed timbre when weight and tribute were worth bowing to. Mei Rong heard all of it. He let the sounds pass through him, sorted, tagged, and stored. Four ox-carts of salt. Two ferries of conscripted labor. One silk-laden barge from upriver whose owner owed him three seasons of “adjusted” weights. His brush did not falter.
Ink beaded at the tip and leapt in precise strokes. Each character he wrote was a hook in the world: one tally for the earthly magistrate, another for the clan coffers, and a thinner, almost invisible curve that echoed in the unseen ledger of the River Registrar. When he added a small, almost careless dot beside a village name, some fisherman’s ritual obligation deepened by a bowl of rice and a stick of incense a month. No one would notice until a year of bad nets later, when they came crawling to his door.
A slave overseer shuffled up to the desk, bow already half-formed. Mei Rong did not grant him a full glance, only the fractional lift of his lids that counted bodies at a distance, lips twitching as he matched silhouettes to the morning’s projected numbers. No shortages. No surplus. No excuse for auditors, mortal or otherwise, to sniff.
He shifted his grip on the brush, feeling the faint answering prickle at his brow where the golden seal of office slept beneath skin and etiquette. The ford was quiet today in the ways that mattered. No unexpected banners, no petitions from temple councils, no rumors of inspectors come down from Yunzhou. Only the slow, grinding traffic of a river that believed itself accounted for.
He preferred it that way. Order. Predictability. Debts flowing where he directed, like channels cut through silt. Any ripple outside his script was an offense, not to the law, laws could be amended, but to the elegance of his arrangement.
On the desk before him lay, beneath the active scroll, a thinner booklet bound in dark thread. His private ledger. Names that did not appear on official rolls. Side agreements inked in a shade just off from regulation black, legible only to certain spirits and to his own practiced eye. A thumb’s breadth to the left of his hand, the bamboo tally of office rested like a dozing serpent, jade surface dull in the dawn light, hungry for its next invocation.
Wind from the river brought up a breath of cooler air, laced with wet stone and faint incense from the shrine. Along with it came a whisper of dissonance in the ford’s pulse: a stutter in the laborers’ grunt, a momentary slack in a barge-line, the distant crack of a whip delivered half a beat too late. Mei Rong’s brush tip hesitated the width of a hair.
A minor fluctuation, he told himself, forcing the next stroke into place. The river grew fidgety near the solstice; contracts stretched thin; lesser spirits bumped their heads against clauses they barely understood. Such noise only mattered if it aligned with ink. Until then, it was weather.
Still, he let one narrow eye slide toward the water, not enough to break his pose of bored authority. The mist clung a little thicker over the jade stones than it should have for this hour. Its edge curled in slow, deliberate eddies, as if tracing unseen script upon the current.
He marked a small, private notation in the corner of the page: no character, only a hooked line that meant, in his own system: Watch.
Farther down the queue, the Green Serpent parted around a warier hull. Han Yu’s vessel came on without hurry, oars dipping in perfect unison, each stroke a measured syllable in a language of discipline. At a low word from the captain the rhythm snapped shut; blades rose dripping, held poised above their reflections before sliding back into their rests with muffled clicks. The hull’s momentum bled away until the ship settled into a still, deliberate hover against the current, just shy of the pilings. Close enough to show they feared no inspection, far enough to prove they would not presume.
Along the rails, his crew shifted as one. Boots planted, shoulders squared, they formed two tight ranks flanking the gangplank. Oilcloth wraps veiled spearheads and the polished mouths of swivel-bows, but no amount of cloth could disguise the weight of tempered steel and seasoned hands. Their bearing said what no banner dared: imperial commission, bound by law but not by local whims.
Silence spread around the vessel in a shallow wave. Nearby bargemen eased their voices lower; even overseers glanced up, measuring uniforms, counting blades, weighing how much trouble this order of men might bring if crossed. The river itself seemed to hush, current flattening in wary deference around the ship’s shadow.
As the prow settled into its marked slot, ropes hissing through calloused hands, Han Yu permitted himself a hairline fracture in discipline. His gaze, meant to measure depth and current, slid past the toll pavilion’s red gate and the neat tyranny of Mei Rong’s desk, past shouting overseers and bickering merchants, to the lean back bowed over a swollen barge-line.
Wei Lun straightened under the weight, frost-tinged breath ragged. The rope cut across his chest like a judgment stroke. Some instinct made him glance up. For the span of a blink the ford narrowed to a corridor of water and mist between them (Wei Lun’s hollow stare sharpening with startled recognition, Han Yu’s jaw unclenching into something perilously close to regret) then shutters slammed down behind the captain’s eyes. He turned away, voice cracking like a whip as he barked fresh orders, cadence brisk and impersonal, scouring the softness from that stolen moment as the crew snapped to obey.
On the riverbank by the shrine, Zhi lay sprawled beside the incense brazier, straw hat tipped over his face, looking for all the world like a drunk sleeping off cheap wine and bad luck. His patched robe hitched with each soft snore; empty gourd flasks clinked at his hip. At that fleeting exchange of glances his hat twitched; one eye cracked open, quick and bright, pupils narrowing as he tracked the invisible line of tension stretching between slave and captain as surely as any binding spell scratched in cinnabar on yellow paper, counting heartbeats, weighing omens in the curl of mist.
Zhi’s smirk thinned. He rolled to his feet with a wince more habit than pain, joints popping like damp twigs in a fire, and shuffled to the brazier. With ink-stained nails he squared the sagging incense into precise triads. Smoke twisted, balky and reluctant. Under his breath he shaped syllables that slipped sideways from prayer into hex, a hedge of crooked words to keep lesser things from following that sudden, shining pull.
A line of pilgrims had already begun to snake past the River Registrar’s shrine, straw sandals scuffing damp stone, their breaths misting faintly in the chill. Copper coins and chipped spirit-tokens slipped from calloused fingers into the brass basin with soft, uncertain clinks, as if each giver half-expected the river to snatch the offering back.
They came in drab browns and washed-out blues, wool cloaks shining dark with fog, shoulders hunched not only against the cold. A farmer with reed-tough hands held out a knot of wilted rivergrass bound with red thread. Proper temple paper cost more than his eldest son’s winter shoes. He laid it on the cracked altar step and did not quite meet the carved eyes of the Registrar’s wooden effigy; his lips moved around the standard petition for clean currents and unbroken bridges, but the words stumbled, snagging on a recent memory of a neighbor’s barge gone down without warning.
Behind him, a pair of novice monks in thin gray robes argued in whispers over the correct phrasing of the ford-litany, one fingering a dog-eared sutra strip as if it were a shield. Their shaved heads steamed faintly in the cold. When the incense smoke blew sideways, against the wind, both fell abruptly silent, eyes flicking to the river and then away again.
At the end of the line, a mother nudged forward a boy clutching a clay fish-charm. He stared at the brass basin as though it were a mouth. “For your father,” she murmured, but the boy’s attention had snagged on the water just beyond the shrine, where the ford ran shallow and deceptively bright. For a heartbeat he saw (no, thought he saw) another child’s face looking up from beneath the surface, features blurred by the current, mouth shaping words lost in the rush. His grip loosened; the charm dropped with a hollow plink that sounded too loud, a note that made a nearby reed-sprite flinch invisible in its stalk.
The basin took the offerings, metal on metal, bone on brass, a stuttering counterpoint to the overseers’ shouted tallies. With each added weight the shallow pool at its base seemed to darken, reflecting less of the gray sky and more of something ink-dense and ledger-like, as though somewhere a spirit clerk were updating a column of names no pilgrim would ever see.
A veiled widow paused before the cracked lintel of the shrine, gloved fingers searching the warped name-plaque until they found the shallow grooves of the Registrar’s title. She traced each character twice, as if relearning it by touch, then bowed her head so low her veil brushed the wet stone. The words that slipped from her, petition, confession, something between, had the cadence of standard prayer but the weight of apology, as though she feared she was crossing on a dead man’s credit.
Around her, murmurings fluttered like nervous sparrows. A carter muttered that on last night’s watch he’d heard two sets of footsteps dogging his own, heel-for-heel in the lantern-glow though the path behind him lay bare. A fishmonger swore he’d seen a storm-lantern walk itself out along the river’s skin, flame bobbing steadily over water so still it held no ripple, no boat: only that solitary light pacing the current.
An old bargeman, beard gone to yellowed wisps, spat thickly toward the river and flicked his fingers in a rough warding sign. Even so, he pried a tarnished silver disk from his purse, a farewell coin meant for his own tongue, and let it fall into the basin, jaw clenched as though he were paying down an overdue debt.
Past them, at the pavilion’s main table, Mei Rong’s hand did not pause, but the faint tightening at the corner of his mouth traveled down the line of scribes like a silent reprimand. Conversation snapped back into column-headings and grain-weights. Still, unease clung as stubbornly as the damp to their cuffs.
Wei Lun, straining on a bowline not twenty paces away, felt the weight of those half-swallowed stories settle over the ford like another, colder mist. The ghost at his back drew nearer, curious, thinning his breath to a thread of frost. For an instant the clatter of abacuses and shouted cargo counts hollowed out, leaving only the river’s murmur, no, not murmur, a dry rustle, page against page, as if the water itself were busy turning leaves in some unseen register.
A junior scribe, trousers still dripping from his dawn wade to sound the depths, muttered that when he leaned over to read the depth-pole, the river had shown him his own barge laid out beneath the stones, cargo, lamp, even his crooked hat, save for one extra figure at the stern. It wore his face, eyes open, lips working soundlessly in water that did not bubble. The others jeered, shoving inkstones and jesting about rice wine before sunrise, but their laughter snapped too quick, too high. Brushes scratched harder down their columns, lines of black tightening, and each time the current hissed against the pilings like paper being turned, several hands twitched, as though expecting a red correction-mark to strike through their names.
At the main desk, Mei Rong’s brush moved with its usual precise economy until a breathless assistant, hair still beaded with river-mist, stammered about the ferryman who had not returned from last night’s late crossing. For the space of a heartbeat the tip of his brush hovered, a drop of ink swelling but not yet falling; the faint golden seal at his brow flickered, catching the edge of Wei Lun’s blurred awareness like a knife-glint beneath water. Then, with a slight tightening at the corner of his mouth, he turned to a narrow side register and inscribed the drowned man’s name in careful, elegant strokes, consigning it to a quieter column where such inconveniences were folded away behind neat margins and secondary seals, buried from both mortal gossip and the river’s official memory.
The ford bustled as always, market hawkers shouting over the creak of cart wheels, children weaving between baskets of dried fish and inkstones, but the noise sat oddly against the river’s steady hush, as if sound itself were being tallied and found wanting. Cries of “Fresh eel! Ink fit for magistrates!” broke and scattered in the damp air, never quite reaching the farther bank.
From the toll pavilion, Mei Rong’s clerks called out names and cargo weights, their tones flat with repetition. Each name seemed to strike some invisible surface and dull itself, as though the river refused to carry it away. From the slave lines came the soft grunt of straining bodies, rope-fibers squealing as barges inched against the current. Overseers’ lashes cracked now and then, not always landing on flesh but always close enough to make muscles flinch in anticipation. From the shrine drifted the sing-song mutter of a bored acolyte reciting the morning litany, the sacred syllables slurred, half-swallowed between yawns.
Yet beneath it all, Wei Lun heard the low, unbroken murmur of water over stone, a quiet counter-ledger to the human racket. The river’s voice did not rise or fall with shouted prices or curses; it ran on steadily, like a brush drawing the same long stroke across an endless scroll. Each eddy, each small slap of current against piling or hull, carried a different weight to his ear. Thin as silk, heavy as lead.
He shifted his grip on the barge-line, palms already raw, and let a thread of his qi run down through calloused soles into the slick stones. The contact sharpened that submerged sound. Under the surface rush he caught faint textures: the crisp tick of a tally-bead sliding, the soft thump of a seal being pressed, the dry whisper of pages turned somewhere far below. For a breath he could almost distinguish syllables, not in any spoken tongue but in the measured cadence of registration, as if the river were reciting an inventory that did not match the one shouted above it.
Around him, others only heard water. To Wei Lun, it was counting.
Prayer ribbons on the half-built bridge fluttered without wind, their faded script occasionally knitting itself into momentary phrases that unraveled the instant attention touched them: a cramped 「慎負債」 (mind the debt) here, a stark 「名闕」, name withheld, there, a crooked blessing that, halfway formed, twisted sideways into something closer to a reprimand. Once, a strip of mildew-stained silk snapped straight and showed three clear characters, 「歸簿否」, return to ledger?, before fraying into nonsense loops.
Each time Wei Lun’s gaze snagged on one of those accidental messages, the hairs on his arms rose beneath the rough hemp of his sleeves, and a cool pressure settled at the nape of his neck where the ghost liked to linger, as if its formless chin were resting there to read over his shoulder. The faint frost of his breath thickened, briefly visible even in the mild dawn. He tried, twice, to fix a phrase in memory, silently tracing the strokes along the inside of his forearm, but the characters in his mind smeared like wet ink dragged by an invisible sleeve, leaving only the queasy sense of having almost read something addressed not to the living at all.
He leaned harder into the barge-line, rope burning his palms anew, the fibers grinding grit into half-healed welts. The ghost’s nearness tightened, no longer a vague chill but a steady pressure along his spine, like an unseen hand bracing the other end of the cord from somewhere beneath the green surface, taking a portion of the weight. His breath clouded pale in the mild air.
Behind his lowered lids, images shuddered up, too clear to be dream: narrow desks in a cavernous hall under guttering oil-lamps; stacks of bamboo slips bound with red cord, their edges darkened by many thumbprints; a clerk’s seal pressed, again and again, into wax the color of dried blood. Ink-strokes rearranged themselves, turning cargo tallies into soul-counts. Voices argued in measured, unfamiliar registers about missing entries, unaccounted crossings, names that should have appeared but did not. Someone whispered 「此名何在」, where is this name?, and a page tore soundlessly in two.
Cold spray slapped his cheek. He staggered half a step, vision snapping back to wet stones, shouting overseers, the raw drag of the rope. His heart hammered far too fast for such ordinary toil, as if he had been running through that invisible hall instead of hauling wood and flesh.
Each time Wei Lun straightened from his work to catch his breath, the edge of the downstream mist shivered, and he glimpsed, just beyond clear sight, a rank of figures standing knee-deep in the shallows. Too still, too many, their outlines wavering like half-erased brushstrokes on damp paper. Some bore the rough suggestion of slave hemp, others the crooked angles of ferry poles across their shoulders, a few the faint glint of tally-slips clutched to indistinct chests, all of them turned toward the ford as if awaiting a summons that never came. The instant he tried to count them, one, two, three, their edges bled outward, lines running like ink under poured water, until nothing remained but a drift of ordinary river-fog, and he was left staring at an empty channel that somehow pressed against his skin with the muffled weight of a crowd holding its breath.
The iron tang thickened, threading down his throat like a draught of bad ink, until he could almost feel phantom brush-tips ticking against the back of his teeth. The barge-line thrummed again, once, twice, as if some invisible registrar had tapped “noted” against his calluses. He flexed his fingers, silently tracing a warding seal into his skin, and fixed his eyes on the next mooring post as though ordinary wood could anchor him to the living shore.
Wei Lun squinted up at the paling sky, breath threading white for an instant as the ghost brushed closer, then fading as the sunlight thinned the mist; around him, the river’s surface lay deceptively smooth, its jade stones glinting like neatly stacked coins at the bottom of a ledger. To ordinary eyes it was only shallow water over rounded rock, but his gaze caught the faint, crawling sheen of script in the reflections. A barge-man shouted for slack; the rope pulled at his shoulders like a line tied not to wood, but to some distant office that had written his life in cramped margins.
He shifted his grip, letting the current’s tug slide along his senses. Under the smooth skin of the ford, colder threads slid crosswise, sly as hidden clauses. He could feel them the way other men felt weather in their joints: underflows where a misstep would turn ankle-deep water into a sudden, plunging absence; quiet eddies that smelled of old offerings, rotten rice-wine and burnt paper; thin, knife-like streaks of chill where no natural current should be at all. There, the ghost favored him most, like a finger pointing.
His name, or the hole where his name should be, seemed to lie coiled in those places.
He dared a shallow inhalation through his teeth, letting the qi of the river brush the inside of his chest. Mist stirred at the edges of his vision, veiling the toll pavilion, smudging Mei Rong’s neat silhouette into a dark blur crowned with a faint, accusing glimmer of gold. For an instant, the tally-boards hanging from the eaves did not hold charcoal strokes but thin, pallid faces pressed flat as paper, eyes blind and waiting.
He blinked hard and the illusion broke; only wood and ink swayed in the damp breeze. Yet the sense of counting did not recede. Each droplet that struck his bare scalp, each grain of grit under his soles, slotted itself into some unseen column. Debits, credits. Souls moved, souls stalled. His own pulse ticked in his ears like an abacus bead flicked back and forth by an unseen clerk deliberating over whether to carry him to the next line or erase the entry entirely.
A low chuckle brushed his inner ear, not quite sound, not quite thought. It was the same almost-voice that haunted the edge of his sleep, dry as old paper, edged with a frustration that was not his. Not yet words, only the shape of them: imbalance, miscount, wrong. The hair on his arms rose. Pale-blue sigils peered briefly through the grime on his forearms, curling like frost-flowers under the skin before sinking again as he clenched his hands.
“Not now,” he breathed without moving his lips, pretending to lick sweat from them. The ford did not care whether he addressed river or ghost. Overhead, a heron flapped past, its shadow gliding over water and stone in a long, narrow stroke that, for the space of a heartbeat, aligned perfectly with his own stretched shadow. Two black lines crossing the ford like a single drawn character waiting for the brush to lift.
The shrine-bell tolled the mid-morning pattern, three slow notes, a pause, then two more, so familiar that Wei Lun could feel the rhythm in his bones; each strike sent a faint tremor through the ford’s qi, like a clerk’s brush tapping a scroll, marking yet another unremarked hour in a long chain of servitude. The sound rolled across the water and through the half-built bridge, setting prayer ribbons shivering and making the tax notices nailed to the pilings quiver as if in faint, indignant protest. Slaves straightened by habit at the third note, then hunched again when no overseer shouted for roll-call; merchants dipped perfunctory nods toward the shrine, more in fear of fines than reverence. Wei Lun felt the vibration in the ropes, in the stones under his cracked soles, in the thin air between his chest and skin: a measured, indifferent heartbeat that belonged not to any god, but to the bureaucracy itself. With each fading echo, the sense of being numbered, filed, and quietly set aside deepened, as if even the river were being kept in ledgers he would never see.
At the toll pavilion, overseers barked cargo lists while junior scribes slammed wet seals onto travel tallies, the crack of wood blocks and slap of paper punctuating each shouted name. Ink-fumes and sweat tangled in the damp air. Wei Lun, half-knee in the ford, watched from the edge of his vision as one stamped tally flashed faintly in his ghost-sight. A brief flare of pale chains looping from the parchment down into the jade-green shallows before vanishing. Han Yu’s sailors laughed softly as they coiled ropes and checked spearheads, their banter practiced and thin; each joke died a little whenever Mei Rong’s narrow gaze skimmed their vessel. Laughter would spill, then hitch, like a current snagging against a hidden stake.
By the riverside market, Zhi sprawled on an overturned crate, jabbing a chopstick at a fishmonger’s tubs and declaiming that only a fool would soak eels in “graveyard run-off” and expect them not to whisper at night. His mockery drew curses, a few strained chuckles, a tossed shrimp shell: but beneath the theatrical slouch his gaze kept flicking to the shrine, to the barely visible warp where hot incense smoke met the cooler river-air, as if measuring some invisible script written in the wavering line above the water.
He exhaled, a precise, ink-scented breath, and a faint gold glimmer kindled at his brow, so slight that only the more sensitive river-spirits flinched. Wei Lun, half-turned in the shallows, felt a pinprick tightening in his chest, as if someone had drawn a red line through his heart-name on an unseen register, then sanded the stroke smooth until it vanished.
Outside, heat shimmered over the jade‑colored shallows, turning the queue of barges into a wavering script against the horizon; boatmen shaded their eyes and pointed upstream, where a pale smudge of sail and the faint glint of gold teased the bend like an omen still choosing its words.
From the slave quay, Wei Lun could not see the banners themselves, only how the light on the far water had changed, thinner, sharper, like a knife drawn along the surface. His hands stayed locked around the warp‑stiff ferry rope, hemp burning his palms, but his gaze kept slipping to that bright smear between the reeds. Each time his eyes narrowed against the glare, a faint frost threaded his breath and vanished in the heat.
The ghost pressed close without shape, only a pressure at the back of his skull, a sourceless chill coiling down his spine. Snatches of not‑his memories stirred: inkstone grit between teeth, the rasp of a brush across silk, the weight of a jade tally in a hand that was not calloused like his. Above the river’s roar, a hundred mortal voices rose and fell: curses, prayers, bargaining calls. Beneath all that, something else moved, a low susurrus that tugged at his half‑trained senses.
On the far bank, the Mei clan’s red‑lacquered gate stood ajar, toll‑clerks craning for a better view while trying not to look as if they were. The little shrine to the River Registrar squatted in the glare, its brass gong untouched, incense sticks guttered low. Even the unseen clerks along the ford, that faint, ledger‑thin presence he sometimes felt at dusk, seemed to lean upriver, as if the whole layered bureaucracy, mortal and spirit, inhaled at once.
The rope jerked. An overseer barked for more pull. Wei Lun set his weight and hauled, muscles answering out of habit while his thoughts drifted toward the incoming flash of gold, and the unspoken question it carried: whose name would it read first.
On the slave quay, the rumor arrived as a hissed fragment, “audit barge”, passed from cracked lips to chapped ears while poles bit into river silt; backs straightened or bowed a fraction lower as overseers’ whips traced idle arcs, suddenly alert to any slackness that might be tallied against them. The word “audit” carried more weight than iron shackles. It smelled of ink and burning paper, of names being scraped thin and written over.
Wei Lun felt it run through the line like an invisible tug on the ferry rope. The men to his left stopped spitting at the water between heaves; to his right, an old chain‑gang veteran’s mutter died half‑formed, teeth closing on whatever curse he’d meant for the Mei clan. Even the river seemed to hitch: one moment pushing steady against their haul, the next sliding oddly smooth, as if eddies were holding their breath.
Whispers scraped the back of Wei Lun’s skull: not the ghost’s voice, but other slaves’ half‑remembered tales of inspectors who could read a man’s registry just by watching how the current parted around his ankles.
In the barracks, the murmur thickened into anxious speculation. Men hunched over their bowls, rice turning to paste on their tongues as talk crawled between them like a fever. Some swore such barges could weigh a man’s sins by the shadow he cast on water, how far it stretched, how the ripples bent around it, reading guilt the way clerks read columns of grain. Others muttered that names smudged in the ledgers would rise and blacken under celestial ink, old scratches glowing like fresh wounds, dragging whole families into invisible chains that tightened in their sleep. A few claimed that if the sub‑auditor found a line improperly cut, he could unmake it entirely, leaving only a blank where a bloodline had been.
By the time it seeped beneath the pavilion’s red‑lacquered eaves, the story had grown lacquered in its own gloss. Three banners, not one; tassels braided from condemned contracts; talisman‑lamps that burned without oil and cast no shadows; clerks whose brush‑tips never dried, scratching out destinies between heartbeats: until even the most jaded toll‑collector found his fingers slowing, abacus beads clicking out of rhythm as though afraid to miscount beneath an ink‑thin, watching gaze.
The courier from the upstream watchpost crashed through the pavilion curtains with river mud still wet on his calves, skidding to his knees hard enough to rattle stacked tallies and send a puff of old ink into the air. Head bowed to the floorboards, he gasped that the gold‑ink flags of inspection had turned toward the Jade Ford, their mirrored script already dragging pale grooves through the water’s skin, troubling the current long before any divine hull would scrape its stones.
At dawn’s second bell, when overseers rattled chains and read out names, a gap opened in the dredge‑gang’s litany.
The sound of iron on iron stuttered there, as if the air itself had forgotten a note. Men shifted on the frost‑damp ground, shackles clinking out of time. The whipman, a thick‑necked fellow with river leech scars mottling his calves, paused with his tally‑slate raised and his lips already shaping the next syllable. A crease cut between his brows.
He went back, barked the missing name once, twice, the sharp consonants thrown toward the fog like stones. The reed‑mist swallowed them whole. On the line, no one dared answer. Backs stiffened, heads dipped a fraction lower: as if each man feared the name might fasten to his own spine if it hung unclaimed.
Wei Lun heard it ring out and felt, with a tiny, treacherous lurch, that it did not land anywhere. No shuffle of bare feet, no embarrassed grunt as a late sleeper lurched from the latrines, no thin voice piping, “Here, overseer.” Just the slow, muddy pulse of the Green Serpent beyond the pilings.
The whipman repeated the name a final time, louder, forcing an official cadence into it, as though the sound itself might summon a body from the mist, drag flesh up out of water by the ears. His gaze swept the shackled faces, counting, measuring, weighing. Wei Lun kept his own eyes lowered, breath shallow, feeling the cold edge of unseen attention slide past like an oiled knife.
No one stepped forward. The river answered with a sluggish slap against the pilings, a dull, wet handclap.
“Lost to the work,” someone muttered under his breath, a prayer or a curse.
“Lost to the river,” the whipman corrected flatly, spitting into the packed dirt as if to stamp the phrase into record. The gobbet glistened darkly between their bare feet, a crude seal over an erased line. Above it, the whip’s leather tip twitched once, eager, then stilled as the slate scraped and moved on.
Wei Lun felt the absence like a pulled tooth: no thin cough edging his left ear, no rasping chuckle when an overseer’s back was turned, no muttered complaint about cold water gnawing at already‑cracked soles. The gap pressed against his ribs. On the rope line, where bodies should have run unbroken from iron ring to iron ring, there yawned an abruptly clean space, a handspan of slack hemp between two gray backs. Yesterday that span had been filled with narrow shoulders and bird‑boned wrists, veins standing out as the youth leaned all his weight into the drag, grinning between panting breaths when the current bucked and surged against them.
He saw, as if overlaid on the morning fog, the moment the boy had slipped only imagined it now, toes losing purchase on algae‑slick stone, eyes going wide, mouth opening not for a cry but to swallow river. The rope burned phantom‑hot across Wei Lun’s palms. Beside him, iron links shuddered once, then settled, lighter by a single heartbeat that would never answer roll call again.
“Lost to the river,” Mei Rong said, as if announcing a change in weather.
He did not glance toward the gap in the line, only angled his body a fraction so the pale light from the pavilion’s open side fell cleaner across his portable ledger. The fox‑hair brush in his fingers tapped once against the inkstone, then moved with neat, economical strokes. On the hanging labor slate, a clerk obediently followed, dragging a wet black line through the youth’s chalk mark, bisecting the ghost of his name.
To Wei Lun’s ears it was no pronouncement of fate, only the dry sound of subtraction. A column adjusted. A burden re‑allocated. One breath of ink, and a shivering body became a cleared space, a freed tally, nothing at all.
By midday, the empty pallet in the barracks had already been stripped, its lice‑ridden mat dragged away and shaken out over the midden as if filth, not absence, clung to it. A new shackled body was herded into the gap with a boot to the calf and a bored notch scratched onto a fresh wooden tag. No rites, no incense‑smear on the threshold, no cracked bowl of rice set aside for the unseen. Only a hoarse mutter from an older laborer, half prayer and half sneer, that the river kept poor accounts of its own dead, and that men like them did not even earn a place in its crooked ledgers.
Shouldering a crate of worm‑eaten scroll paper toward the pavilion, Wei Lun let his gaze drag once, sideways. Where the youth had stood at dawn roll call, the packed earth still held a darker damp, the shape of two narrow, splayed‑toed feet. As he watched, dust sifted down like ash, softening the outlines until other shackled heels scuffed through and ground even that faint print flat.
As Wei Lun neared the toll pavilion, the shrine’s courtyard seethed with a clumsy, panicked bustle that stank of incense and fear. Junior clerks dragged altar tables out from under cobwebbed eaves, unrolling brocade cloths still sharply creased from years of token festivals, the golden thread of river-dragon motifs kinked and dull with neglect. One stumbled, almost sending a porcelain libation cup shattering across the flagstones, and earned a hissed rebuke from a gray-robed scribe who kept one eye on the pavilion door.
Half-awake acolytes, hair askew and belts misfastened, staggered back and forth from the river with bronze basins brimming to the lip. Cold Green Serpent water sloshed over their bare feet, leaving dark prints on the stone. Each time they passed beneath the shrine eaves, the hanging bell-chimes gave a thin, discordant clatter, as if resenting the sudden summons. An overseer with a whip-loop at his belt lurked by the steps, shoving fat bundles of incense into their damp hands, his muttered curses lacquered over with stock phrases of piety.
“Walk steadier, you little dogs. Mind the sacred basins. Reverently, reverently. Do you want the Registrar to mark us for backlog penalties?” His tone rode the line between devotion and threat, every “blessing” sharpened by the thought of lashes.
Wei Lun shifted the crate of worm-eaten scroll paper higher against his bony shoulder and slowed without meaning to. The courtyard’s qi felt raw, scraped open: paper charms plastered along the shrine pillars had browned and curled during long disuse, and now fluttered weakly as acolytes brushed past, their faded vermilion characters catching at the corner of his spirit-sight like half-spoken complaints. The old stone stele before the doorway, carved with the River Registrar’s title, had been wiped in such haste that streaks of muddy water still clung in the chiseled grooves of its name.
Somewhere within the shadowed interior, a gong struck once, out of rhythm. The sound went through Wei Lun like a palm on the chest, a bureaucrat’s knock on a closed door. Behind his ribs, where the ghost sometimes coiled like cold smoke, something stirred, attentive, wary, as if the very word “audit,” carried on hurried whispers, had weight enough to press on the unseen.
Mei Rong stood at the hinge between shrine courtyard and toll hall, as if his body itself were a gate through which all petitions must pass. His dark-blue sleeves were knotted up past the wrists, exposing ink-splotched forearms; the refined courtly drape was gone, stripped down to a working scribe’s hard line. His voice cracked across the flagstones, clipped and exact, each command falling like a stamp on wet clay.
“Threefold offerings to the River Registrar. And the Yellow Tributary Below. Together.” He did not look at the altar as he spoke, only at the open ledgers. “No paltry festival set. Full measure. Copper, grain, lamp-oil. We pray for… auspicious alignment of ledgers.”
The phrase was pure gloss; fear lay underneath.
Acolytes scrambled to heap joss and folded paper silver before both spirit tablets, but Mei Rong’s attention snagged on a boy at the ink-stone. “Not that sludge. Grind anew. Slow. Until it shines.” He stepped in, long fingers testing the paste with a practiced scrape. “Glossy as lacquer, understand? No grain, no grit. The ink must flow clean, mask corrections, hold seals tight. The Registrar reads everything.”
Wei Lun’s path kinked without his consent. A junior clerk collided with him, shoved a sheaf of slim, bamboo‑bound registers against his chest, and barked, “There: assist!” before vanishing back into the smoke. The weight was almost nothing; the pressure, crushing. Ink chill bled through the bamboo slats into his palms.
They steered him to a low side table near the shrine wall, half in shadow. Mei Rong hunched over it, sleeves roped, jaw tight, his brush working in short, stabbing strokes that jabbed more than wrote. Fresh columns sprouted at the ragged edges of old margins, crowding the parchment like invasive reeds.
“Wei clan, collateral tenants… drowned in service, third month flood…” Mei Rong murmured, manufacturing kinships, rearranging cousin-branches, assigning death-dates that fell (precise, too precise) over gaps in last season’s work rosters. Each character landed with the deadly neatness of a verdict.
The strokes bled outward in hairline fractures, spidering through older ink as if trying to devour it. A few names he half‑recognized from whispered barracks gossip now bore tidy death‑marks they had not earned. The ghost in his chest recoiled; a cold pressure tightened around his throat, and in the far-off rush of the river he thought he heard a choked, clerical sob.
As he bore the ledgers toward the inner shelves, the chill in his grip climbed his arms like rising water. Pale-blue script flared beneath his skin, not the soft flicker of practice but jagged, broken lines that stung. The bamboo slips thrummed faintly, register spirits rustling like bristling reeds, a thin, sibilant warning that these fresh accounts were not merely patched, but poisoned, lethal to anyone written inside.
Outside, the Green Serpent’s surface lost its familiar, steady gleam; subtle seams of shadow ran crosswise against the main flow, as if two rivers were trying to occupy the same channel. The usual jade-green glaze dulled to layered glass, and under it something slower and darker moved askew. From the toll pavilion balcony, the overseers only frowned at the chop and shouted for tighter moorings. Down on the waterline, the slave boatmen went quiet.
They said the riverbed had shifted in the night. Poles that knew every stone by memory slid into nothing where solid footing should have been. Iron tips rang off sudden ridges, scraped over new shelves that had no right to exist, then dropped with a hollow gulp into troughs that had not been there yesterday. The men spat over their shoulders, fingers tightening on wet wood as if afraid the current might reach up and take the staff from them.
Wei Lun heard their mutters as frayed echoes, each complaint braided with the river’s own rasp beneath. “Bottom’s crawling… stones walking like crabs…” one hissed, knuckles white. Another cursed that his gauge-marks no longer matched the depth. It was more than silt drift, more than a season’s slow erosion; the contours felt… edited.
Twice, a ferry rope shuddered in rough hands. Hemp that had hauled thousands of safe crossings suddenly bucked, fibers creaking as if something under the ford had seized the line and given it a testing twist. The first time, the bow yawed a handspan out of its usual track, enough for passengers to cry out and clutch for the gunwales. The second, the rope snapped taut, vibrating with a low note that hummed through Wei Lun’s teeth.
Mist lifted from those troubled seams in thin, vertical veils, grey threads climbing against the breeze, then smearing sideways as if smudged by a giant thumb. In their wavering thickness, he saw faint, wrong reflections: pilings where none stood, a toll gate half-sunk, ledger scrolls unspooling into black water. Lines of pale-blue script crawled at the edges of his vision, mirroring the river’s cross‑hatched currents, and the ghost pressed close enough that his breath frosted in the heat.
The ford, which should have been a single, obedient crossing, now felt like overlapping drafts of the same document. The old channel and some invisible revision misaligned. Every pole-thrust, every rope-twitch, every stutter in the water’s skin whispered the same thing to the part of Wei Lun that had learned to read between strokes: someone, somewhere, was rewriting the river.
In the half-built span upstream, a dull creaking rose to a strained, tooth‑grinding whine as misaligned force pressed against the pilings. Joints that had settled through months of sun and rain suddenly protested like bones wrenched from their sockets. The half‑set mortar around the stone footings fissured in hairline bursts, thin white veins spreading through damp grey. Wei Lun felt the vibration shudder through the planks beneath his feet, a brittle, splintering note that set his molars on edge.
Water struck the wooden posts from conflicting directions, not in the clean, single push of a proper current but in staggered blows, as if two invisible tides argued over which way the bridge should fall. Each impact sent up fans of spray that glittered with faint, errant glyphs before vanishing: broken radicals, orphaned hooks and dots that refused to settle into meaning. In those brief arcs, Wei Lun glimpsed crooked strokes of script scattering back into the stream, where darker lines waited beneath, rewriting the stresses that held wood, stone, and water in their uneasy truce.
Along the moored barges, lanterns that should have swung gently with the night breeze began to sway out of rhythm, tugged by a draft that flowed from river to shore instead of from sky to water. Their paper skins puckered inward as if something beneath the planks were inhaling. A few snapped their cords and drifted low, hovering just above the slick boards, their flames bending flat toward the ford.
Then, one by one, cold lights blinked awake upon the current itself: pinpricks of bluish fire drifting upriver, sliding between hulls and pilings without raising so much as a ripple, their reflections lagging half a heartbeat behind as if the underworld’s surface were out of step with the mortal one, a second river trying to overtake the first.
As the ghost‑lights threaded between stacked cargo and slack coils of rope, sound bled into the hush. Quills rasping on paper, seals snapping wetly against ink, the soft clack of abacus beads tallied by hands that had no flesh. The voices that followed came layered and out of joint: some high and nasal like junior clerks drilling ordinances from memory, others hollow and waterlogged, each word trailing a faint burble as if spoken through a full mouth of river. They murmured clauses, counter‑clauses, exception lines and penalty rates, tones flat as ledgers yet edged with a hunger that made even the shrine’s stone hounds lift their carved muzzles and bare grainy teeth toward the darkened ford, as if scenting an audit meant for bone rather than for ink.
By the time the moon reached its height, the ford felt less like a crossing and more like a drowned chancery, a submerged hall whose roof of water sagged under invisible ledgers. The air thickened with a dry, papery chill that did not belong to mist. From the direction of the minor underworld gate came the sense, not of a single ghost passing on some vagrant errand, but of ranks taking their places in ordered silence, as if benches and desks slid into formation just beyond mortal sight. Each pale flame on the river steadied, no longer wandering; they aligned by unseen measure, rows of cold lanterns at unseen clerks’ stations, their reflections forming a second colonnade below. Somewhere beneath that double-lit surface, seals were being laid out, brushes lifted, as a hidden tribunal drew into alignment with the drifting, crooked current and the shuddering beams of the half-built bridge.
Wei Lun surfaced into wakefulness as if torn from the river itself, lungs burning, fingers clawing at the empty air where ink‑thick water and clutching bone had been an instant ago. For a heartbeat he was sure his nails would rake silt or slick cartilage; instead they closed on nothing, the feeble resistance of stale air and hanging dust. The stifling dark of the slave barracks pressed in from all sides, low rafters sweating pitch above, the reek of damp straw, old smoke, and unwashed bodies seeping into his skin, anchoring him by degrees even as his heart hammered against his ribs like a netted fish.
He lay half‑curled on his rush mat, chest heaving, ears straining for the splash that should follow drowning. None came. Only the rasp of someone’s phlegmy snore, the soft scurry of a rat along the wall, the distant creak of a rope‑ferry shifting on the black water outside. Yet beneath those mortal sounds another layer lingered from the dream, or not‑dream, the dry whisper of pages turning in deep current, the muffled snap of seals closing over his name.
His hands still trembled in front of his face. Narrow, callused palms, scarred knuckles: his own. No slime, no algae‑threads, no black ink leaking from the whorls of his fingers. He flexed them slowly, forcing them to uncurl, feeling how the tendons jumped like bowstrings ready to fray. In the dark, the old slave brands on his forearms prickled, then burned cold.
He did not yet dare to move more than that. The barracks felt wrong, as if the walls had shifted half a finger’s width while he slept, as if the floorboards had swollen with river until each plank was a ledger board waiting for an entry.
Sweat had soaked through his rough hemp tunic, and now the night breeze turned it to a clammy sheath that clung to his ribs and spine, as if the river itself had left a film on him when it receded. Each breath scraped shallow and uneven up his throat, tasting of ash and old incense, and a faint thread of steam unraveled from his lips into the barracks’ gloom despite the lingering summer heat. His lungs worked like bellows already filled with smoke; no matter how he dragged at the air, it seemed thin, used, pre‑counted.
On the neighboring mats men twitched and rolled, muttering curses or half‑formed pleas, but none jolted awake as he had. A few reached up, scratching absently at their branded arms, then sank back into the heavy, drugged cadence of exhausted sleep. The dread knotting under his sternum felt too sharp, too focused to be simple nightmare afterscent. It had an edge like a seal‑knife. The sensation ran down his spine in stroke after stroke, as though an invisible stylus were incising a single, private line of ordinance into the marrow of his bones.
The nearness of it was a pressure against his skin, as if the space between his body and the barracks wall had been filled with packed snow. Breath that was not breath feathered along his cheek, a rim of numbness following where no flesh touched. The familiar, maddening susurrus that had haunted the edges of his hearing for years, broken phrases, drowned accounts, the rustle of unseen sleeves, suddenly drew tight, braided into a single strand of intention.
“The audit will not weigh him alone. They will weigh you.”
Each word seemed inked directly along his nerves, deliberate and unhurried, as if copied from a higher register. The sound was not loud, yet it cut cleanly through the barracks’ dark like a knife through wet paper.
The sentence struck with the flat, impersonal finality of a red stamp on warm wax; his back arched, every vertebra locking as that unseen seal impressed itself along his spine. Reflex clawed for excuses, bad millet, swamp‑fog, Zhi’s sour mash, some overseer’s curse, but the litany sounded thin even within his own skull, paper amulets held up against a flood. The words did not fade. They hummed inside his ribs, a taut string pinned at both ends to an unseen ledger, vibrating with a judgment not yet spoken but already entered.
Around his pallet, the dark grew edged and angular; hair‑fine strokes of pale‑blue characters shimmered across the packed earth and smoke‑black beams, half‑formed, then erased, as if unseen clerks tested drafts in the air and discarded them. The barracks timbers creaked once, twice, in slow antiphony, and through that hollow answering beat he felt the ford itself take notice. A vast, ledger‑bound regard turning page by ponderous page. It did not stop at Mei Rong’s crooked accounts. It probed the blurred gaps where his own name should have stood, the inkless hollows in ancestral rolls, every uncounted drowning and unpaid tithe braided into the river’s memory. Each missing stroke tugged at his marrow as if the water meant to write him in again, this time as debtor.
The sound did not so much pass through the barracks as drive a nail through it. It hit the warped rafters, the sweat‑stiffened pallets, the stacked bodies of sleeping men and women, then found the narrow space of Wei Lun’s chest and struck there, precise as a clerk’s seal.
For a lurching, airless heartbeat he hung between two suffocations.
In one, his lungs were full of river: cold, viscous, crowding his throat with silt and the shredded ends of prayer‑ribbons. Ink‑dark hands (jointless, boneless, more brushstroke than flesh) had just folded around his ribs and closed, the cage of his chest snapping inward with the crisp, obscene ease of kindling under a boot.
In the other, he lay rigid on the pallet, hemp blanket prickling his skin, the barracks’ rancid heat crushed low and heavy on his sternum. Yet the echo of breaking bone persisted, sharp as if it had really happened, phantom splinters grinding with each shallow drag of breath.
He could not tell which was dream and which was waking.
The barracks’ stale air tasted wrong: too clean, like melted snow running beneath slag. Each inhale rasped cool along his tongue, frosting the back of his teeth; each exhale bloomed white in the dark, a faint cloud that did not disperse so much as smudge, like disturbed lamp‑smoke in front of a hidden script.
The ghost’s nearness pressed around him, closing off directions. Not above, not below, not in any one corner of the hut. It was as if the old haunting had slipped from its usual place at the edge of his perception and settled fully into the narrow gap between his heartbeat and the world.
Sound changed there. The snoring, the distant slap of water against pilings, the cough of a fellow slave: they all flattened, pushed back behind the steady, resonant toll that still vibrated through his bones. It was not loud. It did not need to be. Like the tap of a brush handle against an inkstone, it fixed his attention with small, absolute authority.
His fingers spasmed before he realized they had moved, curling into the rough mat until straw stabbed under his nails. Something in his training answered reflexively: on an intake of breath he tried to sink his awareness toward his dantian, to steady the wild scatter of his qi. The effort met resistance, as if thin cords of cold had knotted through his meridians, tugged taut by a hand not his own.
The dream’s river clung. He could still feel it sluicing through the hollows between his bones, pooling in the spaces where his name should have been written in some ancestor’s book. Every place the ink‑hands had touched throbbed with numb heat, a paradox that left him light‑headed, unsure whether he was burning or freezing from the inside.
A shift of weight on the pallet above him, someone’s bare foot scraping wood, the soft mutter of a half‑formed curse. None of it broke the suspended quality of the moment. It was like standing on the ford at low water, when the surface lay glass‑still yet he could sense, with the soles of his feet, two contrary currents ramming against one another beneath.
If he moved, he thought dimly, he might choose the wrong river. Waking could be the real drowning. Sleep could be the narrow spit of mud between floods.
He held himself there, muscles trembling with the effort of not flinching, not turning his head toward the source of the cold. The ghost did not speak again. It did not need to. Its single utterance still hung in the close, smoky air: no longer a voice, but a condition, like gravity or the drag of water on a weighted body.
On the edge of hearing, somewhere beyond the barracks wall, the Green Serpent muttered against its stones, a low, rearranging sound. The ford, and something far above it, had already heard.
Then the night itself seemed to flinch. The barracks’ close blackness tightened, a held breath inside a greater, colder inhale. Beyond the narrow slit of the window, across the sheen of moon‑struck water, something convulsed on the opposite bank.
The half‑built piling (an uneven skeleton of timber and rope thrust out into the ford) gave a single, full‑body shudder. Wei Lun did not see it so much as feel it through the packed earth beneath his pallet: a dull, grinding protest that ran up through his vertebrae and clicked against the phantom memory of ribs folding under ink‑hands.
Out on the river, wrapped charms snapped awake, paper and cheap silk whipping in a wind he could not feel on his skin. For a few heartbeats they fluttered in frantic, shredded banners, tugged in three directions at once by water, air, and something invisible that had finally reached the end of its patience.
The timber frame buckled. Joints tore. With a slow, teeth‑set groan that broke, suddenly, into a sharp, splintering crack, the whole structure wrenched free of its moorings and pitched sideways into the moonlit current.
The river took the wreckage without ceremony. Splintered beams vanished beneath the sudden boil of displaced water, leaving only a churn of pale froth and black, sucking gaps where the piling had been. Coils of prayer‑ribbons and lacquered tally‑charms tore loose from their nails and knots, lifted a moment in the air like panicked, fluttering snakes, then whipped down after the falling wood. As they struck the surface, the ford’s thin moonlight went strange. Every pressed seal and brush‑stroked sigil along their length flared up in a lurid, unhealthy blue, lines of script writhing as if they briefly remembered whose names they had bound. Then, one by one, the lights pinched out, smothered, as if a clerk’s brush had slashed a cancelling stroke through them in the deep.
A cold weight cinched around Wei Lun’s lungs as the ghost’s nearness pressed tight to his skin. Not words this time, but the dry, hollow sensation of a page being turned somewhere far below the ford. Columns unfolded there in the dark, ledger‑lines stretching down like submerged pilings, a blank slot yawning open, patient as a grave, waiting for a name that felt disturbingly like his.
He lay rigid on his pallet, counting the fading shocks of the collapse through the packed earth, the uneven lick of disturbed currents against the ford stones, each slap of water like a brush‑stroke across his chest. It came to him with the flat certainty of a sealed verdict: some unseen clerk had turned to this page, set a clock running toward the sub‑auditor’s arrival: and toward his own weighing, his name hovering over that blank, hungry slot below.
Wei Lun lurched upright, the ghost’s chill coiled tight around his spine, and barely had time to brace before a chipped wooden tally was jammed into his palm. Its surface slick with old sweat and a fresh press of jade‑green ink that throbbed faintly against his skin.
“Up,” the overseer snapped, already turning away to kick the next pallet. No need for threats; the stamp itself was the lash. The jade mark meant the toll office had spoken, and anything that wore the toll office’s ink answered, in the end, to Mei Rong.
Wei Lun’s fingers closed, reflex stronger than thought. At the tally’s touch, the unseen frost at his back tightened, a cold hand splaying between his shoulder blades. A whisper, not quite sound, brushed his inner ear: broken bureaucrat’s cant, syllables like dripping water and rustled paper. He could not catch meaning, only urgency.
He swung his feet to the packed‑earth floor. The barracks reeked of damp straw, stale sweat, and last night’s river fog that had crept under the warped door. Around him, other slaves groaned, cursed under breath, or scrambled to their feet, eyes hollow. A few shot him sidelong glances. Being singled out by the jade stamp was never fortune.
He risked one glance at the tally as he shrugged into his rough hemp jacket. The characters were simple, clerk’s hand crisp even on cheap wood: ASSIGNED: RIVER BERTH THREE. TEMPORARY TRANSFER: CARGO LABOR. Below, in smaller, tighter script that most in the barracks could not read, a notation pricked his breath:
“Subject ledger‑irregular. Observe.”
His throat went dry. The ghost stirred sharply, cold seeping down his arms until faint pale‑blue strokes flickered under his skin, answering invisible ink with their own. He clenched his fist, hiding the glow, and bowed his head before anyone could notice.
The overseer’s shadow fell across him again. “Move, slave. Captain’s already on the stones. Make him wait and you’ll taste rope and river both.”
Wei Lun swallowed the retort that rose like bile. His dreams of collapsing beams and swallowing water still clung to his muscles; somewhere beneath the ford, drowned voices were surely still screaming. None of that mattered. The tally burned cool against his palm, the stamp’s qi threads tugging him toward the river as surely as a chain.
He slipped into the thin line of bodies filing out into dawn. Outside, the air was knife‑raw, mist dragging low over the ford. The first horn had barely faded from the watchtower, its brass moan still quivering in the stones. From the toll pavilion uphill came the distant murmur of abacus clicks and brush on paper. The day’s first ledgers already being opened like hungry mouths.
Wei Lun closed his fingers tighter around the tally until the edges bit his skin, and stepped toward the waiting river. The ghost’s presence pressed close, as if trying to look over his shoulder at the same stamped mark that had just fixed his path.
Wei Lun lurched upright, the ghost’s chill coiled tight around his spine, and barely had time to brace before a chipped wooden tally was jammed into his palm: its surface slick with old sweat and a fresh press of jade‑green ink that throbbed faintly against his skin.
The touch of it was like taking hold of a living leech. Thin threads of cold qi crept from the stamped character into his veins, testing, tasting, then knotting tight. The breath misted from his lips in a thin plume; the ghost pressed nearer, a weight between his shoulder blades, as if craning to read over his hand.
For a heartbeat he could not move. The barracks around him blurred, the hunched backs, the mold‑spotted beams, the rasp of straw pallets, as that single square of wood dragged his attention inward. Beneath the simple clerk’s strokes he felt the deeper geometry of the ford’s contracts: unseen lines tugging from his palm to the toll pavilion uphill, to the dark water outside, to some ledger written in ink no mortal eye was meant to see.
His fingers spasmed, closing by reflex. The tally’s edges bit flesh; a bead of blood welled, then vanished into the thirsty wood.
“Slave,” the overseer barked, knuckles whitening around his whip‑stock, “you’re assigned to the noble captain’s cargo. Lend that wretched back of yours to his crates before I have it skinned.”
The insult was tossed as carelessly as kitchen offal into a ditch. Around them, men who’d shared moldy straw with Wei Lun for years dropped their gazes to the floor, shoulders hunching as if to make their names smaller. No one met his eyes. A few, slower or more curious, risked a sideways flicker of a glance, then flinched and looked away, as though even witnessing his summons might leave smears of bad ink on their own records, might knot their fates into whatever trouble waited at the river berth.
Every scrap of river‑honed instinct shrieked that this was a net drawing shut, some invisible cord running from the tally in his fist to Mei Rong’s ink‑stained hand and the toll pavilion’s hungry ledgers. Yet the stamped sigil burned with the flat, layered authority of office and shrine both, a seal that rendered refusal not merely defiance but profanation. An offense written straight into the bones of the ford.
Fingers numb, eyes lowered to hide the surge of panic and the ghost’s tremor in his breath, Wei Lun stepped out into the damp dawn, crossing the slick, jade‑washed stones toward Han Yu’s moored vessel. Fog clung low to the river like smeared ink; each careful footfall he measured against the treacherous pull of the current: and the traitorous wish that the Green Serpent might claim his bones cleanly, washing his name from all ledgers, before the clerks above or below could stamp him into something worse than death.
Han Yu’s hand closed, firm and urgent, around Wei Lun’s elbow. A grip that could, to any watching eye, be nothing more than a captain testing a slave’s readiness for the weight of crates and coils of wet rope. Yet his thumb pressed once, a small, deliberate pulse against clammy skin, a wordless signal that said: not punishment; not yet. Before Wei Lun could fully register the contact, Han Yu had already turned with the easy authority of rank, angling his body so that his broad back and layered robes formed a moving screen between Wei Lun and the toll pavilion.
“Mind your footing,” Han Yu said, voice pitched in a workman’s brusque cadence that carried just enough to sound like rebuke. To Wei Lun’s ears, the words came oddly doubled: the spoken scold, and under it a tight‑strung unease that made each syllable feel like a stone carefully placed in a river to divert a current rather than dam it.
He let himself be steered, shoulders rounding in the practiced slump of submission, eyes dropped to the slick boards. Between his lashes he counted the gaps in the planking, the dark flickers of river showing through, shallow and jade‑green where the light reached, black as spilled ink where the hull’s shadow smothered it. Each glimpse tugged at the invisible thread of his haunting; he felt the ghost lean close, breathless and intent, chilling the patch of skin beneath Han Yu’s hand until bone ached beneath sinew.
A few paces back, the overseer loitered just within sightline, whip‑stock hooked negligently at his belt. Wei Lun sensed, more than saw, the man’s suspicious squint, the habitual weighing of backs and failures. Han Yu’s fingers tightened fractionally, the pressure a subtle reminder to stumble, to bow his head lower, to play the beast of burden. Wei Lun obliged, letting his boot slide on a damp smear of algae, catching himself with a clumsy, half‑kneeling lurch that drew a snort of contempt from the quay and, mercifully, turned the overseer’s attention elsewhere.
When the angle of the hull finally swallowed them from open view, Han Yu’s grip shifted. No longer display but anchor. The space between ship and quay narrowed, smells thickening, light blanching into a dim, greenish wash reflected off the river. Here, the outward show of mastery sloughed away by degrees: Han Yu’s shoulders dropped a finger’s breadth, his jaw unclenched, and his hand eased off Wei Lun’s elbow only to ghost lower, briefly, brushing the inside of his wrist where faint, pale‑blue script sometimes flickered when the ghost rose.
The contact grazed a nerve threaded with forbidden tenderness and fear. Wei Lun’s pulse kicked beneath calloused fingers, a frantic, bird‑wing flutter that betrayed everything his bowed posture tried to hide. For an instant, the world seemed to tighten around that single point of warmth in the chill fog: before Han Yu let go completely, stepping forward into the ship’s deeper shadow with a captain’s impatient stride, leaving Wei Lun to follow like nothing more than another marked back in Mei Rong’s ledgers being dragged toward its allotted labor.
The toll pavilion’s clatter and the overseer’s barking thinned behind them, swallowed by the thud of water against planks and the low creak of mooring lines; here, in the damp half‑light under the ship’s flank, the air tasted of tar, old fish, and secrets.
Sound changed in the shadow of the hull: sharper noises from the quay blurred into a dull, river‑soaked murmur, as if each shout had to push through layers of mist and wood‑grain before reaching them. Drops of condensation slid from the tarred boards above in slow, fat beads, pattering onto rope coils and the back of Wei Lun’s neck with a clammy insistence that felt almost like counting fingers.
The ghost tightened around his ribs, a cold band, as if wary of this pocket cut out of ordinary scrutiny. Breath smoked faintly from Wei Lun’s lips despite the mild morning, threads of pale vapor twisting away to join the mist clinging low over the Green Serpent’s skin. Underfoot, the boards hummed with the river’s steady force, darker currents knocking against the pilings like muffled, impatient fists, as though something below knew his name and was testing the seams of its cage.
Han Yu let his hand fall away from Wei Lun’s wrist as if discarding an unsatisfactory rope, then turned his head just enough to rake the toll pavilion with a captain’s impatient assessment. One clipped gesture of his chin, one barked command and the nearby haulers jumped to obey, boots thudding away along the slick quay. His voice held nothing but workday irritation, the flat edge of someone guarding his own hull-space from clutter. Only when the shuffle of feet and muttered grumbling faded, leaving the hollow beneath the ship momentarily empty, did he step half a pace closer to the riverward side, angling his broad shoulders so that Wei Lun vanished behind him as cleanly as if swallowed by rain.
From the lee of two tar‑streaked barrels, Zhi eased into sight like a reed‑ghost slinking out of fog, his bare feet soundless on the slick planks. His patched green robe drank river damp, trailing a faint smell of cheap wine and spent incense as he shook out a stained scroll: cramped circles and jagged lines sketched the ford in miniature, crowded with hooked strokes that seemed to snag at Wei Lun’s gaze, tugging his thoughts toward hidden depths and ledger‑ink currents beneath the water’s skin.
As Zhi pressed his ink‑smudged fingertip to a knot where three crooked lines met, the parchment twitched like skin over a cramp; damp bled up from nowhere in a bruised halo, ink beading, breaking, then writhing into abortive characters that refused to settle. Behind Wei Lun, the air cinched hard with frost as the ghost went rigid, jerked taut along some invisible bureaucratic hook-line that ran straight through his chest.
Zhi’s fingertip slid along the shivering lines to a cramped knot of red‑tinged sigils, each tiny seal‑mark like a hooked barb strung tight in a net. Where his nail paused, the paper depressed as though over a bruise; the ink there had a wet, raw sheen, strokes lapping over one another like crowded leeches.
“Here,” he muttered, more to the river than to either man, tapping where the characters for Mei coiled in layered variants, clan name, office title, ancestral epithet, nested like parasites around the ford’s main current. The lines of flow that elsewhere ran clean and pale turned thick and rope‑dark as they passed under that cluster, kinking, doubling back, then vanishing into a block of dense script stamped three times over. Each tap sent a faint, muffled throb through the parchment, as if the ford itself flinched.
“This isn’t just a tax‑knot,” Zhi went on, breath sour with wine against Wei Lun’s cheek. “Look. No village tallies, no shrine apportionment. See how the water‑line splits?” He traced the faintest of threads that forked from the main current and disappeared beneath a box of almost invisible characters that swam when Wei Lun tried to focus on them. “That’s no toll register. That’s a reach‑clause. He planted his name into the current itself.”
The ghost drew tighter in Wei Lun’s bones; his ribs ached as if banded by cold iron. Through the wavering ink, the river in his ears seemed to deepen, its gurgle thickening into a murmur of overlapping recitations.
“Lets his authority bite upstream and down,” Zhi said, tapping each direction in turn “without ever leaving that pavilion. Any spirit‑paper filed within these boundary stones,” his finger circled the ford’s perimeter marks, “feeds into this knot first. Contracts, death tallies, accident reports, even missing‑soul notices. They all brush his name before they touch the Registrar’s desk.”
As he spoke, the red tinge of the sigils darkened toward clotted brown, and Wei Lun could not tell if it was only ink or something like blood pressed thin across the page.
He tilted the parchment, coaxing the thin, river‑warped light to crawl across its surface until the hidden strokes caught and shivered. Around a single, square impression (no larger than a thumbnail, its edges packed with hair‑fine sigils that glimmered a sickly, submerged gold) a ring of tighter, more frantic annotations gnawed at the margins, each correction hooked back into the next like a chain.
“That collapse last night?” Zhi’s voice rasped flat, stripped of its usual mockery. “The planks didn’t rot on their own. Ropes don’t all slip the same breath.” He tapped the golden stamp; the parchment dimpled inward, as if his finger pressed through into some deeper register. “He woke this rider.”
His nail traced along a filament of script so pale it was almost only an absence in the fibers. Where he scraped, the characters bled briefly into focus: crooked, predatory strokes that refused to settle into any school Wei Lun knew.
“A clause that hunts misfortune along marked flesh,” Zhi murmured, “step by step through every registered back and neck…until something finally gives way.”
Wei Lun’s gut clenched as he picked out, half-buried in the rider’s belly, the stylized character for shì 敕 (“incident”) twinned with a clipped, hard‑edged “expedient rectification,” that same sour pairing he’d seen stamped over punishment tallies when a beating or a drowning was cheaper than mending rope. The strokes here were finer, almost elegant, but the meaning reeked of broken backs and weighted ankles.
A cold whisper lifted against the shell of his ear, not sound so much as scraped breath: fragments of numbers, docket counts, names flayed down to single strokes, all knotted with a fury that wasn’t quite his own. Frost spidered from the parchment’s corners, silvering the grain; where his unseen ghost leaned in, shackled attention dragged across the diagram like a chained pen scoring grooves through wet ink, trying, and failing, to overwrite the clause.
Zhi’s nail rapped a cramped memorandum half-swallowed by other strokes, the characters so hair-thin they looked etched with a blade rather than brush: supplemental memorial to the Eastern Sub‑Audit Office, pre‑dated against both projected flood‑rise and scheduled inspection, three seals layered so tight their edges bit through the paper. “He’s already told them the river’s groaning is nothing: just ‘localized disorder,’ a calculable hazard he alone is fit to ‘rectify’ for merit.”
Zhi finally looked up from the ink, mischief burned out of his face, leaving only a hard, sober glint. “When those auditors come sniffing for ‘disorderly souls,’ he’s already dangled them a scapegoat: one crooked entry to balance a whole ford’s worth of ghosts.” His gaze followed the faint, disobedient flicker along Wei Lun’s forearms. “A man whose name won’t sit clean in any ledger, no matter how many times they press it flat and rewrite.”
Wei Lun’s stomach tightened, a slow knot pulling under his ribs as if an invisible hand had reached in to twist his innards around a tally-stick. He forced his voice low, tongue dry against the roof of his mouth. “Then there’s nowhere to appeal,” he said, the words tasting like old ink and river silt. “Every seal that might override Mei Rong is already inked in his favor.”
As he spoke, he could almost see them: ranks of vermilion circles stacked atop one another, each impression a weight pressing his life flatter, thinner, until nothing remained but a smudge on the page. Zhi’s smudged diagram wavered before his eyes, the neat lines of current and spirit‑roads briefly overlaid by ghostly watermark seals, each bearing Mei Rong’s family glyph like a leech.
The chill came a breath later.
It started at the base of his skull, a fine needle of cold threading down into the hollow of his spine. Then it spread, vertebra by vertebra, like an ink‑stroke laid deliberately along his back. His shoulders stiffened. Breath fogged in the narrow space between hull and quay, frosting the tar-dark planks.
The ghost’s presence pressed closer, not a shape but a pressure, a narrowing of the world to ink, paper, and the thin reed of his name stretched between them. There was no sound, no whisper, only the distinct sensation of something striking across a line in a ledger, final, practiced, without hesitation.
For an instant, he felt it happen inside him: a decisive slash through a character, the kind a clerk made when canceling an entry beyond appeal. The shock of it shuddered down his nerves. His knees softened, and he caught himself against the hull, palm sliding over damp wood filmed with a skin of rime that hadn’t been there a heartbeat before.
It was consent, that cut. Not his, but the ghost’s. A mute acknowledgment carved in cold. Agreement that the channels were fouled, that the very routes meant to carry redress now ran black with altered numbers and pre-dated petitions.
In the thin overlap between his vision and the ghost’s, he glimpsed again those spectral desks suspended over the waterline, scrolls piled like low hills. An unseen hand moved somewhere among them, methodically drawing a line through a vacant column where his fate should have been tallied. The brush did not pause, did not look up. It simply obeyed the ink already ordered from above.
Wei Lun swallowed back a surge of helpless anger that rose like riverwater against a floodgate. Appeal to whom, when the river of documents itself was bent, every tributary sluiced through Mei Rong’s careful sluice‑gates of wording and seal?
The cold lodged behind his sternum, tight and unforgiving, as if the ghost had folded itself there, shackled and still. The shiver that passed through him felt less like fear and more like a record being quietly, efficiently, erased.
Han Yu’s hand did not move. The scroll lay across his palm like a small, coiled verdict, wax bead dull in the dim light under the hull. His thumb traced the groove the cord had worn into the paper, feeling where other fingers, clerks, messengers, nameless runners, would follow the same path upriver.
“If I loose this as it is,” he said at last, voice roughened low, “it walks the same halls he’s been feeding for years. The same relay-stations, the same copy-desks, the same sleepy clerks whose inkstones he’s already sweetened.”
He looked past Wei Lun’s shoulder, to where the toll pavilion’s roof knifed the sky. “Every stage will see your name already annotated in his hand. ‘Irregular.’ ‘Disorderly.’ By the time it rests on a table that still remembers what is just, they’ll be reading you as a blot to be scraped away, not a wrong to be redressed.”
The river slapped once against the hull, a flat, hollow sound. Han Yu tightened his fingers until the scroll crackled gently. “The channels meant to save you are the very ones he’s turned.”
Zhi made a low sound in his throat, half snort, half curse, but none of the usual mockery reached his eyes. “You’re thinking of a single line on a single page,” he said, chin jerking toward the sluggish, oil-sheened current. “But rivers don’t work like that. They’re layered. Nets upon nets.”
He tapped the edge of the diagram with a dirty nail; the ink shivered, threads of black curling like submerged cords. “Every petition he’s loosed upstream is a weave. Contracts, ‘clarifications,’ pious little memorials about disorderly souls.” His mouth twisted. “Each one says your name crooked in a slightly different way. On their own, they’re nothing. Together, it’s a dragnet. The more righteous the seal looks, the less room you have to slip through.”
Wei Lun’s tongue shaped the thought before he dared give it breath, the hope thin as mist over rapids: some distant yamen, some higher table not yet smudged by Mei ink. But the ghost clenched colder in his chest, and he swallowed it back unspoken. The words tasted already refused, like a petition returned unopened, edges unstamped, corners damp with river seep.
The paper bucked as if something beneath it thrashed, ink-lines kinking, braiding, then knotting into a black snarl. Zhi slammed his knuckles down, teeth bared. “Look closer.” His nail rapped a tight cluster of stamped circles and hook‑script. “Every ‘lofty’ seal shares the same feeder‑line. One poisoned channel, a hundred righteous mouths sipping the same tainted flow. You won’t be fished out by nets he’s already paid to cast.”
Wei Lun swallowed, the motion tight and dry against the ring of ice banding his chest. The ghost’s orbit constricted, a cold weight cinching between bone and lung until each breath rasped shallow, edged with frost. His fingers twitched uselessly at his sides, wanting to trace warding seals and knowing none of them applied here, not when the danger came inked and countersigned.
“Step where?” he asked, keeping his voice low, a slave’s murmur that would vanish beneath the slap of water and the creak of hull-planks. “Every stone on this bank answers to Mei Rong’s tally.” The words felt dangerous the instant they left him, as if some invisible scribe might note the insolence in the margins.
The faint characters ghosting his forearms brightened in answer, hair-thin strokes kindling beneath his skin. It was not sight at first but sound: a dry, incessant scratching at the edge of hearing, like a quill dragged too fast over overused paper. Each breath seemed to draw that phantom pen closer, its tip hovering just above the meat of his name.
He could almost feel it: an unseen hand braced on the back of his skull, forcing his head down toward a ledger he could not see, waiting for him to sign in blood or river-mud. Script flickered, rearranging itself in pale eddies along his veins: property marks trying to reassert their shape, other, older strokes glimmering stubbornly beneath them like drowned reeds resisting the current.
The ghost inside him tightened again, not quite pain, more like being braced from behind. A wordless warning, or perhaps a push.
Step where? he thought, not sure whether he asked Zhi or the thing that haunted him, or the river itself.
Anywhere I move, someone counts the ripples.
“Not on the bank,” Zhi said.
He didn’t look at Wei Lun as he spoke, only spat over the side and jerked his chin toward the slick, jade‑colored current hissing past the pilings. “On paper, every grain of sand up there bows to his abacus. But there are gaps between the tallies.” His fingertip traced an invisible line in the damp air, following the surge and suck of water around the bridge supports. “In the seams. Night‑watch on the scaffolds where no clerk wants to slip a shoe. Candle‑runs to the river shrine when the proper registrar’s already ‘asleep.’ Water hauls to the barracks, latrine buckets, rope checks on the low pilings.”
His lips twisted. “All the filthy, forgettable errands that never earn a brush‑stroke in the day‑books. No auditor stoops to note who carries which pail after third watch.”
Zhi’s eyes slid to Wei Lun’s forearms, where pale script flickered faintly. “You already live there,” he said, voice softening despite itself. “Between ink and undertow. You pass under their eyes because they’ve never learned to read water. You just haven’t leaned into it.”
Han Yu shifted, the timbered hull creaking softly behind him as if the boat itself disliked what he was about to say. His gaze flicked once toward the toll pavilion’s red gate, then dropped to the wet boards at their feet. “My commission lets me ask questions, not smuggle you off the ledgers,” he murmured, voice tight, breath smelling of tea and river wind. “Every soul here is inked somewhere. If I move you openly, Mei Rong brands it ‘interference with soul registration’ and I lose my seal, my ship, maybe my ancestors’ favors.”
He turned to Zhi, jaw set. “And you” (the words came out flat) “are already one missing line away from being declared a rogue adept and convenient offering.”
Zhi’s snort was sharp, but his fingers had gone bloodless on the crumpled diagram. “So we don’t strike the pavilion ledger, we slip beneath its floorboards,” he muttered. “Those drownings, those neat little ‘accidents’?” His nail dug at a black clot of ink where lines knotted and bled. “The feeding‑clauses anchor in the undercurrent. Your ghost’s walked that corridor. Let it drag you close: close enough to taste where Mei Rong buried the rot, where the names go dark.”
Han Yu’s hand brushed his arm as he turned away, a fleeting, impersonal contact like any overseer’s correction. “Back to it,” he called, for any listening ears. Boots thudded on the gangplank; crew voices rose, ordinary and oblivious. In the brief shadow of the hull, Wei Lun let his breath cloud once, then smoothed even that away.
The warning settled in Wei Lun’s gut like a stone dropped into deep water, sending slow, cold rings outward. His breath hitched once. He wrenched his gaze away from the empty place in that submerged office and fixed instead on the scuffed planks at his feet, letting the world narrow to tar streaks and splinters. His lashes lowered, cutting off the last glimmer of ink‑pale clerks and drifting scrolls.
Han Yu’s earlier words rang in his ears, go as a slave, alone, each syllable a seal pressing down. Alone into Mei Rong’s shadow, with only a ghost’s whisper for escort. The thought scraped raw across the inside of his ribs. For an instant, rebellion surged: a wild urge to seize Han Yu’s sleeve, to beg, to refuse, to say I am not just an entry to be moved between ledgers. But the ford’s air was thick with listening. Names could be cut for less.
He forced his shoulders to sag into their familiar curve, the practiced fold of someone who expects blows. Vertebra by vertebra, he packed away the straightness Han Yu’s presence had coaxed out of him. His head bowed, eyes turned dull, the way the barracks had taught: never offer the world the height it could take from you.
The tremor in his fingers betrayed him, a faint stutter of flesh that the ghost’s cold only sharpened. He hid it by reaching for the nearest coil of rope. Hemp rasped his palms, rough and grounding; he curled his hands into it as if bracing against a current. Muscles remembered the motion. Hauling barges, tightening moorings, being useful in obvious, unthreatening ways.
Around him, the ship went on breathing: the creak of timbers, the wet slap of water against hull, the mutter of crewmen above. Each sound slotted into its place like beads on an abacus, ordinary and precise. Wei Lun counted them without meaning to, matching breath to rhythm until his pulse stopped racing so fast it blurred.
Go as a slave.
He tasted the words like river silt. It was not new; the Mei clan’s brand on his registration tablet had said as much since childhood. But now the phrase bore edges cut by higher ink: by the knowledge that somewhere, in offices he could only glimpse in moments of cold, arguments about his soul were already being drafted.
Alone.
His ghost pressed closer at that thought, a ring of frost tightening around his heart. For a heartbeat he felt that other presence almost inside his bones, like an arm reaching from the empty desk to steady him. Or to steer him. A half‑formed impression brushed his mind: corridors of script under the ford, names looping and striking through, a sense of a door left ajar in the dark.
Wei Lun’s mouth dried. He swallowed hard, forcing that alien echo down. Zhi had said: let it drag you close. Close enough to taste the rot. He did not know if he was walking toward salvation or toward the brush that would finally cross his name out of every book that mattered.
The coil of rope weighed his hands to the here and now. He shifted it to his shoulder with the clumsy deference expected of a tired laborer. Back bent, gaze lowered, everything in his posture said what the ledgers said: expendable, compliant, already half-erased. Inside, where no brush could yet reach, a thin line of resolve scored itself alongside the fear, as fine and sharp as a hairline crack in temple jade.
Above, boots thudded along the quay in a staccato rush, each impact ringing through the planks like a count‑off. The overseer’s shout came again, sharper, closer, slicing down between hulls: “Wei Lun! Where’s that rope‑rat?” The name cracked like a lash. Wei Lun’s throat closed, then unlocked on command.
“Here,” he forced out, hoarse, in the flat, emptied tone the barracks had trained into him: a sound that carried just enough strength to be useful, never enough to be noticed. He ducked his head and moved toward the voice with the quick, narrow‑stepped haste expected of property, rope coil biting into his shoulder, posture already shrinking to fit the outline others had drawn.
Behind him, the ghost’s cold retreated by a hair’s breadth, as if slipping back from the surface of his skin into deeper water. In that slackening, Wei Lun felt real sweat break along his spine, prickling where moments before frost had gathered. The submerged desks that had overlaid the river thinned, bled back into ripples and reflected hulls, ink‑pale clerks dissolving into mere light and current. Only the absence remained: the memory of that vacant station lodged like a dull pickaxe in the back of his skull, throbbing with every step he took toward Mei Rong’s orbit.
He kept his eyes on the boards, not the gaps between them, but the river’s chill tugged at his skin when he passed the crates. A prickle at the nape of his neck marked Zhi’s nearness more surely than sight: the way the air there turned thick, resin‑sharp, as if clogged with unshed words. From that blind angle seeped a thread of smoke, bitter as scorched cinnabar, coiling once around his wrist before dissolving. The hairs along his arm lifted, then smoothed as the ward sank into the ford’s own murk. For an instant the ghost inside him recoiled, its whispers muffled, as though someone had drawn a curtain across the underworld’s ledgers. Then even that subtle shelter thinned and was gone.
The overseer seized on him at once, thrusting a sloshing bucket into his hands and jerking his chin toward the toll pavilion. “You. Water for the scribe’s office. Move.” The words snapped the air, a routine command that now carried the weight of a summons. Wei Lun bowed his head and trotted off, letting his shoulders fold into the narrow hunch expected of river chattel. The old rhythm of servitude masked the new cadence in his breath, each inhale counting clauses, each exhale tamping down the urge to look up. Every step past the ford’s boundary stones made the unseen pressure more palpable: ledgers humming just out of sight, tally‑strings tugging at his ankles like thin, unseen cords, as if unseen clerks were already measuring how much of him could be safely spent.
Crossing the toll yard, he felt Mei Rong’s gaze brush over him: a passing calculation no different, outwardly, from the way the minor noble weighed sacks of grain or crates of lacquerware. Yet as Wei Lun mounted the pavilion steps with his bucket, the golden seal at Mei Rong’s brow gave a minute, involuntary flare, as though some hidden column in an unseen ledger had just realigned. A whisper of script shivered through the air, too thin for mortal ears, and for an instant pale glyphs crawled along Wei Lun’s forearms beneath the coarse hemp. The ghost within him lashed tight, thinning his breath to frost, then went utterly still.
Under Zhi’s watchful eye, Wei Lun began slipping from the barracks after moonrise, feet silent on dew‑slick stones as he threaded the misted shallows beyond the boundary markers. The slave pens’ stink and muttered snores fell away behind him, replaced by the thin hiss of current over stone and the far, hollow clank of chains from the half‑built bridge. Cold soaked through the worn soles of his hemp sandals; the river’s breath rose in low curls, beading on his shorn scalp and the faded sigils ghosting his skin.
Each night his cultivation deepened. He stood knee‑deep where the ford’s green stones vanished into blackness, spine aligned with the slow pulse of the current, breath sinking into his dantian until the ache of lash‑marks dulled to a dim, distant throb. Inhale: ribs spread like shutters, drawing in the damp metallic taste of river‑qi. Exhale: the coarse threads of anger, fear, and exhaustion unwound, bled into the mist.
His fingers moved of their own accord, sketching unseen seal‑gestures cribbed from half‑remembered celestial forms he had only ever glimpsed over a clerk’s shoulder: the curve for “petition,” the hook for “record,” the crossing stroke for “witness.” Crude, incomplete, stolen: but something in the water recognized the shapes. A faint pressure answered his palm, as if an invisible brush tip pressed back from below.
River‑qi gathered at his call in thin, shivering sheets. The chill around his wrists tightened, mists coiling like pale cuffs fastened by hands he could not see. Filaments of bluish script flickered along his forearms: broken characters, half‑phrases that never quite resolved before dissolving back into skin. The Green Serpent’s skin silvered and stilled beneath him, ripples flattening outward until even the reflection of the half‑built bridge held perfectly still, as if painted on lacquer.
The usual night currents slipped aside, parted around his legs with wary reluctance. Somewhere upstream a ferry rope groaned; a dog barked once and fell abruptly silent. Within the muted ring of water and fog, time thinned. Wei Lun stood alone between the ford’s humming boundary stones and the slow black depth, the cold weight of an unseen gaze settling at the nape of his neck as the river leaned closer to listen.
With each whispered mantra, breath thin and fraying, the surface split in narrow seams no wider than his lips. The river did not splash or churn; it simply opened in hairline cracks, dark lines in the lacquered stillness. Through those slits, flickers moved: pale faces pressed to the underside of the water as if against a sheet of cloudy glass, features flattened and distorted by depth. Ink‑streaks marred their cheeks like weeping calligraphy; fingers blurred by refraction pawed upward with a child’s helpless urgency, always falling short of breaking through.
At first they came only as fragments: a gape of teeth around a silent scream, a torn tally‑stick tumbling end over end, red seal smeared into nothing by the current. Then, as the thin threads of qi running from his fingertips into the ford steadied, the images thickened, congealed. Entire tableaux bled through the cracks: men and women bent double in invisible labor, shoulders heaving as they hauled phantom ropes attached to nothing Wei Lun could see. Above them hung the hard white glare of a sun they no longer felt, casting shadows that did not match their bodies, long, ink‑black silhouettes stretched away and nailed in place before an absent counting desk, its space marked only by a square of deeper dark on the riverbed.
The ghost within him thrummed like a plucked zither‑string, its mood changing with every syllable that brushed against the old order of desks and inkstones. When a drowned soul stammered about ledgers and cross‑checked columns, its presence surged cold and sharp, flooding his limbs with a clerk’s clipped impatience that was not his own. When another muttered of seals, red stamps, and back‑dated approvals, it spasmed into a tight coil of frost along his spine, shrinking from the words as if they scraped raw against some unspeakable breach of office.
Zhi’s voice drifted from the fogged bank, low and urgent. “Use their rules, boy. Ask like a scribe.” So Wei Lun forced his tongue into colder shapes: “State your contract of service. What clause governed your drowning? Under whose brush was your passage authorized? Which office delayed your transfer?” The questions felt alien in his mouth, heavy with an authority he did not own, yet the river recognized their cadence. The current shuddered. Thin eddies tangled around his calves like knotted red strings, tugging first one way, then another, as if reluctant to pull free the buried provisions hidden in its own waterlogged paperwork.
Their whispers plaited tighter, no longer mere complaints of hunger or chill water in the lungs. Names rose like bubbles, surname clear, given name blurred to a smear, then burst into mute froth. Dates recited with ledger‑sharp exactness curdled whenever tied to any hall, any tablet, any incense niche. Over and over: pages torn from death‑books mid‑sentence; tallies stamped but never countersigned; offerings pledged aloud yet entered under no column. Every testimony dragged the thread back to the same void in the ford’s case‑files, an excised interval that tugged at Wei Lun’s sternum like a missing weight where some forgotten seal should hang.
Nights bled into one another until his spine learned the river’s grievances better than his own weariness. What had been a single ghost’s muffled muttering swelled into a layered chant, each drowned voice catching on a different lost clause, a missing counter‑signature, an erased lineage marker. They did not see one another; they spoke through him, over him, all angling, with the blind insistence of the dispossessed, toward the same vanishing point: where an underworld clerk’s desk, brush, seal, and lamp should have stood. Now it survived only as a warp in the current and a marrow‑deep vacancy in Wei Lun’s frame. Around that unseen absence, river‑qi kinked and stuttered, skirting it like a forbidden archive sunk just out of sight.
The first to go were the nameless: a slack‑jawed barge boy yanked off a slick rope, a washerwoman who stepped too deep when the current hiccupped sideways instead of downstream. No omen drums sounded, no black flags rose over the ford. The only warning was the way the river’s pull snagged in place for a heartbeat too long, as if some invisible hand had paused to underline a line of text and then torn it out. Wei Lun would feel it before the cries: his balance hitching on the stones, a thin numbness crawling up through the soles of his feet, a chill slicking his palms even as he hauled on the same ropes.
Then the shouts: “Rope, rope, you idiots, ” “Where did she go?” “Downstream, she must be downstream!” Overseers cursed, threw coils of hemp that landed uselessly on flat water, and spat about clumsiness and bad fortune. No search parties were sent beyond a perfunctory glance along the bank. Names were never shouted three times toward the current, as the old shrine‑keepers had taught. Instead, a clerk in Mei Rong’s colors made a brief note on a splintered tally‑board, then wiped it smooth with a damp sleeve.
That night, under Zhi’s watchful eye, Wei Lun waded back into the shallows where the accident had snagged. Mist lapped at his ribs; frog‑cold water tightened around his knees. The newly drowned came quickly, bewilderment dragging them close. They did not know they were dead yet, not fully. Their voices fluttered through him as bubbles, as reeds tapping against his shins: “I was just there, at the rope, ” “Master hasn’t called roll yet, ” “My child’s washing still in the tub, ” Each attempt to anchor their story to a record, “My tally stick was in the left bundle,” “The foreman wrote me under Ninth Section”, slid sideways and unraveled.
Their whispers spun in tightening circles around that same missing desk, that same blank alcove in the underworld’s registry where their entries should have stood. Whenever a soul tried to recall the clerk who should have stamped their passage, memory frayed into static: ink smell without brush, lamplight without flame. Wei Lun sensed the ghost within him recoil and lunge in the same breath, like a man reaching for his own chair and finding only empty floor.
He followed the cold drag of its frustration, letting it tune his questions. “Who counted you at dawn? Whose hand held the register?” he asked, voice flat, ritual‑precise. The answers broke apart mid‑phrase, as if their tongues struck some proscribed syllable and dissolved. Around his hips, the current looped and doubled back, reluctant, stuttering, as though the Green Serpent itself had tried to carry the missing entries downstream and been ordered, by ink and seal, to let them sink instead.
By the time Wei Lun stumbled ashore, teeth chattering in the summer heat, he knew this much: the river was not merely taking; it was being instructed where not to remember. Every new drowning arrived in the dark like an unfiled petition, and all of them were being turned away from the same door.
Patterns emerged in the murmurs, thin at first, then knotted as any accountant’s shorthand. Tow‑lines parted not at random but at the exact breath a tally‑stick slipped from a foreman’s bundle and was “mislaid” into his sleeve. Ferries “lost their way” only on nights when Mei clan scribes bowed toward the toll office brazier, feeding it coils of sandalwood and curls of yellow paper, while the shrine to the River Registrar stood dark, its ash‑pan cold. The dead spoke of contracts promised at hiring “once the season’s accounts are settled.” Yet when the ink should have dried, only the masters received folded spirit‑money and stamped petitions; the laborers’ names were chalked on scrap boards, wiped clean by the next rain or a careless sleeve.
Standing waist‑deep in the misted shallows, Wei Lun felt each account catch in his bones. The ghost within him surged and twisted toward every half‑remembered clause, as though groping through silt for ledgers it had once been charged to balance and now found missing, leaves torn out along precisely the lines where these souls should have been inscribed.
The river itself began to move like an aggrieved clerk: petty in its precision, cruel in its consistency, never wasting a stroke. Fishing skiffs overturned only within the toll pavilion’s boundary stones, as if some invisible brush had circled that span and written: here. Ropes did not snap at random; hemp unspooled thread by thread until it parted at the exact midpoint between the unfinished bridge piers, where incense ash no longer fell and no bell was struck at dusk. On windless days, a single, inexplicable whirlpool would bud beneath an overburdened barge the instant an overseer laughed off a worker’s plea for rest. Half‑dreaming with exhaustion, Wei Lun saw red‑tasseled abacuses flicker beneath the surface, bead‑clicks marking, with pitiless calm, each unpaid death.
One fog‑thick dawn, the escalating grievances broke through in a single, brutal correction. A grain barge bearing sealed inspection chests from upriver auditors struck an unseen ridge and slewed sideways, cargo spilling like an offering dumped too early, sacks bursting open in pale, sodden mounds. Slaves chained at the prow vanished under the capsized hull before anyone could fumble the rust‑clogged locks; by the time Wei Lun reached the pilings, only their bubbles and a single, snapped manacle floated up, turning slowly like a discarded character. That night, their voices joined the chorus in his ears, not as distant murmurs but as clear accusations, reciting the exact phrases of work contracts that had never been registered, clauses the unseen ghost within him recognized with a sick jolt of familiarity. And personal shame.
With each new drowning, the boundary between Wei Lun’s borrowed memories and his waking life thinned further. He jolted from his straw mat certain he had just red‑inked a denial or stamped a soul’s passage, only to find inkless hands and whip‑welts instead of brush‑callus and seal‑stone grooves. In the misted hours before dawn he knelt at the shallows, tracing seal‑forms over the black water, trying to smooth the river’s snarled qi; it answered by thrusting sharper images into him: columns of cramped script, names scraped away with a knife, margins where a protesting annotation broke off in a spray of ink and blood. By the time workers muttered of a curse and Mei Rong’s men barked about “careless labor,” the unseen ledger circling beneath the ford tugged at every current. And at the thin threads of Wei Lun’s sanity.
Patrols thickened like a second fence along the water’s edge. Lantern-bearing overseers paced the banks in overlapping loops, their footsteps beating a new rhythm over the river’s muted protests. Oil-light smeared across the mist, turning every curl of vapor into a suspected figure; each time the fog gathered in a human outline, a shouted order and the glint of a cudgel tore through it. Slaves were herded straight from barges to barracks; any pause near the misted shallows earned a barked warning and the hiss of a raised whip.
Men who once loitered to rinse their hands or murmur a quick name to the current now kept their eyes fixed on packed earth, swallowing words that rose with the steam of their breath. The shrine’s worn stone steps, once a casual resting place for aching backs, stood conspicuously empty under watchful eyes. A single new notice, nailed crooked above the incense table in Mei Rong’s stiff, elegant script, declared lingering “for unregistered rites” a form of theft from the Mei estate. No one dared read it aloud. They did not need to. The meaning landed in every flinch each time an overseer’s lantern swept toward the shrine.
Wei Lun felt the pattern of the ford re‑ink itself around him. Paths shifted from gentle, meandering lines to harsh, straight strokes: from rope, to load, to barracks, with no sanctioned curve toward the water. Nights bled into days without the small, stolen conversations he used to hold with the river’s edge. When he risked a glance toward the Green Serpent, he saw patrol routes traced like cages over its surface, lantern reflections marching in rigid columns where drifting stars had once trembled freely. Under that enforced geometry, the currents coiled tighter, like a script cramped too small on a page already crowded with debts.
Zhi’s small tricks, arranging pebbles as makeshift sigils, whistling certain notes to coax reed‑ghosts, turned from harmless eccentricities into punishable offenses. Overseers began to smash any pattern they saw on the ground, boots scuffing out circles and lines before they fully formed. Even idle games of knucklebones were kicked apart as “secret plotting.” A boy caught humming a river‑charm song was struck until he swallowed the tune with blood, his split lip dripping onto the trampled dust where pebbles once lay in quiet arcs.
Charcoal stubs, bits of twine, even the chalk used to tally loads vanished from common reach. Hands that twitched into unconscious mud‑glyphs were slapped raw. Zhi retreated to the edges of the market, eyes hooded, his usual sing‑song patter pared down to grunts and shrugs as he watched patrol lamps flicker over places where he had once scattered tokens for listening spirits.
Wei Lun learned to trace his gestures inside his sleeves, fingernails scraping faint lines against his own skin. The ghost at his shoulder thrummed with frustrated urgency, its presence prickling cold along his forearms each time he bit back a seal‑stroke mid‑motion, as overt communication with the drowned became nearly impossible by day. Instead, he learned to angle the tilt of a bucket, to stagger his pace so spilled water sketched brief, dissolving sigils across the stones. Messages cast faster than a boot could fall.
When Han Yu’s vessel next shouldered through the morning haze, its proud banners drew only tight‑lipped stares from the ford. Guards already lined the dock in stiff, ink‑precise formation, spears crossed at the gangplank as if barring an enemy host rather than a commissioned captain. The usual bustle around a noble ship had been pared down to a narrow corridor of controlled motion: scribes at their low tables, overseers with tablets, no slack water between.
Wei Lun, bent under a tow‑rope upriver, felt Han Yu’s searching gaze like a heat along his nape, but the pull of the line kept him yoked to his assigned arc. When he tried to angle his burden nearer, chains snapped taut; a hook‑pole jabbed the river beside him, icy spray lashing his face as a warning. “Eyes ahead,” an overseer barked, voice cutting across the water.
Their old signals, coin clicks, rope tugs, the casual swing of a bucket, found no purchase. Armor clattered in deliberate counter‑rhythms, drowning subtler sounds; a clerk unrolled fresh edicts beside the dock, their silk ribbons fluttering like mute tongues. Each posted sheet bore the same cold script: prohibitions against “unauthorized contact with imperial traffic,” threats of lashes and docked rations. Under that forest of ink, even a sideways glance toward Han Yu felt like signing one’s own punishment slip.
At the River Registrar’s shrine, neglect accumulated in small, telling omissions. The incense brazier, once kept brimming, smoldered on only a single thin stick at dusk; cracked offering bowls waited days before a grudging handful of rice appeared, often already sour with damp. The shrine‑keeper, eyes sunken and wary of Mei Rong’s clerks, began abbreviating prayers to a few muttered lines, skipping honorifics, swallowing entire verses whenever boots creaked nearby.
Wei Lun, passing with a load of timber, felt the registrar’s stone eyes on him, heavy, expectant, faintly aggrieved, as spiderwebs gathered in corners where petition scrolls should have hung. The carved ledger‑tablet beneath the idol’s hands had grown a film of dust; when his shoulder brushed the gate, a shiver of cold rippled through the wood, like an unread account stirring.
Behind the toll pavilion’s lacquered doors, Mei Rong bent over his private desk, the faint golden seal at his brow pulsing with each stroke of his brush. Ink‑spirits, thin as smoke and edged with characters, slithered from his sleeve to rearrange columns on hovering ledgers: patrol lists shifted men away from weak spots along the bank; drowning reports were rephrased as “labor negligence”; offering tallies were rounded up on paper while the actual stores dwindled; slave rosters were quietly amended so the same exhausted bodies appeared twice under different names. Here a red stamp erased a widow’s complaint, there a marginal note deferred shrine repairs to “next quarter.” By the time those records descended to the public boards, every figure gleamed with bureaucratic precision, even as the river outside gurgled thick with unrecorded names and unanswered accounts.
Wei Lun staggered through his daylight duties, shoulders bowed under coils of wet rope while overseers barked at his slowing pace; more than once, a lash kissed his back when his gaze drifted toward the fog‑bound water where whispers clung like gnats. The hemp bit into raw skin already welted from previous days, each tug sending a dull fire through his spine. He tried to fall back into the blind rhythm of labor, lean, pull, brace on slick stones, but the river’s mutter threaded every heartbeat, syllables of ink and drowning slipping between the slap of waves.
When an oar‑barge caught on a hidden snag and the line shuddered, he almost flared qi by reflex, fingers twitching toward a warding seal. The tremor of nascent mist died under a shouted curse and the crack of a switch across his knuckles, leaving only a faint dampness and the overseer’s suspicion scraping down his neck. “Slack again and the ford’ll take you in place of the cargo,” the man hissed, loud enough for the clerks to hear. Wei Lun ducked his head, swallowing the ghost’s answering chill that surged up his throat like swallowed river.
By the time the work gangs were herded into the barracks at dusk, his muscles trembled with a hollow ache, sweat drying to salt under his rough tunic. Lantern‑smoke mixed with the sour reek of unwashed bodies and wet straw; chains clinked as men jostled for a patch of matting, curses and low jokes fraying into exhausted mutters. Someone coughed up river‑water in their sleep, a wet, rattling sound that made the hairs on Wei Lun’s arms rise.
He lay down with the others but did not let go. Each breath he drew, he matched to the river’s pull beyond the walls, thinning what little qi he had left into something that might still answer. As the overseer’s footsteps faded and the barracks settled into a heavy chorus of snores, he counted heartbeats against the drip from the roof, waiting for the moment when watchfulness slackened.
When the first man rolled over into the boneless sprawl of true sleep and the night shift’s bell tolled far off at the toll pavilion, Wei Lun eased himself up, every movement practiced into silence. He slipped past dangling feet and slack chains, bare soles finding gaps between creaking boards, and pressed his palm to the warped doorframe. Cool damp seeped through the wood at his touch, the ghost’s presence brushing his ear in a wordless nudge. He listened once more for any wakeful breath, then slid into the corridor’s thin dark and toward the river’s breath, leaving his own warmth cooling on the straw like the shell of a man already half‑departed.
The nocturnal wanderings grew harsher as the river answered him more readily. At first, a single traced seal‑gesture over the shallows only raised a faint tremor in the current; now, as his fingers cut the air in crabbed bureaucratic strokes, the Green Serpent heaved like a chest drawing breath. Murk rolled up from the ford’s hollow places, coiling around his calves in bands of liquid ink, and mouths formed where no mouths should be: between reeds, in the slick curves of stone, in the bubbles that burst against his skin. Drowned tongues poured out names and clauses half‑chewed by silt, fragmentary oaths about shifted boundary markers, unpaid ferry rites, signatures forged in a dead man’s hand.
To keep those confessions from washing apart, he had to pour qi into the black water until his limbs went pins‑and‑needles numb, breath frosting even in summer warmth. Each whispered ledger‑error dragged at him like a net; each unregistered soul clung to his ankles, begging for notation. When the river finally loosened its grip near dawn, he would sag free of the shallows and stumble back toward the barracks with teeth chattering, water sloshing in his ears, more of the ghost’s cold certainty lodged behind his eyes like a foreign script he could suddenly read.
In snatched dozes between work and wandering, the borrowed memories sharpened instead of fading, like ink lines gone dark under fresh sizing. He would jerk upright on the barracks matting, heart hammering, certain he had just finished copying a fraud‑slick contract in a lamplit archive only to find hemp rope burns on his palms instead of ink stains, knuckles split rather than cramped. Another time he woke spitting real river mud, yet remembered with horrid clarity the dry rasp of finest wolf‑hair across silk paper as margins were quietly altered, drowned names folded into decorative flourishes. The boundary between his own life and the vanished clerk’s thinned, until both sets of guilt settled on his chest like a river stone, cold and impossibly heavy, pressing the breath from his lungs long after he woke.
His cultivation faltered in ways even the dullest overseer might eventually notice. Morning drills at the ford, when slaves were ordered to clear debris, sound depths with poles, and test the pull for imperial engineers, had once left faint wreaths of mist around his ankles, easily dismissed as river chill clinging to bare skin. Now, when he shaped the old breathing patterns and traced unseen seals along his ribs, the water did not so much as shiver for him; instead, his vision tunneled at the edges, black creeping in like spilled ink, and a sour weakness spread from his dantian outward, turning muscle to soaked paper, leaving only a clammy sheen on his skin and a high, insect‑thin ringing in his ears that sounded suspiciously like distant abacus beads ticking through someone else’s reckoning.
Zhi watched the decline with a frown that burned away his usual joking slouch. His strengthening brews, once potent enough to send a man skimming over moss‑slick rock, now merely kept Wei Lun upright, the last bitter drops clinging to empty gourds as herb‑stalls doubled prices under new “river security fees.” When he reached for fresh ward‑slips, his own pouch proved nearly bare, too many talismans already burned to divert prowling shades and blur the ink‑scent of their questions, leaving only a few smudged charms between them and the river’s mounting fury, with Mei Rong’s tightening net cinching shut above.
The notice arrived rolled in neat bamboo and tied with the Mei clan’s yellow ribbon, as if it were nothing more than a routine toll adjustment. A junior scribe read it aloud on the quay for all to hear, voice carrying over the clatter of chains: by order of Acting Registrar Mei Rong, Captain Han Yu’s right to dock at the Jade Ford was now “provisional pending verification.” The phrase gleamed in sharp vermilion beside Mei Rong’s graceful seal, each stroke precise as a knife. On the margin, in smaller script, another note: until verification was complete, all contact between crew and shore laborers would be “disciplined and observable.”
By dusk the captain’s vessel had been towed from its familiar mooring near the river shrine, ropes creaking as slaves hauled it, under guard, into a new position directly beneath the toll pavilion balcony. There, lanterns never went dark, throwing a constant, jaundiced light across decks and dock. From above, clerks peered down like perched crows, brushes already wet, ready to record the smallest misstep.
The change rippled through the routines of the ford with silent brutality. Where once Wei Lun could steal half‑glances at Han Yu between loads, the path to the waterline now funneled slaves through a corridor of spearpoints. Guards paced the length of the gangplank in pairs, boots thudding in rehearsed rhythm; whenever a slave slowed within sight of the ship (whether to shift a yoke, cough river grit from his lungs, or merely blink up at the rigging) the twin spearheads snapped together in front of his chest with a flat, metallic kiss. “Eyes down,” the overseers barked. “Cargo first. No lingering.”
From his place in the labor line, shoulders burning under wet rope, Wei Lun felt the weight of the pavilion’s gaze like a physical thing. Each creak of Han Yu’s hull under the balcony sounded less like a ship resting at anchor and more like a prisoner shifted nearer to execution grounds, every board, every line now counted, measured, and hedged about with script he could not yet touch.
Petty humiliations followed in swift succession, as neat and methodical as entries in a punishment ledger. Grain sacks that had passed three checkpoints upriver with unblemished seals were slit open on the planks, pale kernels spilling like bone fragments under the probing of ink‑stained measuring rods “in case of contraband edicts.” Slaves were ordered to scoop the grain back with bare, muddy hands, while a clerk noted “quality degradation” and added another red mark.
Han Yu’s quartermaster was forced to recalculate weights aloud, bead by bead, under the bead‑bright eyes of smirking toll scribes. Every correction they demanded spawned a new fee: re‑sealing charges for sacks they themselves had torn, ledger‑alignment surcharges for “discrepancies introduced by river sway,” even a “spirit contamination risk” tax because some bales had rested within arm’s reach of the mist‑slick rail. Ink bloomed across the page like spreading mold.
From the labor line, Wei Lun watched each invented charge fall on Han Yu’s shoulders like invisible shackles. Every measured protest the captain dared to voice was copied down in deliberate strokes, one more line in a growing file that already felt less like record‑keeping and more like a prepared indictment.
The line between public discipline and personal threat blurred when a young deckhand barked laughter at some muttered jest from the labor line and, without warning, a Mei overseer hooked two fingers into his queue and wrenched his head back. Accusations of “improper familiarity with bonded property” rang out as the sailor was dragged across the planks, boots skidding, to the quay’s edge and forced to his knees where everyone could see. Crew on one side, slaves on the other, river in between like a mute witness. Bamboo rose and fell in metronomic strokes, each crack landing in the same breath as Mei Rong’s soft explanation to a watching merchant that “order at the ford is maintained by example, not sentiment.” Wei Lun, rope‑burns raw on his palms, felt each blow as if the bamboo crossed his own shoulders, ghost‑cold rising under his skin with every strike held perfectly, bureaucratically, within count.
Rumor, always quick along a river, grew anchor‑heavy around Han Yu’s name. Other captains stopped hailing him within sight of the pavilion, speaking instead with their backs turned and hands tight on their own scroll cases, eyes flicking to the talisman strips nailed above the ledger windows. Word seeped down that an unsigned memorandum drifted upriver between offices: commissions of “over‑inquiring” officers could be placed in “temporary abeyance” for the audit’s duration. Sailors muttered that any captain lingering near the shrine, or letting his gaze rest too long on the slave lines, might find his barge held for “clarification,” cargo rotting sweet in the holds while creditors upchain sharpened their knives and ink.
Zhi, who had long slunk through the ford’s blind spots, discovered those shadows narrowing. The first time, guards hauled him from behind the shrine with his nose full of incense ash, demanding why his footprints overlapped so often with those of a known haunted slave. They released him only after confiscating a bundle of charms “for inspection,” their fingers lingering too knowingly on the inked knots. When the bundle was returned days later, one cheap copper bell rang half a beat out of step, etched with a hair‑fine bureaucratic sigil that thrummed against his fingertips like a distant clerk’s pulse. The second summons to the toll office came with polite tea, paper‑thin smiles, and too‑careful questions about his clientele and “minor spirit services,” making it plain that even an unregistered hedge wizard now occupied a line, however small and deniable, in Mei Rong’s expanding book of watchlists.
Zhi felt it first in the prickle behind his eyes: the ford’s qi had gone from sluggish to twitching, like a fever about to break. The confiscated bell in his pouch rang without sound whenever he neared the water, the hair‑fine sigil along its rim heating against his palm as fog pooled in bright daylight, crawling low over the jade stones like spilled ink seeking margins.
By dusk he had Wei Lun by the wrist, dragging him down past the barracks where overseers’ lanterns swung in rigid pairs. “Keep your head down,” Zhi muttered, though no guard was close enough to hear. Wei Lun’s breath steamed faintly in thehumid air, that telltale frost that came whenever the unseen ghost drew near. His rope‑burned hands trembled as they slipped free of the last watch‑fire’s light.
At the shallows, Zhi nearly recoiled. The Green Serpent’s current no longer flowed in smooth lines from upriver to down, but in broken eddies and counter‑turns, coils of water folding over themselves like pages being thumbed through too quickly. Silver threads of reflected starlight kinked and knotted instead of running straight, as if invisible hands were shuffling ledgers beneath the surface, reordering entries with every swirl.
When Wei Lun stepped in, cold clamped his ankles like shackles. The river pressed against his calves from two directions at once. One tugging him toward the prefectural capital, another trying to drag him back under the toll pavilion. For a heartbeat his balance vanished; he saw, not stones beneath the water, but stacks of bamboo slips, warped and swollen, jostling for place.
Around them, reed‑ghosts huddled in tight knots, long green leaves wrapped around themselves like mourning sleeves. Their usual thin giggles were gone; instead they rustled in a fretful susurrus, refusing to extend pale hands into the open current. Wei Lun could sense their fear as a high, whining pressure behind his teeth.
Zhi clicked his tongue and shook out a string of cheap copper charms, each inked with crooked seal‑strokes. “出来,出来,” he coaxed under his breath, flicking them toward the clustered reeds. The first charm sparked mid‑air with a sickly blue flash and dropped into the water, dead metal before it sank. The second burst into a puff of greasy smoke that smelled of burnt paper and old offerings, drifting sideways against the wind.
He tried a third. An old reliquary bead re‑drilled and painted with a folk ward. It swung once and then went abruptly cold, the red lines on its surface blanching to blank clay as though something had licked the ink away from inside. The confiscated bell at his belt throbbed in answer, the bureaucratic sigil along its rim glowing a dull, unhealthy gold that did not belong to any village altar.
Wei Lun watched, jaw tight. The river’s mutters climbed up his bones, half‑words and docket numbers pressing against the edges of his hearing. Mist thickened around his knees without rising anywhere else along the bank, curling with purpose, like script assembling stroke by stroke.
“This isn’t just anger,” Zhi said, voice low, the usual slyness stripped thin. “Someone upstream is rewriting while the ink’s still wet. The ford’s caught in the margins.”
Wei Lun closed his eyes and let his qi sink, following the water’s broken pulls. Beneath the confusion he felt a pattern. The same entries started and abandoned, names half‑formed then smeared away. Somewhere close, his ghost stirred sharply, as if recognizing a hand on the page that had once held its own.
On the third night of strange tides, the river ran black as inkstone. When Wei Lun waded out to the waist‑deep hollow Zhi had marked, a drowned ferryman’s shade tore loose from the reflection, but only halfway. Its lower body smeared into the current, its torso stuttering between sodden slave rags and a neat clerk’s robe whose sleeves bled water instead of dye. Its face blurred, first the slack mask of a laborer, then the pinched composure of a scribe.
Words spilled from its mouth like miscopied entries. It choked through testimonies in two alternating tones: one rough, one thin and precise. Scrolls scraped clean after death; ancestral tablets quietly misfiled; a desk on an upper terrace that “went missing” the same night a river‑tax ledger was “corrected” under midnight lamplight. Addresses, shelf numbers, seal colors. Then all of it smeared into a wet hiss.
Each phrase snagged inside Wei Lun’s skull, overlaying his own memories with alien sensations. The coppery taste of ink on the tongue; the drag of a brush instead of a hauling rope; the cold, clerkly satisfaction of adding a single fatal stroke to someone else’s name and watching their line vanish.
His knees buckled. Freezing water closed over his ribs before Zhi’s hand and a clutch of reed‑ghosts hauled him back toward shore. He collapsed on the slick stones, shivering so hard his teeth knocked like abacus beads. Just behind his shoulder, his unseen ghost leaned close, its presence suddenly knife‑sharp. It whispered numbers and docket codes in a cadence that almost, but not quite, matched his own voice, as though practicing a forgotten signature it once shared with him.
Dawn brought no relief, only a harsher kind of clarity. Overseers were on the banks before the mists lifted, driving slaves chest‑deep into water gone treacherous overnight. Men with frost‑rimmed lips shoved poles against currents that curled sideways, cursing as rope‑ferries spun like abacus beads knocked out of line. Barges that had passed safely for years now grated and lurched over ridges of stone that yesterday had been smooth sand, each jolt sending panicked shouts up to the toll pavilion.
Inside, junior scribes worked in a sour haze of ink and sweat. Sand trays were upended, paper replaced, yet characters feathered and slid whenever brushes neared certain entries, as if the names themselves refused to be fixed. Margins crawled; dates smeared forward and back. One clerk tried to blot a blot, only to find the stain had reappeared three lines below, curling into the ghost of a different signature.
Rumor, thinner and quicker than smoke, slid through barracks alleys and under market awnings. A celestial sub‑auditor’s barge, it said, had already slipped past Yunzhou’s piers, its lacquered hull escorted by whirlpools that bowed instead of drowning. Even the river, people whispered, straightened its spine for such a man.
Zhi hunched over a cracked gourd of ink behind the shrine, grinding a stick that refused to take the right shade. The confiscated bell at his belt pulsed, answering some far‑off tally. “Once he sets his private seal on this place,” he muttered to Wei Lun without looking up, “every lie on those slips stops being a crime and starts being Heaven’s law. After that, boy, even the ghosts will have to swear they drowned the way Mei Rong wrote it.”
Mei Rong reacted to the news like a man racing a rising tide. He stalked the pavilion with sleepless eyes, dictating revisions faster than his scribes could write, their brushes squealing as golden‑edged seals bit into fresh decrees that still smelled of damp ink. Toll rates were “temporarily adjusted,” witness oaths redrafted, routes reclassified as “hazardous” to justify new levies, and an entire shelf of older tablets vanished into his private strongbox. Each time his jade tally struck the desk, the warding scripts woven into the beams flared a little brighter, smoothing away smudges in the visible registers even as the invisible ones grew more tangled, snarling like nets in a flooded weir. To the labor gangs, the change came as sharper blows and longer hours in a river that no longer ran straight; to Wei Lun, it felt like invisible netting drawing tight around the ford, knot by knot, with his own breath caught at the center and the ghost at his back straining against lines only it could see.
Under this mounting pressure, Wei Lun’s nights turned frantic, jagged. The drowned dead no longer murmured in slow, muddled loops but flung shards at him: the same absent name, the same vanished desk, the same hair‑fine clause in a contract no living eye could retain. He woke choking on phantom silt, fingernails gritty, arms banded in fleeting blue script that crawled like live centipedes and faded before Zhi’s hastily lit lamp caught more than a stroke. “The heart of it sits under your own feet,” the ghost rasped through his chattering teeth whenever they passed the shrine, its chill worming into marrow. With the auditor now only days away, not weeks, he and Zhi finally stopped circling the thought and named it aloud: they would crack the warded foundation stone beneath the River Registrar’s shrine and drag whatever contract nested there into open air. Before the coming seal turned every forged entry into unassailable Heaven‑ink.
The courtyard fell abruptly silent except for the shriek of blazing script as the warded lattice tightened around him. Each line of golden text sank into Wei Lun’s skin like molten needles, overwriting the pale-blue calligraphy that had always flickered there. The familiar, wandering strokes of his hard-won cultivation shattered and ran, drowned beneath angular bureaucratic clauses that marched in from his wrists and throat.
He tasted iron and ink on his tongue as characters he did not choose carved themselves along his veins: his clan-name unspooling into an empty bracket, his birthmark rewritten as a property tally, numbers ticking upward with every labored breath. His heartbeat stuttered in time with the strokes, dot, hook, severing line, until it felt as though some clerk were revising his pulse in a distant office.
With every stroke, the unseen ghost pressed closer, howling without sound, its distress rippling the river-mist into jagged, freezing shards that cut his bare feet. The mist that usually answered him like a trained hound now thrashed like a netted beast, torn between his call and the invisible leash of the contract. Frost blossomed around his ankles in the heat of the golden light, thin ice cracking with each forced step in place.
A second layer of script bloomed beneath the first, visible only at the edges of his sight. River-glyphs, tide-marks, half-familiar annotations he had seen flicker at the ford’s edge. Each one caught and burned away the moment it neared the Mei characters. The collision of hands, the dead clerk’s and the living scribe’s, sent knives of pain through his forearms.
He tried to raise a seal-gesture, fingers twitching toward the old water-sign for “release,” but the lattice tightened. New strokes flared across his knuckles, snapping his half-formed mudra into a crude, degrading character for “asset.” His joints locked with a soundless crack; blue qi guttered, then recoiled, driven back into his bones like conscripted laborers forced into a pit.
His spirit-sight flared open without his consent. For an instant, overlaid on the courtyard, he saw another space: an endless archive-hall of dripping stone and river-light, rows of ghostly desks vanishing into mist. At one such desk, a faceless clerk collapsed as his own arm burned with reflected script. Ledgers slammed shut of their own accord; a chain of watery light snapped taut from that distant figure straight into Wei Lun’s chest.
Words, half-heard, brushed his mind like the drag of a current: Amendment…breach…collateral extended.
The lattice answered the thought. More text speared down from the empty air, pinning his shadow to the flagstones. His shadow-torso sprouted hooks labeled “extraordinary risk,” his silhouette-limbs tagged with quotas and penalties that glowed a cruel, account-keeper’s red before settling into obedient gold.
His knees buckled, but the script held him upright, demanding that he stand to receive the rest of the clause. Every part of him that cultivation had made his own, breath, blood, balance on slick stone, was carefully inventoried and stamped, until he felt less like a body and more like a register being filled in.
Through the burning, he sensed the river’s attention turning, slow and immense, toward the shrine. Not in mercy. In witness.
Zhi lunged forward, half-formed counter-charms spilling from his lips in a slurry of village-god names and crooked water-signs, only to be driven back by a gust of stinging ash that smelled of scorched paper and old incense. The air itself turned grainy and hot, flaying his cheeks; his eyes snapped shut against a spray of invisible grit.
At his belt, the contraband inks in their gourd flasks boiled and burst one after another with wet, sick pops. Colors he had begged and bargained from a dozen minor spirits (river-moss green, drowned-sky blue, the thin silver wash from a moonlit eel) fountained out, then clotted midair. By the time they hit the ground they were nothing but gummy black scabs, spreading in ugly blotches that would not soak into the stone, only cling and curdle, useless as dead blood.
Above the ruined tools, lines of hard-edged light snapped together into a sigil shaped like Mei Rong’s personal tally-mark: that narrow, hook-thin stroke he favored when condemning a name. It hung there, pulsing, then pressed down as if stamping an invisible document before dissolving into bitter smoke. A mocking acknowledgment of authorship and ownership both.
“He wrote this into the stone itself,” Zhi croaked, voice raw, eyes streaming from more than ash. As his vision cleared, he saw it: faint golden veins running through the foundation blocks, script like fossilized worms. The realization struck with cold, sober force. The shrine’s base was not merely guarded by Mei Rong’s seal. It was part of the seal, a single character in a vast, buried sentence that now tightened around them all.
Across the compound, the toll pavilion woke like a roused beast. Bronze bells that had hung still all evening began to toll in a discordant rhythm, summoning overseers and spirit-clerks alike. Paper charms shivered on their cords and spun to face the shrine as if accusing it, their faded ink briefly flaring in hostile recognition. Inside, unattended ledgers snapped open; brushes dipped themselves into ink and leapt across the pages, scribbling furious notations in tight, clawed bureaucratic shorthand. Columns rearranged themselves with a dry, cracking sound like bones underfoot. Invisible quills scratched in the air above the labor rolls, their strokes echoing in Wei Lun’s ears as a phantom rasp: amend, reclassify, bind, each word hammered into the registers as if nailing shut a coffin.
On the labor roll, wet strokes crawled into being beside his name, each one sounding in his bones. “Extraordinary risk service” spelled itself out in a dull, arterial red that beaded but never dripped, rimmed by a coronet of imperial-gold approval. Every slave at the ford knew that phrase; it meant bodies sent into sabotage-floods, rotten caissons, demon‑touched cofferdams. Places where ledgers always listed “unavoidable loss.” As the clause fixed, an invisible hook set behind Wei Lun’s eyes and drew, cool and clinical, as if some remote office were already gauging how much of him could be expended before the numbers no longer balanced.
The understanding that followed was not thought but verdict. The mirrored clauses on his skin cinched tight, each glowing brand a lien reaching backward into nameless graves and forward into children he would never be allowed to have. Zhi’s muttered curse, “double”, barely reached him over the drum of boots and the shrilling bells. The stone lay dull and pious as any village altar, its treachery sunk out of sight; yet he felt registers adjust somewhere unseen, columns rebalanced to account for his newly increased expendability. The ghost thrashed inside his ribs, terror and incandescent fury beating against his heart like a trapped bird against barred lattice, and under it all a thin strand of guilt, as if it believed this was the second time its pen had destroyed them.
The ghost’s terror hit him before his own could form: a plunging, tidal chill that locked his joints and arched his back as if some invisible yoke had been dropped across his shoulders. Breath left him in a soft grunt; the world narrowed to the stone, the ink, the white‑hot line of fear that was not entirely his. What had always been background noise in his skull, clipped ledger‑phrases, muttered apologies that broke apart before the second word, suddenly fused, shards spinning together into a single, cutting edge of awareness.
The air above the foundation stone clouded, not with mist but with script. Pale, translucent strokes unfurled like frost‑flowers on winter glass, brushlines hanging in the gloom, crowding one another. They wrote and rewrote themselves in frantic layers, but every variant traced the same looping structure, the same disciplined hand. Wei Lun could not read them all at once; the meaning blurred, but the movement of the wrist, the set of the fingers, was unmistakable. It was the same impulse that sometimes seized his own hand in the dark when he practiced forbidden talisman forms, that alien confidence in a stroke order no one had taught him.
Still on his knees, ribs heaving against the constriction of the slave harness, he watched as those phantom strokes bent inward, collapsing like a folding screen. They streamed down, a ghostly rain of ink, and sank through the weathered surface into the exposed corner of contract he and Zhi had torn free. The hidden clause drank them in. Lines that had been faint, half‑erased by damp and time, sharpened under his gaze; the missing clerk’s seal flared in sudden focus at the bottom margin.
Not merely familiar, his stomach lurched, it completed something in him. The flourish of the signature slotted into the blank, aching hollows of his own muscles, a pattern his fingers had been reaching for all his life without knowing it. As that fit locked into place, the phantom sensation of a brush settled between his cramped fingers, and he understood, with the nauseating certainty of a name spoken over a grave, that the hand which had once signed away “one river‑born lineage and all its issue” was the same hand that now belonged to him.
His blistered hands lifted of their own accord, the raw skin along his palms tightening as if an invisible brush had been thrust between his fingers. Tendons jumped against hemp cords; each finger trembled in a rhythm not his own, as though some unseen instructor stood at his shoulder, correcting his grip with chill, precise touches. The ghost pressed closer, abandoning its usual diffuse orbit to pour itself down his arms. He felt it move, ice‑water threading through sinew and bone, until his knuckles ached with a cold that was not of the river.
His right hand rose, wrist loosening into a practised arc he had never learned, and mimed the signing flourish hanging in the air above the stone. Every invisible wobble and arrest, every minute shift of pressure at the phantom brush‑tip, matched the engraved strokes below with merciless fidelity. Pain knifed through his skull, a vertical split from brow to nape, as half‑remembered hours at a cramped desk burst across his sight: lamp‑oil burning low, ink‑cakes ground to mud, the rasp of bamboo petitions stacked too high. His nails were ink‑black and bitten short; his back throbbed with the weight of sheer, bureaucratic tedium.
Voices droned around him in that memory, clerks reciting statute numbers, the clipped corrections of a superior scribe, but in the present shrine their echoes arrived only as pressure behind his ears. For a heartbeat he tasted cheap tea gone cold, felt the greasy smear of lamp‑smoke on the roof of his mouth. Names and case numbers fluttered past like dead leaves, too many to grasp, until one phrase jolted into focus: “one river‑born lineage and all its issue.”
He flinched, but his hand did not. When his vision cleared, he found his arm still extended, hovering over blank stone, completing the final curve of a name that the law had buried. The air resisted the motion as if coated in thickened ink; each stroke dragged, heavy with consequence. The finished shape hung there, invisible yet utterly present, burning against his tendons.
No one living was meant to write it. The prohibition pressed down on him from all directions: encoded in temple oaths, in household ledgers, in the silent omissions of village shrines. Yet his body had written it anyway, muscle and ghost conspiring. A thin whine escaped behind his teeth as he realized that what trembled in his hand was not just a stolen script, but the exact calibration of guilt and duty that had once driven that signature onto real contract paper.
Beneath his hovering fingers, the exposed shard of Mei‑contract seemed to quiver, as if waiting for an ink that was not ink, a seal that was not yet struck.
The pull was not wholly his; the ghost dragged at him like a hooked net, and he lurched from the shrine’s shadow to the river’s lip, slave harness scraping stone. The Green Serpent, swollen with dusk, would not hold still. Its surface shivered, cleaving his reflection into misaligned halves: hemp‑bound drudge with rope‑scarred shoulders; narrow‑faced youth in neat registry robes, a brush tucked behind one ear. Images overlapped, bled: ledger columns smearing into sloshing water‑buckets, abacus beads scattering into damp ferry knots between his fingers. The toll pavilion’s barked counts thinned, stretched, became the distant page‑rustle of some vast, unseen archive. In the water, the robed self bent over a contract, ink still wet and damning, reaching for a seal‑stamp with a hand that shook from more than exhaustion, while behind that thin back, only half‑visible in the wavering light, gold‑threaded Mei ancestral silhouettes leaned close, their mouths moving in soundless, satisfied approval.
A raw, throttled cry clawed up his throat as the two selves slammed together, overlaying so perfectly that for a breath he could not tell which body enclosed his bones. The ghost’s once‑contradictory tugs, toward river, away from brink, knotted into a single, merciless axis of guilt tempered by refusal. Recognition struck like a seal‑stone: the “missing clerk” who had consigned “one river‑born lineage and all its issue” was not some external parasite fixed to his fate, but his own soul, split and refiled on two entries of the same rotten ledger, one as compliant instrument, one as nascent accuser, both methodically scrubbed from the roll. He was not merely accompanied; he was the leftover fragment of a self that statute and ink had tried to carve apart and drown.
Around that realization, everything he had built as Wei Lun the slave wavered like mist over rapids, a temporary bridge laid over a swallowed channel. Zhi’s sardonic lessons by the water, the quiet cups of stolen wine, the way Han Yu’s gaze had begun to soften from pity into something riskier: all of it suddenly felt provisional, annotations scrawled in the margin of a much older file. The years of lash and labor, of biting back words and learning to shape qi in secret, shrank to footnotes beneath a heading stamped in Mei ink. The river’s damp breath on his face bore an almost-audible verdict: these small endurances, these cautious kindnesses, were clerical errors in a ledger whose primary entry had always been the Mei clan’s theft, countersigned by a frightened junior clerk who was also himself. As the ghost’s rage and his own horror braided into one rope drawn tight through his ribs, he understood that to reclaim that erased existence would not merely restore him; it would overturn the table that had sorted souls and estates alike, indicting the entire script that had agreed to forget him. And the price written, faint but legible, in the space beneath that realization was clear: this fragile, present life (his nameless friendships, his stolen moments with Han Yu) might be demanded as payment, struck through so the record could be made true.
The realization struck not as a thought but as a physical constriction: when he snapped his fingers into the old seal‑gesture, the answering coolness did not rise in his lungs. Instead the river‑mist thickened along the opposite bank, sheathing the shoreline in a dull, pearly band that stopped a handspan above the water like a painted border. He felt the qi move, heavily, grudgingly, but it slid sideways, pooling against an unseen perimeter. No matter how he shifted the talisman pattern, the mist refused to cross an invisible line that had been written without his consent.
Wei Lun dropped to his knees and thrust his hand into the shallows. The Green Serpent, which had always curled around his fingers like a dog greeting its master, shuddered. The chill that met his skin was flat, lifeless. Water slipped past his knuckles as if they were oiled stone; his qi ran out of him and failed to grip, skidding against a boundary he could not feel but his bones recognized. It was like pushing into glass hidden just beneath the surface, a pane that divided not only river from air but “permitted flow” from “forbidden interference.”
An acrid tingle crawled up his forearms. The half‑faded slave sigils, usually dull as old scars, warmed under his soaked skin. Lines of ink that should have been long dead prickled awake, threading heat along the faded curves. They were not answering his will. They pulsed in an offbeat rhythm, attuned to some distant brushstroke being dragged across a document in the toll pavilion above.
The brands brightened from gray to a low, animal red, each stroke resolving into cramped contract script he almost, but not quite, recognized. His attempt to send qi outward was seized, turned, folded back on itself. The marks drank it, humming faintly, and for a moment his own forearms felt less like flesh than like tally‑sticks slotted into a larger abacus. Somewhere, beyond sight, someone had redefined where the river began and where he, as registered property, was allowed to end.
Up under the shrine’s broken eaves, Zhi braced one bare foot on a dislodged roof‑tile and jabbed a reed charm down into the current, lips moving in a half‑drunk, half‑precise litany that Wei Lun had heard a dozen times over smaller troubles. The river accepted the charm’s weight, then should have carried it, spinning, downstream with the test‑spell riding its flow. Instead, it drifted a handspan, snagged on nothing, and hung quivering midstream like a pinned insect. The ink characters crawling its surface flared a sickly yellow, then the entire sliver of reed twisted in on itself and collapsed into soggy ash.
Zhi’s habitual smirk vanished as if scraped off. He spat, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and snapped two more charms from the bundle at his belt. The second he cast low, skimming the surface; the third he flicked high, a neat arc toward the ford’s far bank. Both struck something that was not there. They rebounded with a brittle, papery crack, scattering droplets that burned into faint ripples of golden script, flickering and interlocking in the mist.
“紧急封栏文牒…… emergency enclosure writs,” he rasped, more to himself than to Wei Lun, eyes tracking the spreading shimmer. “He’s locked the whole crossing like a ledger page under review: margin to margin, signature to seal. Anything registered here doesn’t leave until the auditors finish reading.”
The shrine bells answered that diagnosis with a wild, unpatterned clamor, jangling as if a drunk priest had seized the ropes, yet from the toll pavilion came a clean, measured ringing, each note spaced with clerkly precision, like an abacus being snapped into balance one bead at a time. From its roof, folded papers shivered, shook themselves loose, and took flight: a cloud of paper cranes, wings rustling like dry brushes on silk. Each bore a sliver of Mei Rong’s seal at its breast, a pinprick of orderly gold. They fanned out over river and banks in a widening net. Wherever one passed, the air thickened with luminous tally‑marks and boundary lines, sketching an invisible grid that settled over labor camps, rope‑ferries, barracks roofs, and footpaths alike. When a panicked porter bolted toward a goat trail upriver, a crane dipped, tracking him with a predator’s calm. The strip of script nailed to the tablet hanging from his neck ignited in cold fire; his legs locked mid‑stride, tendons standing out, and he crumpled sideways as if the ground itself had yanked his registration back into place.
Heat flared under Wei Lun’s collar, a slow, choking burn where his slave tally lay. The wooden tag, sweat‑darkened and ordinary an hour before, now throbbed faintly in time with the toll pavilion’s bells, each pulse a stamped character sinking into his flesh. An impulse surged through him to wrench it free, to splinter the link by brute force. Zhi’s fingers clamped his wrist before he could move, nails biting. “别动,” the hedge wizard hissed, voice stripped of its usual mockery. “They’ve rewritten the tallies as anchors. Tear it off and the ward treats you like a runaway clause: either it snaps you back into place or deletes you from the page entirely.” Around them, other slaves pawed at their tablets and throat‑cords, eyes gone white‑rimmed, sensing the trap as beasts sense a cage door swinging shut, though no one spoke its name.
Downstream, Han Yu’s ship strained visibly against nothing at all. The mooring ropes hung slack, yet the vessel pitched and tugged as if seized by a countercurrent that did not touch the surrounding water, hull shuddering in a leash of invisible script. For a heartbeat, Wei Lun felt a familiar tug from that direction: a shared, habitual thought of escape by night and hidden berth, the remembered weight of Han Yu’s hand dragging him up a rope ladder in defiance of toll clerks and fate: but it was severed by a cold, formal pressure that rolled along the surface like a stamped decree. On the ship’s mast, a faint imperial seal shimmered and then overlaid itself with fresh characters authorizing “temporary containment for purposes of investigation,” the strokes aligning with Mei Rong’s golden grid. The message was brutally clear: the river no longer offered him a downstream horizon or an upstream path; each imagined flight unraveled into red‑lined corrections, every possible exit pre‑inscribed and invalidated, leaving only the trap’s center, the toll pavilion and its shrine‑shadowed stones, as the one place he could still move toward without the world itself rejecting his step.
Wei Lun’s burned palms throbbed around the cracked gourd, each heartbeat squeezing a dull sting from split blisters where the ward-light had kissed flesh. The clay felt deceptively cool, river-damp against his skin, as if the ink inside drank heat and pain alike. Zhi leaned close enough that Wei Lun could smell sour wine and scorched herbs on his breath, words pushed out between clenched teeth as though even syllables might be overheard by the grids hanging in the air.
“No spirit,” he rasped, eyes flicking once toward the shrine where unseen clerks rustled. “No hired proxy. No petition from afar. 只有被写进条款里的命. Only a life named in that paper, standing here, inside the boundary stones, under an envoy’s eye. Otherwise the contract is stone.”
The ford’s invisible circumference pressed faintly against Wei Lun’s awareness now, a ring of tightness at the edge of his breath. The golden flare from the foundation stone still crawled along his nerves, a phantom burn etched beneath skin and qi alike. Where it had struck, something in him had been docketed, indexed, pinned: not merely as “slave,” not merely as “haunted,” but as 牵连之魂: an implicated soul. No mortal register showed the mark, yet he felt its chill like a thumbprint pressed into his very shadow.
Zhi’s ink-blackened fingers caught his wrists, turning them palm-up. “Hold still,” he muttered. Gone was the easy grin, the half-drunken swagger; what remained was a village adept with nothing but scraps facing a prefect’s seal. From one of his gourds he dabbed a smear of dense, metallic-smelling ink, the color of stormwater over silt, and with brisk, crooked strokes he drew across Wei Lun’s pulse points: a broken circle, an open-mouthed character whose final stroke he deliberately never closed.
“It won’t stop him reading you,” Zhi said, low. The makeshift talisman tingled, seeping into skin with a brief, nauseating cold. “Can’t block the judgment, not here. This is just a peasant’s counter-seal. It tangles the thread between name and soul. If he tries to erase you outright before the sub‑auditor sets foot on the stones, the brush will skid. He’ll have to spend more power, leave more trace.”
Wei Lun swallowed, tasting iron. “And if he spends it?”
“Then the ledger screams,” Zhi replied. “Even the laziest underworld clerk upstream will smell burnt ink where it shouldn’t be.” His gaze cut toward the pavilion, then back. “I can’t save you from being weighed. I can only make it costly for him to throw you off the scales before the envoy looks.”
The river whispered around their ankles, cool and insistent, flowing over stones inscribed long ago with pacts Wei Lun had only begun to glimpse. The ghost within that whisper stirred, a pressure at his back like a hand urging him forward, its voiceless intent threading through Zhi’s rough ward and the searing brand of Mei Rong’s light. Caught between fraudulent contract and desperate counter-seal, between ancestral erasure and the chance to speak, Wei Lun tightened his fingers on the gourd until the cracked clay creaked, and let the pain fix him to the only rule that remained: he had been written into the clause. Only by walking into its teeth could he hope to change the line.
The toll pavilion loomed across the slick stones, its red‑lacquered beams dimmed to a bruised maroon in the river mist, characters for “TOLL” and “REGISTER” bleeding into dark streaks where old sacrifices had smoked the wood. Bells still swayed from the earlier alarm, chiming faintly without wind, each thin note dropping into the ford like a stamped clause, acknowledged, filed, irrevocably heard. The sound nested under his skin, a metallic ringing that set the half‑faded slave sigils on his scalp itching as if they were trying to rise and rewrite themselves.
Between shrine and pavilion, the trampled strip of open ground that Wei Lun had crossed a thousand times with bowed head and rope‑burned shoulders suddenly narrowed into an execution corridor. The boundary stones at its edges glowed faintly to his altered sight, their buried contracts rising like breath on a winter morning.
Overseers’ silhouettes paced the veranda, iron hooks and tallies swinging at their belts, shadows elongated and doubled by lantern‑light and a thinner, harsher radiance that only his spirit‑touched eyes could catch: lines of celestial script webbed the building, taut and bright as drawn bowstrings, converging in layered knots toward the inner office where Mei Rong kept his ledgers. And where, tonight, the sub‑auditor’s seal would soon be set down like a blade.
At his ankles, the river’s chill surged higher, soaking his hemp trousers to the knee though he had not moved. The water did not splash; it climbed, deliberate as ink in paper. Every droplet that clung to him carried whispers (snatches of names, half‑prayers, drowned curses) that braided into a single, insistent pressure pushing him forward, away from the dark safety of the bank and into the written jaws ahead. Faces shimmered for an instant in the black water pooled between the stones: a ferryman with rope‑scarred hands, a girl with temple‑cut hair and silt in her lashes, an old woman clutching an unseen tally, its corners worn by generations of unacknowledged debt. Their mouths opened in soundless protest, and the ghost bound to him rose in answer, a weight behind his ribs and a cold along his spine that aligned with their unspoken demand for reckoning, their collective refusal to be footnoted as “miscellaneous losses” and forgotten.
Fear crawled over him as he imagined the other choice: doing nothing, letting the alarm’s ringing decay into the ledgers’ complacent hush, allowing Mei Rong to paste a fresh layer of red‑tasseled ritual over the wound and call it auspicious repair. Zhi, usually flippant even before hungry spirits, had gone tight around the eyes as he sketched the consequences in quick, bitter strokes. Once the sub‑auditor’s barge docked and found everything “in order,” the exposed clause would fold back into sealed stone, the punitive wording ripening into permanent fact, as inexorable as silt settling after flood. Wei Lun’s name and those braided through his erased lineage would harden into a kind of negative space in the records, a void so official that any future attempt to contest it would register as fraud, as deliberate forgery against heaven’s own script. The ghost at his back recoiled at that prospect, terror shuddering through his bones like cold current through rotten pilings; for the first time, Wei Lun understood that inaction was not safety but a slower, more final death: an archival drowning where even memory was methodically blotted out.
He straightened, letting the ache in his shoulders and the sting in his rope‑scarred palms tighten into a single, blade‑thin resolve. Breath hissed in and out, frosting the damp air; each exhale feathered with pale script that wasn’t quite his. He dipped his fingers into Zhi’s contraband ink. It crawled eagerly up his skin, cold and metallic on his tongue, thrumming against the residual burn of Mei Rong’s activated ward: two rival jurisdictions colliding in the conduit of his flesh. With deliberate care, resisting the urge to flinch as the ghost pressed closer, he drew a crude, river‑sect seal over his own chest, centered on the faded brand that named him property: not a recognized legal mark, but a self‑issued edict, binding his testimony to this ford’s stones rather than any ancestral hall. The ink sank into his skin like water into cracked earth, leaving a faint chill that pulsed in time with the toll bells. Then he stepped off the shrine’s shadowed sill and onto the open stones, each bare footfall firm and unhurried, sending out low ripples of mist that skated toward the pavilion and tangled with its invisible scripts. Overhead, beyond cloud and night, the distant qi‑wake of approaching official barges flexed, the celestial current bearing the sub‑auditor’s seal tilting a fraction toward the Jade Ford, drawn, not by prayer or incense, but by the quiet, procedural disturbance he was now walking straight into.
The toll bells’ last shiver faded, leaving a listening hush over stone and water. Wei Lun slowed without stopping, letting his breath steady into the thin thread of cultivation Zhi had taught him for “walking between notations.” The ford’s bustle had not yet begun; overseers still snored in their barracks, boatmen still dreamed of clear currents. In that liminal quiet, the layered contracts webbing the Jade Ford rose to meet his senses: faint glyph‑tastes of ink on the back of his tongue, hair‑fine lines of obligation brushing his skin where mist clung to his slave rags.
He let his gaze rest on the pale sheen of river spread over the stones, but did not look into it; reflections here were dangerous. Instead, he listened with his skin. Each boundary stone thrummed at a slightly different pitch, a chord of jurisdictions braided tight: imperial edict, clan charter, river pact, all vibrating against one another like ill‑tuned strings. The fresh sting along his branded chest answered that dissonance, his crude self‑seal taking hold, stitching his breath to the ford’s hidden registers.
Under his soles, the stones were not simply cold. They carried residues, thin as worn brushstrokes, where countless crossings had been tallied and filed. With each step, tiny shocks climbed his calves: the prick of unpaid ferry dues, the drag of a widow’s remitted tax, the oily smear of falsified grain weights. Deeper still, like an old watermark beneath new ink, he felt the broad, submerged sweep of his own erased lineage: a hollow absence that nonetheless shaped the flow of every obligation above it, as a missing line in a scroll distorted all the columns that followed.
The ghost inside him stirred, its fear tight as a fist, but did not pull away. Its cold steadied him, sharpening his sense of where the contracts knotted thickest: around the toll pavilion like barbed wire around a ledger’s spine. Ahead, the air itself grew heavier, dense with unseen clauses, each breath a risk of inhaling some binding word that would cling to his lungs. Wei Lun walked on, counting his steps as if marking lines on a page, threading his frail mortal presence through the gaps in the script before the ford fully woke and the web tightened beyond any hope of slipping through.
He let his gaze soften until the pavilion’s bulk was only color and edge, then lifted two fingers toward his shoulder in a lazy, unremarkable stretch. Precisely the sort of motion an overseer’s eye slid past. The pose opened a narrow channel along his arm. Inside that conduit, the ghost pressed in, its presence a thin, biting cold that threaded itself into the damp trickle of river‑qi he coaxed up his spine from the stones.
Flesh, breath, and haunting aligned for a heartbeat. The red‑lacquered walls of the toll house shivered, their painted grain dissolving into layers of ink and faint, bureaucratic light. What had been plank and pillar thinned into stacked, translucent folios: on the lowest layer, the heavy brushstrokes of old river treaties, water‑oaths hammered out between drowned kings and forgotten magistrates; above them, the neater arithmetic of village tax rolls, names and numbers pinned like insects.
Cutting diagonally across both, harsh and proprietary, ran Mei clan addenda in a darker script. Those strokes did not sit on the page; they bit into it, a binding scar that turned every clause they crossed toward ownership, every “debtor” toward “chattel,” every “temporary levy” into a word that meant “forever” in the tongue of ledgers.
Through the mist‑softened lattices, Mei Rong’s office unfolded not as a single room but as a layered engine of fate. On the mortal surface, abacuses and neatly stacked scrolls glimmered with mundane oil‑sheen. Beneath that, Wei Lun saw the true machinery: ledgers that repeated in paler echo on an underworld desk, each mortal entry birthing a ghost‑line twin; spirit‑warrants whose flowing calligraphy hooked into distant village registers, dragging whole family columns a few characters sideways into “provisional labor” categories that never quite cycled back out. Where a scribe’s brush had once hesitated, a faint smear spread into whole hamlets reclassified; a single added radical in a clan name split bloodlines apart, consigning one branch to bondage while the other rose, spotless, in the rolls.
His gaze caught on movements too small for ordinary eyes. Ink‑spirits, thin as reed‑shadows and nimble as midges, jittered along document margins, nipping and splicing stroke order to invert meanings. As the ghost inside him shuddered, a single tally there flared in sympathetic answer, its glow stuttering in the exact rhythm of its ragged, unheard whisper, as if the missing clerk were banging his fists against the inside of his own name.
The realization coiled tighter with every breath, not a flash but an inexorable constriction, like a casting net drawn hand over hand. The shrine’s buried clause was the mold, not the aberration; here, at the ford, it had been poured again and again. Villages, bloodlines, widows’ sons and stillborn daughters. Inked into a single, unseen chain that threaded the Jade Ford’s contracts and vanished into hungrier, upstream ledgers. The damp stones under his straw‑sandaled feet no longer felt like mere riverbed but like the exposed ridge of some colossal counting device, each smooth oval a bead already slid into place. His own erased name was only one among thousands, waiting on an unseen abacus for the tap of an auditor’s finger that would decide whose existence tallied, and whose would be quietly wiped clean.
Wind off the Green Serpent pushed against the slave column, lifting the damp edges of Wei Lun’s coarse hemp and setting the toll‑pavilion’s notices rattling, but the world’s noise had thinned to a distant hiss. Each step through the shallows sent a shiver of cold up his bones, a wordless reminder of the foundation stone’s exposed clause. The revelation did not feel like something he could carry; it rose and rose inside his skull, a dark tide that washed over the barked counts of the overseers, over the crack of whips, over the groan of ferries straining at their ropes.
This was not some petty graft that a stricter prefect might prune away with a few arrests and a revised tax schedule. What lay under the shrine was a template. If the Mei contract slid unchallenged through the coming sub‑audit then its phrasing, its sly rearrangement of radicals and categories, would calcify. “One river‑born lineage and all its issue” had sounded, on stone, like a single theft; now he saw it as a prototype, a legal mold ready to be pressed against any bank from here to the sea.
He imagined lacquered manuals in distant offices, slim fingers leafing to a case study labeled “Jade Ford Precedent.” Lines of tidy script recommending “hereditary river service” as best practice for managing flood risks and labor quotas. Mei Rong’s fraud, washed and blessed, would become guidance: a sanctioned method for converting births along any waterline into ledger assets, their chains justified in the same clipped brushstrokes that once erased his name.
The thought struck him with more force than his own fear of punishment. If this passed as proper order, then the Green Serpent itself would serve as exemplar and alibi, its currents carrying the pattern outward, until what had begun as one clan’s crime hardened into the law of the river.
He saw ledgers, not as bound volumes in Mei Rong’s study, but as an invisible river laid over the real one, each eddy a footnote, each back‑current a clause. The image that seized him was not of his own chains, but of the riverbed itself rewritten: every nameless body swallowed by the current, every soul snagged on submerged pacts, converted into tidy marginal notes. Drownings would be footnoted as “ritual wastage,” spiritual unrest dismissed as “inefficiency within acceptable bounds.” Future petitions from widows, mothers, and surviving children would arrive at underworld desks only to be bounced back stamped with the same cold verdict: no grievance recognized, no compensation due, case closed before it began.
On some distant bronze counter, clerks would slide those petitions into a side file labeled “statistical variance,” their brushstrokes bored, not cruel. A child’s incense at a village wayside shrine would climb no higher than the toll pavilion’s rafters before bleeding into the same category ink. Grief itself would be standardized, trimmed to fit the empty margin left for it by Mei Rong’s careful hand.
The thought of the ghost knotted to his breathing thread made his chest tighten, as if each inhale tugged at a noose shared between them. That shade was not merely a lingering conscience, not some random river-wisp that liked his scent; it was living evidence that a registered clerk had vanished mid‑duty while uncovering fraud. Its existence was a loose page fluttering in an archive that otherwise pretended to be complete. If Mei Rong’s revised terms passed unchallenged, the ghost’s file could be formally reclassified as an “errant record”: a misfiled scrap to be dissolved in cleansing flame. Its memories, its accusations, the very imprint of its signature would scatter with the ash. Once its ledger‑line was burned away, nothing would remain to contradict the immaculate fiction of Mei Rong’s books, or to prove that any crime had ever been committed along this river at all.
For himself, the danger reached past lash or scaffold into something colder. He saw the sub‑auditor’s brush hover over his entry, then not condemn but revise: one thin stroke converting a living man into a marginal correction. His body could be tallied as “excess labor expended,” his qi dissolved and apportioned through nameless currents, a mere adjustment to flow. No ancestral tablet, no docketed underworld case, not even a sanctioned ghost left to mutter his story along the banks; the ledgers would close over him as if no rope had burned his palms, no breath had ever steamed in the ford’s dawn, no act of defiance had disturbed the accounts at all.
Around him, the ford’s daily chaos blurred into omens: the toll bells’ nervous chiming, the quiver of ward‑lines along the pavilion eaves, the way the river’s surface shivered as if resisting an invisible pen. Overseers’ shouts stretched thin, distant, like voices heard through water. All of it pressed on a single, narrowing moment. Either he forced the buried clause and the missing clerk into the sub‑auditor’s direct sight, tearing the carefully woven fabric of Mei Rong’s scheme, or the decision taken at this ford would seep upstream and downstream alike, inking over the very concept of justice for river‑born lineages. With that realizing chill in his veins, simple survival ceased to be enough; he felt the ghost lean in, its silence a demand.
The first time he dared it, a dawn mist rolled in thick and low, blurring overseers to looming silhouettes. The Green Serpent ran dull and pewter under the half-light, its usual jade sheen smothered. Overseer gongs thudded, voices cracked like whips: “Pull, you dogs! Tighten! Tighten!”
Under shouted orders to haul the ferry rope taut, Wei Lun felt the coarse hemp bite into his palms, old calluses splitting anew. His fellow slaves leaned and heaved in a shuddering line, backs bowed, breath steaming. He counted heartbeats with each staggered step along the slick stones, waiting for the instant when the foreman’s gaze slid past him to curse another laggard.
On the next lurch the rope juddered; for a fraction of a breath his hands were his own. He let his grip slip, fingers skimming free of the twisted hemp, and in that narrow stolen moment he carved a sigil into the clinging river spray: a half-remembered clerk’s glyph he had once glimpsed inverted on a bronze mirror in the toll office. The shape lived more in his knuckles than his mind now, a habit his body refused to forget.
Cold qi pooled at his fingertips like melted snow sluicing through bone. The air around his wrists tightened, damp and heavy. Somewhere behind his breastbone, the ghost stirred.
It pressed close, sudden as a hand at his throat. Breath frosted his lips, a rime of ice threading the edge of his teeth. Faint script fluttered beneath the skin of his forearms, pale-blue strokes rising like fish just beneath a frozen surface. The river’s surface darkened, then trembled: ever so slightly, as if another current, thinner and older, had brushed against it from below.
A creak went through the ferry posts. One of the other slaves cursed, thinking the rope snagged on some unseen rock. Overseer lashes cracked the air, but their shouts came to Wei Lun as if from the far bank of a much wider river.
For a heartbeat, the toll pavilion’s reflection shivered free of the waking world. The red-lacquered gate and hanging ledgers blurred, ink bleeding sideways, then peeled apart like damp paper. In their place, another image slid into alignment: stacked shelves rising out of the water’s depth; bamboo cases with worm-gnawed bindings; scrolls nested like sleeping snakes behind shuttered doors that should have remained closed to slave eyes.
The shrine to the River Registrar warped in the same breath, its small carved visage smearing into a blank seal, then re-etching itself with unfamiliar strokes. Between shrine and pavilion, a corridor that did not exist above water appeared below it: a narrow aisle crowded with ghost-lanterns shaped like floating brush tips, their dim flames licking at invisible characters in the current.
The ghost’s presence flared, not just at his shoulder but layered through every ripple. It dragged his sight deeper into the mirror-river, where a dim counterpoint of the ford unfolded: clerks without faces passing scrolls hand to hand; ink that ran uphill; tally-sticks diving like eels between shelves. For that one held breath, he did not stand ankle-deep in muddy shallows, rope in hand; he stood at the threshold of an office built entirely from reflections and record-qi.
Pain lanced his skull, a spike of chill driving from nape to brow. The sigil in his fingers faltered. The phantom shelves wavered, threatening to fall back into ordinary water. Wei Lun clenched his jaw and forced the last stroke of the seal, tracing it against the mist until it closed like a lock.
The mirror-world steadied. The hidden interior behind Mei Rong’s polished pavilion lay half-bared beneath the ford, flickering but legible long enough for a desperate pair of haunted eyes to begin reading.
Within that warped mirror, faint strokes of ink brightened like embers under ash. Columns not meant for mortal sight bled through the pavilion’s watery outline: primary ledgers overlaid by a second, thinner script that crawled beneath like roots: duplicate tallies, shadow-notes, secret adjustments written in a clerk’s pinched hand. He saw river-tax amounts double-listed in cramped side-columns, one figure bold and correct, the other slanting, diminished, tucked under a curl of brushwork as if hoping the river itself would not notice the theft.
Names marched in vertical file, each neatly boxed, yet under some a paler name clung, ghost-character sharing the same family stroke, the same township radical, branded instead with a tiny hook of bondage. “Redeemed serf,” one margin gloss read in that lesser ink; “reassigned property,” whispered another.
At the very edge of his sight hung a single entry scratched out so furiously the paper beneath had torn, fibers fraying in the current like exposed nerve. The ghost surged against his ribs. A keening whine rose in his ears as it tried to force a forbidden syllable past the contract cinched around its tongue, breaking apart into sibilant fragments of “clerk… register… Mei…” before dissolving into raw, crackling static that smelled of burnt ink.
He cut the sight loose before it dragged him deeper, letting the world slam back into place. Rope burns roared awake in his palms; he made a show of hissing and stumbling as the overseer’s switch hissed past his ear. The lash caught his shoulder instead of his neck. Pain flared, blessedly mundane. He bowed his head, swallowed the metallic tang of river-qi in his throat, and carried the glimpse ashore like contraband stitched under his skin.
That day, broom in hand, he traced the toll courtyard’s invisible routes instead of its dust. He fetched ink-water, trimmed brushes, refilled sand trays, eyes lowered, attention sharpened razor-thin. He learned the choreography: petition, counter-sign, seal, ledger, shelf. Every stamp had a witness; every pause, a vulnerability.
He began inserting breaths of misalignment into that dance. An answer offered a heartbeat late so one scroll sat unsupervised on a windowsill, its ribbon loosened by a stray gust. An inkstone nudged just off true so a junior clerk’s sleeve smudged a crucial subtotal, forcing him to rewrite the page and leave the original, tainted, revealing, half-dried on the rack. Lamps in the pavilion he lit out of customary order, starting with the corner nearest the shrine instead of the gate, so shadows fell wrong across the offering table and the petty priest had to repeat a minor rite, pushing the entire sequence of daily petitions a bell behind.
At first the alterations vanished into the ford’s clamor, no louder than eddies under oar-splash. He chose his instants like a boatman reading flood-swirls. A cargo manifest “lost” and re-found between two barges whose fees bled into separate ledgers; a routine bridge-inspection note quietly shifted to the bottom of a stack so a repair petition idled unsigned; a soul-register copy he folded the wrong way before passing it across the counter, creasing its fiber exactly through a glowing indemnity clause he’d seen drown and reappear in the river’s mirror. Each nudge traced a premeditated paper-current, deciding which scrolls would arrive late, be recopied, or collide on the same sub‑auditor’s desk instead of dispersing harmlessly through the bureaucracy’s depths.
By the third dawn of fog and secret seal-work, the pattern no longer lived on any single page, but in the chafed places where pages met and disagreed. The shrine-keeper, forced to stamp offerings out of rhythm with the contracted hour, swore and logged a formal protest, cursing “whoever is shuffling the gods’ own clock.” Downriver, a barge captain slammed his manifest on the counter, veins standing in his neck as he pointed to duplicate entries. Two toll slips, two taxes, one journey. Harried by such complaints, a junior clerk abandoned discretion and drafted a tightly worded memorandum flagging “recurrent, cross-ledger discrepancies in the Jade Ford’s registers,” routing it, exactly as Wei Lun had intended, toward the sub‑auditor’s circuit. Beneath the ford, unseen quills scratched faintly in the dark. The river’s own clerks shifted, attention canting toward the knotted tangle in the record‑stream where Mei Rong had sunk his fraud like a stone: and where, once the current of oversight reached it, something would have to surface.
Working within the pattern of irregularities now surfacing in the ledgers, Wei Lun began to treat each new restriction as a marker rather than a shackle. The paper-warrant branding him “unstable” meant that every movement of his was now logged: which watch he took, which rope he held, which accidents he had been “near.” Those notes, jotted in margins and side-columns, became signposts. Night assignments to the most hazardous crossings turned into opportunities carved out of danger. As he hauled ropes through the milk-thick fog, bare feet numb on slick stone, he let the toll-bell’s iron voice drill into him.
Two slow strokes for a pilgrim-barge, three sharp for grain, a hurried, muffled clatter when nobles’ craft slipped through with abbreviated rites. He counted the gaps: intervals where a bell should have spoken but did not, nights when a fully laden ferry bumped past without the proper clang of its weight recorded in sound. From the watch platforms, he listened to which lists were recited aloud to the river, names of merchants, cargo tallies, boat registries, and which clay tablets hung untouched on their hooks, their carved characters never once given breath. Those silent tablets pulsed wrong against his skin, like stones placed to divert a current.
Each discrepancy he sensed (an omitted name here, a suddenly “corrected” tithe there, a drowned worker’s tally transmuted into “lost cargo” in the overseer’s barked report) he stored like a bead on an invisible abacus. He rolled them back and forth in memory during brief snatches of sleep, aligning their weight against the river’s own muttered accounting in his bones. The ghost at his shoulder shivered with recognition whenever a falsified sum passed his ears, its cold breath snagging on particular numbers, particular clauses. Slowly, bead by bead, he traced the outline of a concealed account that did not match the Green Serpent’s true flow. A dark ledger running parallel beneath the official ones, siphoning value and fate into channels the bells never named.
Under the pretext of inspecting frayed lines and loose posts, Wei Lun lingered where lantern-light broke across the Green Serpent’s surface, using those shattered reflections as a map. He moved like any exhausted slave ordered to double-check moorings, shoulders rounded, rope-burns fresh. Only his eyes were wrong: fixed not on wood and hemp, but on the trembling skin of the river. There, in panes of broken gold and ink-dark hollows between ripples, another ford overlaid the first: pylons doubled as columns of script, bridge-ropes as taut brushstrokes.
The ghost-nets’ talismans gleamed as jagged threads of pain to his spirit-sight, knotted strands of blistering white-blue that hissed whenever the unseen clerk brushed too near. By following their phosphorescent sting back through layered images. The toll pavilion’s eaves bent into hooked radicals, the shrine’s rear wall flattened into a stamping surface, the underside of Mei Rong’s private archive rearing up like the lid of a coffer: he charted where each ward was anchored. In that mirrored world of inked seals and spectral knots, he began to see how all the nets converged on a single, dark ledger-stone sunk beneath the pavilion, a weight of silence distorting every current around it.
With Zhi slipping him vials of adulterated ink and scrap-paper brushed in counter‑script, Wei Lun learned to wound the nets without tearing them. He practiced on discarded temple notices first, tracing Zhi’s crooked annotations until his hand could blur a single hook of a character without shaking. Then, among the live wards, he worked. A thumb smudged “unseen” as he bowed to a plaque thick with watching talismans; a fingertip’s worth of river mud pressed into the gap of a binding stroke as he pretended to steady himself on a post; a “rotted” slip piously replaced with a fresh copy whose one stroke bent against the intended flow. None of these acts shattered Mei Rong’s protections. They introduced slivers of contradiction, pockets where the written command no longer fully matched the river’s will, forcing contracts to vibrate with hair‑fine discord and quietly bleed certainty.
Han Yu, reading Wei Lun’s quick, weighted glances during inspections, began weaving his own part of the snare from within the lattice of proper procedure. Brandishing his imperial tally and invoking murmured complaints of overburdened captains, he demanded supplementary manifests, mirrored tallies, cross-signed receipts for every significant passage. Each had to be drafted, corrected, or re‑stamped under his gaze, then (ostensibly for “verification”) routed through Wei Lun’s hands for counting and bundling. Calloused fingers brushed damp strokes; a dot drifted half a grain-width; a total nudged from column to marginal note; “exclusive” blurred toward “provisional,” “permanent” softened into “pending.” Once impressed, dried, and bound into the pavilion’s ledgers, those hairline misalignments became sanctioned truths, quiet disharmonies humming through every register they touched.
As fogbound days dragged past and complaints from shrine, barge, and junior clerk alike accumulated into a low, constant grumble, Wei Lun’s inner chart of the hidden fraud sharpened. Wherever a ghost-net’s glow now stuttered, an ink-stain swam out of alignment in his second sight, or a copied clause no longer chimed with its supposed original, he pricked a mental mark: another junction where Mei Rong had spliced fate. Piece by piece, a pattern surfaced. Altered clauses braiding drowned workers, missing tablets, and erased lineages into the steady rise of the Mei clan’s fortunes, like stones sunk in others’ mouths to weigh their ghosts down. By the time the first minor soul‑register creaked and warped under the pressure of these seeded contradictions, Wei Lun was no longer simply slipping through Mei Rong’s hunt; he was drawing shut an invisible noose around the scribe’s most dangerous books, one hair‑fine misprint at a time.
The buckling soul‑register sent a visible shudder through the shrine.
Incense smoke, which had been rising in obedient threads toward the cracked rafters, kinked mid‑air and curled backward, coiling down toward the altar like snakes recoiling from a struck gong. Bronze offering bowls rattled against the stone, coins chiming in dissonant intervals. On the wall, a row of bamboo tally‑slips quivered, their stamped seals sweating fresh vermilion that should have long since dried.
Within the lacquered frame of the register itself, neat columns of characters began to sallow. Ink bled toward sour yellow at the stroke‑edges, as if age were forcibly dragged forward several decades in a single breath. Names that had been crisply boxed wavered; some thickened, some thinned, one or two flared so dark they were almost holes burned through the page. A faint chorus rose from the book, not loud enough to be heard by ordinary ears. A susurrus of name‑whispers, syllables overlapping out of rhythm, like two temple choirs trying to chant the same sutra from different copies.
Outside, at the ford’s edge, Wei Lun stiffened.
He had been standing knee‑deep in the river, rope across his shoulders as he guided a late barge through the mist‑slick channel. The night had been its usual weight of damp and watchfulness: ghost‑nets humming faintly across the barracks behind him, the toll pavilion’s lanterns burning with bureaucratic steadiness. Then the pressure hit.
It came as a thin wedge of pain driven in behind his eyes, sharp enough to blur the stars reflected in the water. His breath smoked white in the humid dark as the unseen clerk within him recoiled, then lurched closer. The surface of the Green Serpent’s current smoothed, turned mirror‑hard for a heartbeat; in that black jade sheen, layers of script rose like submerged bones.
He saw entries, names he half‑recognized from muttered roll‑calls and dead men’s gossip, blink into being in pale, river‑blue ink. A drowned poleman who had gone under last winter, hands still wrapped in rope. A girl from the toll kitchens whose body had never been found, only her blood on the stones. Their characters flared, then thinned, then flickered out, only to blossom again a hair’s breadth higher or lower in the column, doubled and misaligned.
Written. Erased. Written again.
Each re‑inscription came with a corresponding tug in the current around his legs, as if unseen weights were being tied on and cut loose in frantic succession. The water chilled, not with the clean cold of mountain melt but with the flat, exhausted temperature of underworld seepage. The river’s own whisper (usually a low, continuous litany in his inner hearing) broke and stuttered, syllables catching, a clerk’s brush snagging on grain.
Over the slave barracks, ward‑lanterns guttered and flared, casting nets of shadow that didn’t match the nets of cord. A dog in the market‑yard began to howl, then choked off mid‑note, as if its throat had remembered a noose. Somewhere upriver, unseen in the fog, a ferry’s oar struck wrong, sending back a hollow, off‑beat knock that set his teeth on edge.
Wei Lun tightened his grip on the guide‑rope, pretending to merely brace against a stronger pull of current as the barge captain cursed softly behind him. In his peripheral vision, the toll pavilion’s eaves wavered, their carved river‑reeds bending against a wind that did not touch his skin.
In the river’s reflection, the shrine atop the bank appeared doubled for an instant: one image crisp and orderly, registers intact, incense rising; the other warped, ledgers swollen, pages buckling like damp wood. Between those two overlapping shrines, a thread of ink‑black water seeped and pulsed.
The ghost that haunted him pressed close enough that its breath should have frosted his cheek, though no one else saw it. Fragmented impressions (brush strokes, cramped margins, a clerk’s cramping hand) rattled through his skull, not his memories yet beating in time with his pulse. Beneath the stab of pain, something in him noted, with a cold, narrowing attention, the precise cadence of the distortion: the way a name stuttered when it shouldn’t, the way offerings were counted twice in the echo and once in the source.
The register was not merely failing. It was being forced to carry two incompatible truths at once, and the strain of that lie was bleeding out through every contract touched by the ford.
Inside the shrine’s back chamber, Mei Rong loomed over the buckling register, lamplight carving hollows under his eyes. The lacquered frame creaked faintly with each wavering breath he drew. Where clean columns should have marched in obedient order, characters now appeared doubled, misaligned. One name pressed like a bruise atop another. His fingertips hovered above the warped page, close enough to feel the faint, unnatural chill sweating from the ink.
The composure that had carried him through audiences with prefects and minor auditors slipped. A pulse beat in his temple; the thin skin at the corners of his mouth twitched. This was not a petty copying error. This was intrusion.
Jaw tightening, he snatched up his jade tally and brought it down onto the altar stone with a sharp, ceremonial crack.
“By emergency privilege of liaison office,” he hissed, voice low, “open.”
The tally’s embedded seal flared. Golden script (dense, angular bureaucratic strokes) spooled out across the altar, then funneled into the waiting inkwell. The black surface convulsed, bubbled, and from its mouth slithered razor-fine ink‑spirits: eel-slim bodies banded with shifting contract clauses, their edges serrated with tiny, legalistic barbs. They coiled and uncoiled in the lamplight, shedding tar‑dark droplets that sizzled where they struck old paper, then lifted their narrow, ink-brush heads toward Mei Rong, hissing softly as they awaited his command to hunt the saboteur threading lies through his books.
Fueled by equal parts panic and fury, Mei Rong snapped a command, and the ink‑spirits fanned out like spilled oil. They vanished into brush‑tips and seal‑stones, then bloomed again wherever characters lay. Toll ledgers shivered as eel‑shapes swam between columns, tasting for contradiction; work rosters crisped at the edges when a spirit passed, names briefly liquefying before settling back into place. Even the rain‑bleached charms nailed to ferry posts darkened, their faded strokes re‑inked by writhing, hair‑thin tongues. In the same breath, he ordered new ghost‑nets strung: from barrack beams, along dock pilings, across the half‑built bridge’s ribs, talisman knots smoldering cold blue. Each time the unseen clerk grazed a net, Wei Lun’s breath smoked and his forearms erupted in stinging script, mapping for him, line by burning line, the shape of the scribe’s tightening snares.
To smother the ledger’s growing distortions beneath a display of zeal, Mei Rong decreed “purity audits” among the river crews. Under overseer whips, slaves were trussed wrist and ankle and driven, like bait, through the ford’s blackest channels to “test their ordained buoyancy.” A few never resurfaced, their flailing silhouettes smeared into snarled undertows that Wei Lun felt recoil in mute, silt‑thick protest. Those who staggered back ashore coughing mud were scored at the nape with fresh cinnabar‑black stamps, “fate‑stable,” the characters declared, while the Green Serpent’s current seethed around their legs, gnawing at the lie inscribed over its drowned.
Zhi’s quiet meddling, charms tucked under eaves, offerings nudged just off prescribed lines, had begun to fuzz the bite of several ghost‑nets, their talismans smoking instead of searing. Mei Rong seized on him as a lesson. Dragged before slaves and guards, Zhi was bound to a toll post, his patched robe torn open, his mouth stuffed with a rag so his curses came out as wet, animal sounds. The overseer’s whip fell until the wood was slick and the cobbles ran red. That blood, scraped up with shaking brushes and muddled into cinnabar, was ground into a crude, iron‑tanged ink for fresh seals hammered onto pavilion doors and shrine thresholds, tightening the spiritual vise. Under that vindictive escalation, the ford’s air went heavy and metallic; even the Green Serpent’s breath felt throttled, and the swollen ink‑spirits prowled Mei Rong’s ledgers, coils taut, ready to strike the instant they scented the hidden corruption’s source.
The moment Mei Rong’s fresh blood‑seals dried, a shiver ran through the toll pavilion’s ledgers; stacked books exhaled as if a hidden lung had drawn breath. One thick account register bulged, its lacquered covers bowing outward. The hemp cord along its spine creaked, then snapped with a muffled crack. Pages buckled as if something beneath them twisted to the surface.
A blot seeped up from the center fold, glossy and black as congealed night. It pooled, then rose, dragging lines of ink after it. Strokes hooked to strokes, radicals locking like bones. The stain lengthened into a sinuous spine of characters, each vertebra a cramped note in Mei family shorthand: “adjusted tithe,” “lost at crossing,” “reclassified property.” Marginalia that had once crowded the edges of columns scrolled over its flanks in overlapping scales. Entire rows of names, long ago scraped to paleness and written over, reappeared as dim, bruised shadows beneath newer script, ghost‑letters writhing under the fresh gloss.
Eyes opened where two denied signatures crossed, pupils ringed by the fine, legal script of penalty clauses. Its jaw hinged on a pair of stamped seals, smeared with Zhi’s dried blood; between its teeth glittered barbed brushstrokes that had once formed the word “audit,” now sharpened into fangs. When it inhaled, loose papers shuddered, and the brush‑stands rattled against their porcelain wells.
Mei Rong leaned close, the golden seal at his brow pulsing once. Under his breath, he traced a clause buried in the ink’s heart (“seek and bind all traces of anomalous slave‑qi linked to unregistered spectral attachments”) each syllable sinking into the creature’s body as a glowing ligature. The ink‑spirit’s length tightened, coils resolving into orderly columns, its movements acquiring the terrible efficiency of a properly filed writ.
It slipped off the register and flowed down the table leg like spilled lacquer, leaving behind a faint smell of iron and crushed cinnabar. Shadows in the pavilion’s corners leapt to meet it, darkening as the thing passed. At the threshold, it paused, its calligraphed snout hovering just above the sill, restrained by the last line of the door’s old protection charm.
Mei Rong tapped the charm with his jade tally; the ward’s characters splintered, their strokes scattering like dry leaves. Freed, the ink‑spirit dipped its head toward the ford. From its nostrils, fine filaments of script unspooled, descending into the night air until they brushed the river’s skin.
The Green Serpent lay in a sluggish, iron‑tainted hush, but where the threads touched, the surface quivered and clarified. Lantern‑glare and starlight drained away, leaving a depthless panel of black glass. The ink‑serpent’s whiskers of cursive slipped into that mirror, tasting not water but record: the sum of crossings, drownings, stamped tallies, names shouted and forgotten.
Flavors flickered along its length: salt fear, old oaths bound in hemp, the chalky tang of broken bone‑tablets tossed without rite. It sifted them, rejecting the clean, ledger‑matched currents. It searched for dissonance: qi that did not sit square with its written column, ghosts that clung where no ancestral entry waited.
There: a thin, bitter thread, like frost woven through silt.
Not the river’s own dead, whose resentment ran broad and muddy, but a narrow, vertical incision in the flow, cold as a clerk’s brush left overnight in winter ink. The taste of a soul half inside the rolls and half scraped out; a presence that carried the echo of office yet bore the stamp of chattel.
Wei Lun.
The ink‑spirit’s scales rippled; along its side, the erased names beneath its script twitched, as if recognizing kin. Its tongue, a sliver of running script, lapped again at the ford’s reflections, following that ghost‑tainted flavor upstream and down, triangulating where the anomaly disturbed the river’s quiet account.
Satisfied, it withdrew from the water’s glass, dragging the thread of that scent into itself until it glowed like a hair‑fine silver column along its spine. Guided now by the inscribed clause and the memorized taste of the fugitive record‑soul, the ink‑serpent turned from the threshold and slid, silent and intent, into the ford’s waiting dark.
Wei Lun, hauling ropes at the night crossing, felt the ghost inside him go suddenly rigid, like a hand clamped on his spine. Cold knifed through his lungs; frost feathered his lips despite the humid dark, and the Green Serpent’s surface shuddered once, then went mirror‑flat.
In that pane of black, his reflection warped. His gaunt outline peeled away, replaced by a coiling lattice of cramped characters, “arrears,” “misreport,” “forfeited soul‑share”, fines and accusations braided into a serpent column. The script twisted, noticed him. Its strokes thickened, ink beading into flesh.
The reflection lunged before the water itself moved.
Wei Lun flung himself backward, hemp rope burning his palms, as the ink‑serpent burst from the ford in a shower of black droplets. Its jaws, hinged on stamped seals, snapped shut where his throat had been, the bite shearing a loose thread from his slave collar instead.
He hit the slick stones hard, rolled, scrambled. Chain and iron tally clattered against rock. Behind him, the spirit skimmed low, riding the river’s sheen, then flicking from puddle to puddle. Each time it struck, a splash froze into a blazing sigil that seared his bare soles when he stumbled through, brands flaring against the hidden clauses in his bones.
Lantern gongs slammed into the night, harsh and overlapping, as Mei Rong drove his jade tally against a bronze fate‑plate. The impact rang down the slave‑lines; brands along forearms and shaven scalps flared dull red, tightening muscle and breath. Overseers jerked upright on their pallets as if yanked by unseen brushstrokes, hands snapping to hooked poles and paper fans stiff with woven arrest‑sigils. Some were still half‑dreaming, eyes unfocused, but their feet moved in drilled obedience, boots splashing from barracks mud onto the ford.
“Run him to the pier!” Mei Rong’s command knifed along the riverbank. Lanterns swung, hemming Wei Lun with staggered arcs of light as guards spread in practiced files, sweeping him sideways with fans of sizzling talisman mesh that spat when they licked his qi, each near‑miss raising the fine hairs along his arms.
The ink‑serpent, sensing the mortal net cinching around its ledger‑marked prey, grew bolder. It lanced through overturned wash‑buckets, shattering reflections into flurries of squirming characters, then re‑coalesced in rain‑fat wagon ruts, its script‑scaled body lengthening with each leap. Every time it surfaced, it came nearer to Wei Lun’s skittering shadow, its calligraphed jaws snapping inches behind his heels, scattering burning droplets that branded the stones with fleeting clauses of capture.
The chase funneled him toward the half‑finished pier, where timber skeletons thrust into the snarling current and half‑driven piles made the footing treacherous, slick with algae and tar. Desperate, half‑blind with ink‑stung tears, Wei Lun dropped to one knee, slapped his bleeding palm to the river’s skin, and dragged his fingers through the chill.
Stolen brush‑forms flared in his mind: fragments glimpsed over clerks’ shoulders, echoed in the ghost’s hoarse midnight whispers. He traced a crooked seal in red‑washed ripples, strokes wobbling yet falling, by some buried muscle‑memory, into their ordained positions. On the final hook, he snapped his wrist and hissed the cracked syllables of calling‑mist.
Cold breath surged upward. The Green Serpent exhaled through his hand; veils of vapor boiled from the dark like spirits loosed from docket jars, rolling low over stones and piling‑roots. Lantern‑glow smeared, then vanished, swallowed to dim orange smudges; shouts and gong‑beats folded inward, turned to damp, close echoes that seemed to come from every side at once.
Within that sudden fog, the ink‑serpent’s leaps grew hesitant, its script whiskers lashing at blank white where reflections had been. Wei Lun let the ghost inside him tighten like a guiding wire along his spine, tugging his weight left, then sharply back, steering him in broken angles between stacked stone blocks and abandoned scaffolds. Twice his sandals slid on empty air where planks had rotted through; both times an icy grip wrenched his hips aside, spinning him past black mouths where the river yawned hungry below, teeth of current snapping inches from his dangling heels.
On the black water beyond the main channel, Han Yu’s ship tugged at its anchors like a restless beast. Ill‑starred halos clung to the crew’s lanterns; each flare against the low clouds confirmed the unease that had dogged him since dusk. The first gong‑clash from shore snapped him upright. He strode to the rail and found the toll lights gone, swallowed by a single, blooming shroud of white. Mist rolled where pier, pavilions, and slave‑lines should have been, a texture and density he knew too well.
“Emergency flood precautions,” he snapped, voice carrying the weight of imperial commission. Sailors who had learned to hear what he did not say sprang to it. Loosening mooring lines, half‑raising poles, beating the hollow‑bellied warning drums in a steady, booming cadence. Officially, it was readiness against a sudden swell; in truth, it gave him cause to drift. The hull crept sideways on the current, lanterns swinging wide arcs that slashed erratic light across the fog‑wrapped pier.
Reflections scattered, broke, recomposed in jagged panes on wave and vapor. Every time the ink‑serpent tried to leap along a continuous surface, the ship’s passing wake shattered its route, turning once‑clean paths into fractured script‑traps and blind alleys of light. Han Yu gripped the rail, knuckles whitening, as he felt the vessel’s mass interpose itself between the ford’s hungry contracts and the single, flickering life he watched for but could not yet see.
The first scream tore through the fog, thin and raw as a reed‑whistle, cutting across the muffled gongbeats and the slap of running feet. Shapes loomed and smeared in the whiteness, lantern halos, hooked poles, hunched backs, but this voice came from within the slave‑line itself. A gaunt figure broke ranks, chains on his ankles clattering, shoving past two stunned overseers whose brands glowed dully through their damp tunics.
“Wei Lun ran upriver!” he shouted, throat cracking. “He’s headed for the temple barges. Mei Rong did not step fully into view; only the edge of his dark sleeve and the distant glint of jade marked his presence. He flicked his brush once, almost lazily, across invisible air. Paper leapt from a stacked file beside him, stiffening and folding as if seized by unseen fingers.
The spear formed in an eyeblink: a narrow shaft of layered petitions, point honed from overlapping warrants. It hissed as it flew, cutting a clean, white corridor through the mist. For one breath it looked like harmless moonlight. Then the talisman wrapped around its head unfurled, strips of inscribed paper snapping outward into serrated banners of ink.
The spear struck center‑chest with a sound like tearing cloth. The slave’s body jerked backward, feet leaving the slick boards; he hung in the air as the talisman whipped around him, razor‑edged script cinching tight. Characters blazed to life along his bare skin, 诬证, 诬告, 虚词, each stroke branding deep, burning through flesh into bone. He tried to drag in air, but the words themselves seemed to choke him, clamping around his ribs like iron hoops.
Wei Lun, chest pressed to the slime‑coated piles beneath the pier, heard the strangled gurgle above the river’s roar. He forced himself not to look, but the water betrayed him. Fog‑drip and lantern‑leak met on the river’s skin, sketching a trembling mirror in which the scene replayed sharper than any direct sight.
The moment the slave’s heart stuttered, something tore loose. A pale, translucent double of the man peeled upward from his collapsing body, mouth still open in a soundless cry. For a heartbeat the spirit hovered above the boards, eyes wide with the stunned realization of death; then the ford’s deeper currents woke.
Under the thin, green surface‑flow, Wei Lun’s straining sight caught the other river. The one of clauses and tallies. Dark channels of script pulsed there, coiled like eels around the pilings, all feeding toward the toll pavilion’s shadow. As the freed soul wavered, those currents surged.
Ink‑dark tendrils, each line composed of minuscule, densely packed characters, coiled up around the spirit’s ankles. They looked almost gentle as they brushed his spectral calves, but each touch left notches, erasing faint traces of his shape. The slave’s face turned down toward Wei Lun’s hiding place without seeing him, features blurring as if smeared by a careless thumb. For an instant their gazes met: one living, one already being filed away.
Then the bureaucratic undertow seized hold.
The spirit dropped through the boards as if they were smoke, dragged straight down into the ledger‑flow veining the riverbed. In the water’s dim reflection, Wei Lun saw shapes layered beneath: rows upon rows of dim figures flattened like pressed leaves, pinned under chains of gold‑flecked script. The new arrival tumbled among them, his outline thinning, name and lineage stripped in silent strokes, reduced to a faint, flickering mark on a page he could not read.
The surface rippled once and smoothed. Up above, the corpse slumped, tethered to the pier by a paper spear gone dull and grey. Overseers shouted, some in anger, some in sudden, superstitious fear, their words blurred by fog. Mei Rong’s sleeve withdrew from the mist with surgical calm.
Cold bled up through the soaked wood into Wei Lun’s bones. The brands along his own arms throbbed in answer to the vanished man’s, a phantom ache chasing the path the stolen soul had taken downward. Somewhere just behind his ear, the ghost that haunted him hissed: a thin, furious intake of breath that tasted of mildew and ink.
Not an accident, the unspeaking presence pressed along his skull, a pressure more than a voice. Precedent.
Wei Lun dug his fingers harder into the slime and shadow, fighting the shaking in his limbs. Above, chains rattled as the line re‑formed under the overseers’ barks. Beside him, the Green Serpent rolled one slow, sullen wave against the pilings, as if marking yet another unpaid debt sunk beneath its stones.
On the southern bank, where the shrine’s flagstones vanished under moss and runoff, Zhi lurched out from behind a toppled incense stand, one leg dragging in ugly half-steps. The flogging he had taken that afternoon had left his back a lattice of split flesh beneath the patched robe; every jolt made his vision pulse red at the edges. He spat mud and blood, fingers scrabbling at his belt until they closed on the gourd of counter‑ink he’d hoarded for months, brewed from stolen lampblack, grave‑dirt, and shaved petition slips.
“去你娘的公文蛇,” he hissed, and flung.
The gourd spun end‑over‑end into the fog, its clay skin buzzing as the ink‑serpent’s approach warped the air. For an instant, resistance: then the vessel snapped backward, as if slapped by an invisible seal. It burst against his own chest with a wet pop. Oily blackness geysered out, splashing over his hands, his mouth, both cheeks. Wherever it struck, it sank, etching writhing, cold‑luminous characters into his skin. They crawled like maggots of script, chewing through callus and scar alike.
One eye clouded first. The pupil went milky, then vanished under a spiral of cramped, clerk‑hand radicals that drilled inward, burning without heat. Zhi screamed once, a bitten‑off, animal sound, and staggered blind toward the sound of water. He fell to his knees at the river’s lip and plunged his head beneath the current, letting the Green Serpent’s chill close over his face.
The ink did not wash away.
Instead, the flowing water made the characters bloom brighter, branching in fractal strokes across his brow and temple. Behind the ruined eye, vision did not vanish; it twisted. Through that socket he saw the ford as the ink‑serpent did: lines of contract‑light, tally‑marks in place of stars, souls tagged with docket numbers instead of names. The weight of that ordered cruelty slammed into his skull like a dropped ledger.
He jerked upright, choking, river streaming from his matted hair. One eye saw only fog and dim lanterns; the other flickered with hurtling edicts and coiling seals. Between them, balance broke. Zhi pitched sideways onto the slick stones, fingers clawing at his own face, but the living calligraphy only dug deeper, knitting itself into nerve and thought with every panicked heartbeat.
Down in the mist‑clogged shallows, Wei Lun felt the ghost’s terror spike a heartbeat before the weighted net hissed toward him from the pier. The warning hit like a nail driven into his spine. He twisted with inhuman speed, spine bending flat to the current as he called thin ripples of water‑qi around his skin, blurring his outline into streaked shadow and foam. It blunted the cast, but the net was meant for panicked, drowning slaves: stone weights punched straight through the surface, barbed hooks and knotted cords dropping hard. They sank faster than his breath, snagging shoulder, wrist, the back of his neck. Impact drove him against slick stones. Rough hemp bit, cords tightening with every convulsion, cutting deep furrows into his forearms as he slashed and writhed. One hook opened his palm to the bone; another caught at the half‑faded slave sigils on his scalp, tearing fresh fire across old shame. With a final, desperate surge of qi he rolled, driving his own weight against the net’s sinking edge until the barbs tore free in a wash of pain. His blood streamed into the jade‑green water in widening ribbons. Where red met river, it flared briefly with cold blue light, veins of chill radiance threading the current. In that instant, his half‑open spirit‑sight yawned wide.
The physical river thinned. Beneath its skin, another bed came clear: a lattice of ink‑black channels, each one lined with cramped, glimmering script. Chains of golden characters stretched along that hidden riverbed, coiled three, four times around hundreds of pale, kneeling figures arranged in precise, ledger‑straight rows. Their heads were bowed by clauses; their wrists pinned by seals. Faces wavered like smudged brushwork, every feature there and not there. Where their names should have been, the binding slips on their chests were scraped to blankness, gouged raw and white. The absence itself shone like a wound. Some looked up as his awareness brushed them, mouths moving in soundless petition, but no breath rose. The chains tightened, cinching their silence. For a heartbeat, Wei Lun recognized the pattern of those erasures, the same bureaucratic hand that had eaten his own lineage, and then the vision shuddered as the upper current dragged him bodily downstream.
On the mid‑river anchorage, the uproar slammed into Han Yu’s deck like a breaking wave. Overseers on the pilings bawled for “all loyal captains” to close ranks and pen the fugitive, and his own courtesy name was barked with unmistakable relish. He ground his back teeth once, then let his face settle into the blank deference expected of a commissioned noble. Voice clipped, carrying, he ordered the mainsail loosened and the yardarm swung “to brace against that cross‑current,” sailors scrambling to obey the familiar drill. The riverboat heeled, timbers groaning as he brought her broadside to the toll pavilion at the exact instant a fan of killing talismans screamed out from Mei Rong’s shadowed veranda, white streaks knifing toward the densest fog where he knew, felt, Wei Lun must be. The heavy spar swept through their trajectory like a low‑hung scythe. Charms smacked and skittered along seasoned wood, sigils flaring, scripts unraveling in mid‑impact. Blades of paper and ink detonated harmlessly against tarred planks and salt‑stiff canvas, showering the deck in a blizzard of scorched confetti and blue‑white sparks. The hull blackened in ragged streaks, a few ropes parted with sharp, gunshot snaps, and one sailor went down clutching a burned forearm, but no soul was pierced, and nothing with a pulse fell overboard. More importantly, nothing of Mei Rong’s wrath reached the patch of river where a single, hunted shape bled into the current.
The deflection did not pass as mere seamanship. Mei Rong’s gaze knifed through the fog, fixing on the yardarm’s “accident,” on how Han Yu’s crew had flowed to the rail in a line of living armor. A scribe‑guard bent close, whispering of “misaligned loyalties” and “contagious sentiment.” Brushes hovered; a second volley of talismans froze mid‑script, then were carefully re‑inked with clauses authorizing “area purification” rather than execution. White slips fanned outward, slapping into open water, detonating in sheets of hissing steam that drove Wei Lun deeper into the current instead of cutting him down. Choking on river and iron, feeling broken cords drag at his limbs, he tasted the shape of the trap: Han Yu marked as suspect but not yet condemned, Zhi crippled but alive, the dead slave’s name already dissolving from the overseers’ tongues. Above, every narrowed eye and half‑finished notation tightened those invisible vectors, all angling toward a single collision point when the auditors arrived and no one would be able to claim ignorance of what the ford had become.
Mei Rong read the uproar at the ford not as the failure of his “safety measures,” but as proof that a coordinated plot coiled around the upcoming sub‑audit. His answer was swift and suffocating. Couriers went out before dawn; by noon, spear‑guards from three outlying hamlets were marched in under hastily stamped orders, their village seals dangling from their belts as collateral. They were posted in overlapping rings around the toll pavilion and the River Registrar’s shrine, patrol routes inked on slate tablets and revised every bell. No one crossed the packed earth between pavilion and pier without passing beneath at least two sets of eyes and one counting abacus.
Within the record hall, the usual rotation of sleepy scribes was abolished. Mei Rong’s most trusted disciples (thin‑wristed men and women with callus‑scarred fingers and neat, nervous mouths) were ordered to unroll their bedrolls beneath the high shelves of bamboo scrolls. Oil lamps burned all night, feeding on expensive sesame oil until the air tasted of scorched seed. Brushes were laid beside pillows, inkstones kept wetted; at the first shout from outside, they were to spring up and “correct” any irregularity before it could harden into a discrepancy visible from upriver. Names could be nudged, times adjusted; ledgers could be made to forget.
Word of the new regime bled outward along the slave lines faster than any official proclamation. “Don’t speak near the doors,” someone hissed in the barracks, and it became a rule. Overseers lounged closer to the pavilion steps than before, ears pricked. A grumbled curse about short rations, a muttered prayer that “the river take them,” even a hoarse joke about crooked scales: each was met with a flick of a scribe’s brush at the threshold, a tiny notation made on a hanging slate. No one was told what those marks meant, only that tallies were being kept.
The atmosphere at the Jade Ford, already heavy with mid‑summer humidity, thickened. The very air seemed to clot, like ink left too long in a carved stone well: glossy, unmoving, ready to stain any sleeve that brushed it. Conversation dropped to murmurs. Feet scuffed softer. Even the Green Serpent River ran as if under watch, its surface dulled, its current muffled beneath the new, invisible weight of written suspicion.
Behind shuttered lattice and a screen smeared with lamplight, Mei Rong worked in a hush that felt like held breath. He ground rare vermilion with wormwood ash and powdered jade, mixing the slurry into a thin, hungry ink that hissed faintly when it touched air. On specially cured talisman‑paper (edges brushed with gold dust and river salt to bind both mortal law and underworld clause) he drafted emergency edicts in a cramped, unornamented hand. Each line stacked authority atop pretext: “instant exorcism or dissolution of disruptive spiritual entities, mortal or otherwise,” framed as a temporary privilege to “safeguard the august person of the sub‑auditor and maintain ritual purity of the ford.”
At dawn, a pliant temple notary was summoned, eyes bleary, seal‑stone already inked. The man barely skimmed the dense script before pressing his god’s turtle‑mark where Mei’s brush indicated. By midday, the edicts were nailed into living wood: shrine pillars, toll‑gate lintels, even the side posts of the slave barracks. To the common eye they were just stern notices, characters marching in tight, severe rows. To Wei Lun’s sharpening perception, they were open maws.
Threadlike ink‑spirits writhed between strokes, tasting the breath, the shadow, the very name‑vapor of all who passed beneath. Each hesitation, each flicker of fear, left a faint aftertaste that curled back along invisible filaments into Mei Rong’s keeping. The edicts did not merely warn; they selected. Any soul the Mei clan chose to point at would find the script already coiled around it, definition and sentence written in the same, unblinking hand.
To cloak his tightening grip in a veneer of piety, Mei Rong proclaimed a grand purification rite to fall exactly on the sub‑auditor’s expected mooring bell, promising to “wash clean the ford’s recent disturbances” before external eyes weighed his ledgers. Under that pretext, carpenters and scribes swarmed the half‑built bridge until it resembled a ritual scaffold more than an engineering work: fresh banners of river‑dyed silk were strung between raw stone arches, stamped with the Registrar’s seal; bronze censers were lash‑tied to creaking poles above the current; temporary platforms were nailed together so officials could stand literally over the water, looking down. Slaves were driven to scour mud, blood, and smoke‑stains from plank and piling, scrubbing away the chase’s footprints while the river’s undercurrent only grew more knotted and murmur‑loud beneath the newly polished jade stones.
The logistics of the coming inspection compressed every important thread into one place and hour. By decree, all registered slaves of the Mei estate, even those from the farthest rope‑ferries and quarry outposts, were to be marched in chains to the half‑built bridge and arrayed as living ledgers, “evidence of orderly management”, their shackles aligned within clear sight of the auditor’s mooring point. Han Yu, bound by the buried clauses of his imperial commission, received a lacquered summons bidding him stand at Mei Rong’s side as “cooperative witness,” even as unfamiliar hamlet‑guards tramped his deck, fingers brushing sword‑hilts while their eyes lingered too long on his sealed scroll‑chests. Zhi, crouched in his cluttered shack by a gutter‑canal, discovered that the experimental ink he had mixed with a drop of Wei Lun’s blood now thrummed whenever fresh seals were hammered up: every vermilion stroke Mei Rong added to his defenses rang through the hedge wizard’s bones like a distant bell, turning the ford itself into a map of pulsing beacons and tightening snares.
Hemmed in by warrants, patrols, and ritual obligations, Wei Lun felt the last of his hiding places close: reassigned to work crews preparing the slave procession, stamped as “spiritually unstable” in a warrant he could sense but not see, and watched by overseers who flinched at every flicker of mist around him. Yet that same compression of fate traced a single narrow path in his mind: the sub‑audit, the purification rite, the auditor’s barge docking alongside the half-built bridge, and the newly empowered edicts all intersected in one moment when river, law, and witness would converge. If he was to sever the ghost’s contract-chains and force Mei Rong’s fraud into the open, it would have to be there. Turning the river’s thin veil into a public tribunal where celestial ink and drowned souls alike might finally speak, even if doing so shattered the ford into a battlefield. In sleepless snatches between shifts he rehearsed seal-gestures behind his back, mapped currents in memory, and listened to the ghost’s fractured murmurs threading through the splash of oars, schooling his fear into something narrow, cold, and sharp enough to cut script.
As ritual clerks unfurled yellow silk across the barge’s prow, Wei Lun watched the river’s reflection thicken: beneath the normal shimmer of water, lines of bone-pale script coiled like submerged eels, looping between bridge pilings, ferry ropes, and the toll pavilion’s shadow. Each loop ended in a hook-shaped character he half-recognized from overheard exorcism warrants, capture, excise, silence. The more he focused, the more the reflections stopped behaving like reflections at all, lagging half a heartbeat behind reality, as if the river were waiting to stamp a verdict already written elsewhere.
The drums on the barge beat a slow threefold cadence, petition, inspection, sealing, but in the water, the pale lines answered with their own rhythm, knots tightening each time the mallet struck. Mist that should have drifted sank instead, drawn down into the written coils, until the Green Serpent’s surface seemed filmed with thin, greasy ink. When a ferryman spat over the side for luck, his sputum hit not water but invisible script; it sizzled and spread, outlining a hidden lattice of characters that vanished the instant Wei Lun blinked.
He shifted in the slave-row, chain biting his wrists, trying to look anywhere else. Yet every gleam of wet stone, every ripple between the pilings, held faint copies of the same looping clause. Even the shadow beneath the half-built bridge had acquired edges of calligraphy, as if someone had written a corridor into the underworld and then shoved it under the ford.
A ritual clerk on the barge lifted a brush thick as a child’s arm and painted a final sweeping stroke on the hanging silk. The stroke did not stay put. Its dark curve bled down through the cloth, dripped into the river’s reflection, and there joined the waiting hooks. The water shuddered (just once, like something restraining itself) and all the coiled script turned, together, to face him.
The ghost surged close, breath frosting Wei Lun’s lips despite the humid heat, a rime so thin no one else could see it. His vision doubled and slid: over the bowed heads of slaves and clerks, a second scene pushed through. The faint outline of a courtroom with dim bronze pillars and ink-black banners hanging motionless in air that was not air. Faceless clerks hunched behind high desks, sleeves stiff with dried ink, scratching at ledgers with broken brushes that squealed rather than wrote.
Pressure built at the base of his skull, a slow screw tightening, a throbbing denial that made his knees buckle against the slave-chain’s drag. Each heartbeat came with someone else’s memory: the rasp of ink scraped off a name until the paper tore; wrists lashed to a desk with red cord that smelled of blood and cinnabar; Mei-family seals descending like hammers, flattening petitions into silence.
The ghost’s panic poured through him in jagged pulses, until a single clear impression drove into his bones so hard his teeth ached and his tongue tasted metal: do not let them finish the rite.
He flicked a glance toward Zhi at the edge of the market crowd, where the hedge wizard loitered beneath a sagging awning of rain-warped charms. For an instant their gazes locked. Zhi’s usual mocking squint was gone; his pupils were pinpoints, sweat edging the grime at his hairline. Instead of some theatrical flourish, his fingers sketched a tiny, urgent circle-and-slash in the air: the sign they’d agreed meant abort, burn the plan, walk away alive if you can. The motion smeared red where earlier talisman ash had singed his skin. Wei Lun’s breath hitched. Abort what? They had nothing but fragments and hope. Yet when he followed Zhi’s darted look toward the toll pavilion, he saw Mei Rong already at the fore of the sub-auditor’s reception line, ink-stained hands folded, lips moving just out of sync with the official prayers, as if murmuring a second, hidden liturgy beneath the sanctioned one, feeding it with the river’s held breath.
Han Yu’s vessel lay at anchor just downstream, banner furled in showy deference to the imperial barge, yet Wei Lun felt the captain’s attention like a taut line threaded through his ribs and knotted around his lungs. Han Yu stood at the rail in formal coat and sword-belt, rain beading on his lashes, gaze cutting between the slave-row, the bruise-dark sky, and Mei Rong’s attendants quietly setting bronze bowls along the waterline. Those bowls were wrong: too many, too close, each rim scratched not with broad, auspicious pleas for safe passage but with cramped, spiraling strokes. Snare-forms Zhi had once traced in nervous candlelight from a stolen manual, nets meant to catch not only spirits but the very memory of their drowning.
The officiating priest lifted a carved wooden fish and struck the gong, calling for silence; the sound rolled over the ford like a lid dropping onto a jar, smothering even the creak of ropes. At that moment the faint pulse from the pavilion seals synchronized with the beat of Wei Lun’s own heart, each thud tightening a cold band of foreboding around his chest, as if ink-cords were being drawn. He saw, with terrible clarity, how every element, the timing of the sub-audit, the placement of the slaves for “inspection,” the storm-laden sky, even his warrant branding him unstable, had been arranged not as an opening, but as a pre-written execution script with no line for appeal. Yet when the first wave of wind pushed ripples toward the midstream ferry, his body moved on older instincts than fear or obedience: if he did nothing, the river would take the chained laborers with him, nameless into the depths, their erasure feeding the very ledgers that condemned him.
The officiating priest’s second gongstroke had barely faded when the river’s skin rippled: not from the wind now shunting low under the bruise-colored clouds, but from something deeper and off-tempo in the darker channel. The surface shivered in concentric rings, as if struck from beneath by an unseen bell. Wei Lun watched the midstream deepen in a single breath, the green of the shallows darkening to ink. A bulge of water thickened there, pushing stubbornly against the natural grain of the current, swelling in place like a held breath before it broke loose.
It rolled forward as a low wall, no higher than a man’s chest yet heavy with purpose, dragging an undertow that clawed at the riverbed stones. The air around the ford thinned. Voices that had been muttering prayers and gossip a heartbeat before cut off, mouths still open. For that suspended instant, even the reed-fringe at the banks seemed to bow, as if the whole crossing were listening for a verdict.
Then the surge struck.
The freight ferry, nothing more than a wide, squat platform slick with spilled grain dust and rain, crowded with hunched backs linked by iron, met the wall of water sideways. It lurched as if something massive had kicked it from below. One end jumped, the other dug in, plowing a furrow through the surface foam. Bodies slammed against rail and planking; chained ankles skidded, went out from under. Someone screamed, short and sharp, cut off as their teeth clicked shut on their tongue.
The thick tow-rope, tarred and twice-wrapped around the pier-post, snapped with a sound obscenely like a limb giving way in a joint. Its severed length lashed back toward the toll pavilion in a wet blur, whipping across the dock. An overseer went down, hands to his face; blood and rope fibers sprayed together.
Spray sheeted over the front ranks of petitioners and traders waiting under the red-lacquered gate. They recoiled as one, silk hems and rough hemp alike dragging through suddenly flooded mud, umbrellas tilting uselessly. Ledgers and prayer-slips spattered dark as droplets soaked into ink. A woman’s offering tray upended, copper coins and rice scattering into the standing water only to be snatched at once by the hungry pull sliding back toward midstream.
On the half-built bridge pilings, prayer ribbons snapped and snapped again, torn loose to whirl down like pale, drowning serpents. The gong’s last vibration died against the toll pavilion’s carved beams, leaving in its wake only the rising roar of disordered water and the high, panicked bark of orders from Mei Rong’s guards as the tethered ferry began to swing, broadside, toward the deep.
Wei Lun felt the pull first through the soles of his bare feet where they pressed into slick, algae-slick stone, a nauseating resonance vibrating up his shins, through kneecaps and spine, until his teeth hummed with it. It matched, beat for off-kilter beat, the thudding pulse of the pavilion seals: an ink-heart somewhere behind him slamming shut, again and again, around unseen names. The tether-line linking his wrists to the other inspection slaves snapped taut without warning, burning hemp into his skin as forty bodies lurched as one. Men went to their knees, curses strangled with fear; iron collars clanged, a choked sob broke into a wet cough.
He did not think. Thought belonged to ledgers and hesitation, and there was no time left for either. If the ferry swung flat into the deepened channel, its chained cargo would go down like a dropped abacus, every bead a life counted only as lost property. He twisted hard against the binding rope, shoulder screaming as joints ground, ribs flaring with white heat. Fibers rasped over one another; the line bowed, then grudgingly gave, a hand’s-breadth of slack. No more, but enough. He drove his weight sideways into that scant looseness, exploding out of the line’s sagging center like a stone from a failed sling, boots scraping for purchase before he flung himself toward the broken lip of the bank, where stone ended and the river’s bruised gleam waited.
He hit the drop in three running strides, the packed mud vanishing from under his soles. For an instant he hung over a smear of broken reflections, storm-bruise sky, the flailing black line of the ferry’s shadow, and then the river rose to meet him. Cold air knifed past; then jade-green and silt-brown slammed over his shaved head, ramming icy needles into his sinuses and ears. Sound tore away. The roar of voices on the bank sheared off mid-scream, replaced by the thick, enclosed thunder of moving water and the frantic hammering under his own ribs. Darkness mottled with debris pressed close. Instinct surged where drilled obedience would have frozen: fingers fanning, wrists cutting tight arcs as he slashed seal-gestures through the murk, groping to catch the onrushing force and spread it thin, to coax the angry swell into veiling mist rather than a killing blow, to buy one breath more for the chained men above.
Water thickened to glass around his forearms, his spread fingers suddenly moving as if through stamped clay. The faint, familiar shimmer of his own mist-script guttered, smothered beneath heavier strokes that slotted into place around him like filing shelves closing. He felt, rather than saw, clauses lock each condition an iron bar in an unseen cage.
Pain flared white. The net tightened with juridical precision; every glowing barb carried a clause, every loop a stamped verdict. His lungs spasmed; breath became ink dragged through a clogged brush. The ghost shuddered close, a cold pressure at his back, and the biting glyphs slid through it as well, snagging two beings on one snare. Panic flared, useless. There was nowhere to push, nothing to push with. The river he had always felt as a restless, half-willing partner now moved past like a disinterested clerk shuffling sealed scrolls, indifferent to which name sank unread.
The ferry lurched again as the surge rolled under it, pitching the deck to a treacherous angle; men slid in a tangle of limbs and chains, the wet clatter of iron swallowed by the river’s roar. Han Yu’s boots skidded on slime-slick planks; hemp rope and green algae smeared under his soles, offering no purchase. For a breath he felt his weight go weightless, the world tilting (sky, scaffold, boiling water all trading places) then his shoulder slammed into the mast. Wood bit into bone. He caught himself with one arm wrapped hard around the rough, tar-streaked pole and, with the other, he lunged blind, seizing the nearest slave by the back of his sodden tunic just as the man’s shackled feet lost the deck.
Iron links snapped taut across Han Yu’s knuckles, biting into callus and old sword-scars. The man’s full weight yanked his arm long; tendons flared fire up into his shoulder. The slave’s shaved head dipped over the ravaged rail, spray exploding against his face, then Han Yu hauled with everything he had, dragging him in against the mast, pinning him there with his own body as the ferry’s bow sawed down into another trough.
A second man slammed into his side, carried by the slide of bodies and loosened cargo. Chain hammered his thigh, a metal garland trying to take his legs out from under him. For an instant all three of them caromed together, a knot of limbs and iron on the slanting boards, momentum taking them toward the yawning gap where the railing had torn free. Han Yu’s heel caught on the splintered stump of a post; pain flared, but the jolt checked their slide by a finger’s width.
He drove his weight backward, shoulder and spine grinding against the mast, boots hunting for the least ridge in the water-greased planks. Muscles corded along his back and arms, tendons in his neck standing out as he braced, feeling the entire vessel shiver under him like a panicked animal straining against the one rope that still held it. Every roll of the hull translated through his bones: the sick rise of the starboard rail, the hollow slam of water against the underside, the ominous creak of timbers not built for this angle. Beneath that, in the gut-voice he trusted more than charts, he felt the pull of the undertow: a steady, murderous hand closing around the ferry’s belly, trying to flip it and grind everything underneath into the jade-colored stones.
“Cut that tether or she’ll roll!” someone howled from the scaffold, voice snatched thin by the wind. No knife moved. The remaining tow-line had already locked rigid, turned from plaited hemp into something like an iron spar, creaking as it bit into the groaning bollard. Each heave of the surge drove the ferry further off true, the line grinding a deep, splintering groove into the mooring post, showering pale sawdust onto froth.
Forward, the broken chain at the bow thrashed and snapped, a headless serpent lashing the air. Every crack flung fans of river water broadside; where the droplets struck Zhi’s earlier chalk and ink-scrawled wards along the painted rail, they hissed and spat in tiny flashes of blue-white, sigils flaring, then guttering to ash. Protective loops twisted into nonsense. A charm-strip detonated into soggy confetti, useless as wet straw against the weight of written fate bearing down.
Han Yu’s gaze jerked from the skewed line of river and sky to the toll bank. Crowds boiled and surged there, overseers waving, laborers pointing, villagers clutching prayer beads, yet at their center Mei Rong’s dark-blue sleeves hung perfectly straight. The scribe-noble stood with his bamboo case tucked under one arm, jade tally gleaming, lips pressed in a narrow line of polite concern that never reached his eyes. He neither shouted orders nor signaled the boatmen. He simply watched.
Recognition slid cold through Han Yu’s stomach, cutting through the roar and lurch. Storm, surge, snapped chain, failed wards, immobile official: the pieces locked together with ledgers’ neat inevitability. There was nothing random in how this “accident” unfolded.
Two guards in Mei colors dropped from the scaffold onto the canted deck with a river-born sailor’s balance, knees bending to drink the tilt as if they’d rehearsed it on calm water a hundred times. They landed in a low, widening crouch between Han Yu and the worst of the slide, backs to the void, sleeves neat despite the spray. “Honored Captain, please withdraw to safety,” the nearer called, his voice smooth over the roar, breath unhurried. His free hand braced lightly on the mast, the other resting on his sword-hilt in a posture that was almost a bow and almost a threat.
Behind, two more planted themselves across the warped gangplank, boots straddling the splintered gap, shoulders squared to form a tidy human palisade. One held a coil of unused line, its end dangling just out of any slave’s reach; his thumb idly stroked the binding-knot near his belt as if measuring how long it would take to cinch it around a man’s throat instead of a fallen comrade. Their blades slid in their scabbards with a dry, anticipatory whisper, steel glinting half-revealed, angled not quite at anyone. The ferried slaves, bodies jostled by the pitching deck, found themselves funnelled away from that narrow route of escape, pressed back by the mute geometry of crossed arms and sheathed swords. One wrong lunge, one desperate hand on blue silk, and protocol would bloom into sanctioned violence: an orderly answer already waiting for chaos that had not yet occurred.
Han Yu’s gaze jerked to the waterline where the ferry’s warped edge sawed against the churning green. Between the slap of waves he caught, impossibly clear, a pale contour twisting just below, lashed by ghostly threads of ink-light. Characters spiraling tight like a noose around a drowning form. Recognition hit like a fist to the chest: that gaunt frame, that way the current clung as if reluctant to release him. Not a doubt, not a guess: a certainty sinking claws into his marrow. “Men overboard!” he bellowed, voice shredding against wind and spray as he thrust an arm past the guards. “Lines. Throw lines, now!” Boatmen flinched, hands twitching toward coiled ropes, but the nearest overseer’s jaw locked. His gaze slid, not to the drowning patch of froth, but uphill toward the toll pavilion’s red gate, measuring the distance to Mei Rong’s still, unreadable figure. Orders warred with instinct in his eyes, and for the space of a single, monstrous heartbeat, obedience to ink and seal outweighed the weight of flailing lives below.
The ferry sagged further, prow knifing into the undertow so sharply the world seemed to cant on a broken hinge; screams pitched higher as chained bodies sluiced toward the sunken rail in a helpless, sliding knot of limbs and iron. The last intact section gave with a splintering crack. Three men vanished in a fan of foam, chains jerking taut; a fourth was yanked to his knees, throat striking the spar with a wet choke. Han Yu lunged on instinct, fingers rasping cold links before a guard’s forearm stamped across his chest, pinning him with a murmured, almost apologetic, “For your own safety, my lord.” Steel and etiquette closed around him like a ritual circle. Forced to stand, to see the overloaded hull poise on the edge of rolling Han Yu understood, with a cold clarity sharper than fear, that Mei’s courteous “protection” was a deliberate yoke: binding him as helpless witness, not permitted rescuer, to the drowning of one man and the neat erasure of a crime.
On the toll pavilion steps, Mei Rong lifted his sleeve just enough to brush the jade tally at his belt, fingers smearing a faint sheen of rain across its carved face. The tally’s edges were worn where generations of Mei scribes had gripped it, but the characters etched within (Authority, Annex, Rectify) gleamed as if freshly incised. He pressed the pad of his thumb to the final sigil, feeling the almost-imperceptible warmth of bureaucratic qi answer him, and under his breath he murmured the activation line that turned a mundane inspection rite into a killing mechanism: a clause nested inside a clause, buried deep where only he and his ancestor’s shade had ever traced.
Above the ford, thunder muttered like a judge consulting hidden ledgers. The air thickened; the smell of wet stone and ink grew sharp. The golden seal at Mei Rong’s brow flared to a precise, pinched brightness, neither wild nor grand. Just exact, like the point of a brush touching paper. Invisible strokes wrote themselves through the rain, racing down along unseen channels that braided toll pavilion, bridge piling, and shrine foundation stone into one compliant circuit.
Far below, where the Green Serpent River rolled green-black over its jade bed, the first of his ghost-nets unfurled.
They did not look like nets to mortal eyes, only a sudden stiffening in the current, a knot in the flow, but Wei Lun’s unseen companion would have seen them as written thunderheads boiling out of the riverbed, each knot a contract, each droplet a seal. Loops of inked clauses coalesced from cold light, lines of cramped, ruthless calligraphy spiraling in concentric rings. They tightened around the shadowed hollow his diagrams had marked days ago: the point where barge-drag and hidden undertow crossed, the exact span a chained slave would thrash through when the “freak surge” struck.
Mei Rong’s lids lowered, lashes beaded with rain. In his mind’s eye he followed the alignment he had calculated by lamp-smoke and abacus: the sub-auditor’s barge anchored at the prescribed angle; the half-built bridge forcing the flood into a harsher curve; the overloaded ferry nudged off its usual cable-line by a single, innocuous adjustment to the mooring-stone. All sketched in beforehand, all signed off as “necessary accommodations for imperial inspection.” Now the river merely traced the lines he had already written.
The tally at his belt pulsed once, acknowledging the snare’s first contact. A faint tremor flickered along the golden seal at his brow as the net brushed both flesh and ghost in the depths. Mei Rong’s mouth did not move, but in the hollow behind his ribs a quiet, ledger-keeper’s satisfaction clicked into place like an abacus bead sliding home.
“Protect the imperial observers! Clear the banks. No panicking!” he called, letting the words crack like a whip over the roar of water and terrified shouting. The command rang with the right blend of alarm and drilled composure, precisely the tone manuals prescribed for calamities that must appear unfortunate but contained. He slashed a hand toward the knot of guards hemming Han Yu in, and they tightened formation at once, interposing lacquered shields and drawn steel as if defending a fragile relic rather than a man already straining toward the flood.
At the same moment, Mei Rong pivoted, sleeve snapping wetly as he fixed a junior scribe with a hard glance. “Emergency protocols. Now.” The youth fumbled open a bamboo case, spilling a rolled scroll into Mei’s waiting hand. Ink bled faintly where mist had kissed the silk, but the prepared headings shone through: INCIDENT / IRREGULAR SPIRITUAL AGITATION / PROTECTIVE MEASURES. Under the sub-auditor’s narrowed eyes, Mei Rong’s brush moved in swift, immaculate strokes, slotting this chaos into a waiting template. A few added clauses and careful phrasings turned a premeditated snare into a documented “sudden agitation by unregistered spirits,” and vested him, on record, with full authority to unleash “immediate exorcistic measures in defense of imperial property and personnel,” all while appearing the reluctant servant of imperial order.
Rain-specks deepened the blue at his cuffs as he raised both hands in a priest’s calming posture, fingers combing slow, orthodox circles over the seething ford. To the crowd, it was textbook supplication: placate the Registrar, soothe the flood. In truth, every rotation of his wrist plucked at hidden ligatures inked years ago into bridge-pilings and shrine stones, threads that stitched his private ledgers to the empire’s clean-edged edicts. He felt them answer with a silken, gratifying drag: one strand sinking like a hook into the drowning slave’s branded skin, another slipping around the ice-cold, half-glimpsed knot of the haunting clerk that had smeared his accounts with anomalies. Clause after buried clause cinched tight, the river’s rage folding neatly into his handwriting.
When a ragged shout went up, Zhi, somewhere near the market stalls, hurling a fistful of crude, rain-smeared talismans toward the foam, Mei Rong pivoted smoothly, sleeve flaring as if to shield the sub-auditor from stray sparks. His invisible wards rose at a thought, a transparent curtain of calligraphed vetoes stitched from prior decrees; the hedge-wizard’s charms hit that barrier and detonated in a stuttering spray of light, ink-lines blistering, curling, and running like cheap dye under boiling water. The shock rattled lesser clerks; Mei merely narrowed his eyes, then let the faint tightening at the corner of his mouth dissolve into a mask of pained, dutiful concern.
“Unfortunate… deeply unfortunate,” he murmured, letting the words fall heavy enough for nearby clerks to hear, already dictating to a second scribe crouched beneath the eaves, brush trembling above fresh silk. “Record: one laborer lost to sudden river turbulence during sacred inspection: omens grave, but protocols followed precisely. Add: unidentified hostile talisman interference, suspected outside agitator, origin under investigation.” He angled his body toward the sub-auditor in practiced deference, shoulders dipping under a display of weary obligation. Inside, the last figures aligned: nets sealed, anomaly contained, ledger risks erased. Once the foam flattened and the cries on the bank thinned to numb murmurs, the Jade Ford would read as impeccably balanced in every visible book, whatever the river might remember.
The clerk-god’s gaze bored into him, not pleading but measuring, as if each heartbeat were a bead sliding along an invisible abacus. No pity, no rage: only assessment, columns of red and black tallied in eyes filmed with silt. Around them, the ghost-net tightened by imperceptible increments, threads dragging through water like wet silk drawn over whetstone. Each filament carried script, tiny, knife-fine clauses, that bit when they brushed flesh or shade, shearing slivers from both.
When Wei Lun exhaled, bubbles burst against the threads; in their trembling skins he saw miniature characters shimmer and settle, adding themselves to clauses already strangling them. Every instinct screamed to thrash, to kick for the wavering brightness above, but the first jerk of his arm tore a strip of qi so cleanly he felt it as absence rather than pain. The trailing cold at his back, the presence that had haunted corridor shadows and river mists since childhood, jerked with him, snagging on a dozen unseen barbs. Its formless weight smeared thin, dragged through the mesh like ink forced through coarse paper.
The more he strained, the more the net answered, adjusting like a practiced hand correcting an errant stroke. Hooks, invisible until they sank, suddenly gleamed with cramped seal-script as they embedded in his shoulders, his ribs, the ghost’s half-formed limbs. Heat and cold mingled into one raw sting. His fingers no longer felt like his own; they were numb reeds tugged by current and clause alike, caught in someone else’s handwriting.
Sound warped into pressure. The river’s roar dulled to a dense, enclosing hush, broken only by the thunder of his pulse. Somewhere above, ritual drums boomed. Each beat seemed to answer the net’s constriction, as if the ceremony itself were tightening the snare by liturgy and rhythm.
His chest burned, every stolen mouthful of air now a fading memory rather than a promise. Within that suffocating blur, lines blurred further: the ache in his lungs, the distant panic that might have been the ghost’s or his own, the frost seeping from his spine into the water. The boundary between skin and haunting dissolved until he could not tell if it was his heart hammering, or the clerk’s quill tapping impatiently against an unseen margin, counting down the last empty spaces left beside his name.
A shard of foreign memory slammed through him, sharper than the hooks. A cramped archive cubicle, walls sweating mildew; fingers cramped around a wolf-hair brush; the slow, sticky drip of lamp oil down a cracked stand. Columns of neat black script marched across a ledger, all but one, “irregularities”, left stubbornly clean. His, no, the clerk’s, hand hovered above that blank space, brush-tip trembling, Mei-family seals glittering like watchful eyes at the margin. Each unused stroke was a swallowed accusation.
The scene buckled, folding into the river’s dark. That same brush-hand became his own, knuckles bone-white, and the ledger-column yawned inside his chest instead of on paper.
Along his arms, pale-blue characters burst awake, not as scattered sparks but as ordered lines, whole clauses unscrolling from wrist to shoulder. They flared in answer to the ghost’s golden shackles, aligning stroke for stroke until blue and gold formed a single, interlocking script. The surrounding current hit that pattern and stuttered. Eddies curled inward, hesitating, as if the Green Serpent itself bent close, scales whispering, to study the joined writing and decide how it should be read.
Zhi’s warning rose up from some half-remembered night on the riverbank, when cheap wine and fear had loosened the hedge wizard’s tongue: the tale of an old registrar whose true name once summoned a flood tribunal that drowned a whole estate in legal rain. Not storm, not whim of god or sky, but rain falling in measured sheets, each drop stamped with clause and counter-clause, every rooftop and rat-hole filled according to statute until all accounts were “cleared.” “Names are ledgers, boy,” Zhi had muttered, breath thick with liquor and incense smoke. “You call a registrar, you’re handing it your account book, blank lines and all. It’ll balance you, one way or another.” Now, seeing the clerk-god’s ink-smeared face and the shattered dignity of its chains, Wei Lun understood with a lancing certainty: that forgotten registrar’s title had not vanished; it had been buried, stroke by stroke, in the erased corridors of his own name.
It hit with a bladed, merciless clarity: his own erasure and the ghost’s gagged testimony were not parallel injustices but two halves of a single entry brutally scraped from the river’s accounts. The slave tally at his nape, the faded sigils, the missing strokes where his clan-name should have rippled through Mei ledgers: all resolved into one long, empty column awaiting balance. To speak the hidden office coiled inside the clerk-god was to slide that emptiness beneath its brush, to offer his unwritten lines as margin and collateral both. Either the resurrected authority would shear through Mei’s woven clauses like rotten hemp, or it would come down upon him as a flawless vermilion seal, pressing flesh, memory, and borrowed script flat into official, elegant nothing.
With the undertow grinding him against invisible anchors of script, Wei Lun stopped struggling and forced his fingers into a slower, more deliberate mudra, tracing the pattern Zhi had only dared sketch in river-mist, never ink, for fear that any paper would be seized as evidence. The pale-blue calligraphy on his arms surged, lines unkinking into an archaic sigil of office older than any Mei charter, older even than the stone markers buried beneath the ford. The clerk-god’s eyes widened, accusation shifting into fierce, desperate recognition, as if a superior seal had finally arrived to countersign its strangled report. Pain lanced through Wei Lun’s chest as his last air bled away, ribs creaking, but he shaped his lips around the forbidden title that rose unbidden from the stolen memories, a registrar’s full honor-name meant only to be spoken at investiture and judgment, under bright lamps and witness tablets, and let the dark water carry the first syllable into the bones of the ford.
Soundless to air and ear, the uttered stroke knifed outward through black water and riverbed silt, a cold resonance that made the very grains of sand shiver in their layered beds. The ghost-net sigils convulsed. Lines that had been clean, ruthless loops of vermilion contract began to fuzz and crawl, as if a drop of unapproved ink had fallen across them from some higher desk. Clauses that had run one direction, downward, toward erasure, hesitated, their tiny ticks of notation trembling as though they no longer knew which column they belonged to.
Where the golden chains pinned the clerk-god, characters lifted from metal like startled fish. They wriggled free one stroke at a time, shedding authority as they rose, their edges fraying into hair-fine threads of light. Around Wei Lun’s limbs, the nets that had tightened with the mechanical certainty of stamped edicts now quivered, meshes bulging in and out as contradictions flickered through their woven script: two different seals occupying the same line, one old and ocean-deep, one neat and freshly pressed in Mei Rong’s tidy hand.
The clerk-god’s bound form spasmed. Script that had been shuttering its eyes did not simply part; each lash-mark of ink unraveled into vertical columns, thin as reed-shadows, rolling back from its face like scrolls forced open against their ties. From the corner of one half-liberated eye, a single bead of ink gathered and broke loose. It floated between them, impossibly black, viscous as regret, then stretched under the syllable’s lingering vibration.
In its teardrop length, Wei Lun glimpsed rows upon rows of delicate account-lines: debtor, creditor, offense, redress, each heading stamped in an archaic hand that made Mei ledgers look like a child’s practice sheets. Names, smudged, half-vanished, violently scratched out, flickered through that hanging script. His own missing strokes flashed there like a gap torn in a column, bracketed by the faint ghosts of an ancestral office-title.
The ink-tear thinned, strands loosening into pale, luminous tally-marks that hissed as they touched the ghost-nets. Wherever they brushed the contracts, new sub-clauses budded like mold, annotations in a registrar’s cramped, uncompromising marginalia: “improperly bound,” “jurisdiction disputed,” “evidence suppressed pending superior review.” The nets shuddered, their knots grinding against Wei Lun’s skin as if they suddenly weighed not less but far, far more, sagging under the burden of unresolved entries they had never been authorized to carry.
Yet under that weight, a hairline slack appeared.
The unraveling columns streamed away into the current, seeping along the riverbed, tracing the invisible boundary-stones of the Jade Ford. Old agreements woke like dust-choked lungs taking a first breath; forgotten signatures on submerged rocks flared and dimmed in response. In the clerk-god’s half-bared gaze, accusation did not fade, but sharpened, gaining focus as if a witness finally recognized the court convening around him.
On the surface, that unspeakable sound rose as a faint, discordant tone under the storm’s growl, not quite thunder, not quite wind: a thin, metallic keening that made teeth and talismans ache. The rite-drums stuttered, mallets striking off-beat; one drumhead split with a dry, offended crack, its leather curling as if scalded. The officiant’s hand froze midstrike, veins standing out along his wrist, the lacquered stick hovering above the ruined skin. Sweat beaded along his spine despite the river-cold, each droplet prickling as though ink-brush hairs dragged lightly over his back, tracing characters he could not see.
The ferry’s violent rocking slackened for a heartbeat. The boiling water at its gunwale drew in on itself like a held breath, froth collapsing into a glassy, concave sheen that reflected sky, pavilion, and hanging ledgers in warped, trembling miniature. Han Yu’s footing shifted as that sudden stillness stole the expected sway from under him; his boots slipped a fraction on wet planks, throwing him momentarily off-balance, his own sword half-drawn but arrested. The guard’s blade still kissed his throat, cold and humid, yet no longer pressed forward. The arm behind it slackened, eyes gone wide and unfocused, as if listening to some unheard decree issuing up through the hull.
Under the toll pavilion’s awning, Mei Rong’s brush hand spasmed. The neat column of figures he had been composing shattered as a blot of ink burst across the audit register. Before his eyes, that random splatter cinched itself into form: a heavy, archaic header he had only ever seen in worm-eaten manuals: three grim characters declaring “Emergency Inquest.” The paper shivered under the stroke. His jade tally seared against his hip, light leaking through silk like a concealed brand flaring in open court. It did not answer his grip or whispered counter-seal; instead it tilted, resonant, as though bowing to some invisible, superior credential. For the first time in years, true fear cracked his cultivated poise. The ford’s layered contracts were no longer obeying him; they were being summoned, refiled, under a higher docket.
On the riverbank, Zhi felt the syllable like a nail driven through the air, pinning breath and thought; the scattered scraps of his failed talismans twitched in the mud, threads of faded script slithering together to sketch a crude, shimmering boundary-circle around his crouched form. Blistered fingers shaking, he dared not add a stroke, sensing that any clumsy interference might collapse whatever precarious invocation Wei Lun had triggered between drowning and decree, refuge and indictment, turning his makeshift ward from shield into evidence.
Deep below, as Wei Lun’s vision narrowed to a tunnel of murky light, the crushing pressure of three realms’ ledgers wavered; quill-shapes and abacus-ghosts in the dark current hesitated, beads arrested mid-click. The classification-stamp descending toward his dimming spirit slowed to a crawl, its carved verdict of “lost in service” blurring at the edges, strokes unhooking, radicals dissolving into raw ink. Balanced between oblivion and proclamation, he forced the rest of the blasphemous name through water-scorched lungs, not as plea but as an act of recognition (a clerk acknowledging superior seal) and the ford itself shivered, choosing to listen, silt and script tilting as dockets rewrote around his heart.
The registrar’s name left his torn throat like a shard of ice, each syllable weighted with the bone-deep certainty that it belonged to him as much as to any distant god. The current around his body convulsed once, then smoothed, flattening into a sheet of black glass that swallowed the last of his bubbles and reflected not the sky above, but stacked shelves of drifting, waterlogged scrolls.
Cold drove into him from every side, not the numbness of drowning but a precise, cutting chill that traced his meridians and pried open locked gates of qi. The half-faded sigils on his scalp flared, not in the dull red of slave brands but in a thin, pale-blue radiance; the calligraphy racing across his forearms uncoiled of its own accord, strokes aligning into neat columns like clerks snapping to attention.
Sound vanished. The drum of the river in his ears, the distant shouts from the banks, even the frantic thud of his own heart. Everything was pressed flat beneath a silence that felt stamped and filed. In that silence, the registrar’s name echoed again, not from his mouth this time but from the dark water itself, spoken in a dozen overlapping tones: a child’s gasp, an old scribe’s cough, a drowning man’s last exhale. Each voice struck him like a seal pressed into wet clay.
The glass beneath him deepened, its surface resolving into lines of ledgers stretching down instead of outward. He saw narrow desks grown from river-stone, inkstones slick with algae, brushes floating like trapped minnows. Scrolls drifted past his face, their edges frayed, characters blurred by years of silt and neglect. With each scroll that passed, his lungs spasmed, demanding air; with each, the cold hand of panic clawed higher in his chest.
He clenched his jaw until his teeth ground, forcing that terror sideways, feeding it into the thin threads of qi he still controlled. Water and mist: this was all water and mist, just thickened into form and clause. He let his fingers twitch through the seal-gestures he had pieced together in darkness and eavesdropping: stabilizing tide, opening docket, witnessing ink.
The mirror-river accepted the gestures as if they had always been part of its flow. A faint ring of ripples spread from his hands, not upward but inward, circling through the reflected shelves. Characters along the scroll-backs shivered, old titles peeling away: “Supplemental Slave Census,” “Adjustments to Toll-Exempt Lineages,” “Unregistered Casualties (Minor).”
His half-stolen cultivation strained, every channel in his body buzzing on the edge of tearing. Somewhere, distant and muffled, he felt the tug of his physical form beginning to sink, felt rough rope biting his wrists, tasted blood and silt. If he let go now, the river would simply close and erase this glimpse as it had erased his name.
He forced more of himself into the invocation, not merely qi but memory. The cold mud of the barracks floor, the hiss of overseers’ whips, Han Yu’s callused hand closing for an instant around his own at the ferry’s rail, Zhi’s drunken mutter: “Names stick, boy, even when they’re scraped from the tablet. Ink remembers what stone forgets.”
“Ink remembers,” he mouthed, though no bubbles rose. The words scratched across the inside of his skull, catching on something buried. The registrar’s name flared brighter, not as a foreign title but as a line returning to an empty ledger space.
The shelves shuddered. Several scrolls tore free of their drifting ranks and spun toward him, their cords snapping like rotten reeds. As they wheeled, their seals cracked hairline-fractures that bled thin streams of black ink into the water. The ink did not disperse. It coiled, forming hesitant strokes that reached for his glowing forearms, as if hungry to rewrite themselves along his skin.
Within that mirror-dark, the clerk-ghost’s face sharpened from a smudge of drowned ink into hard lines and hollow cheeks; its lotus-pale eyes snapped open, pupils pinpricked with tally-marks that ticked and rearranged like abacuses tallying lost years. Waterlogged hair drifted around its head in slow, bureaucratic curls, each strand threaded with minuscule clause-marks. The chains of clause-script wound around its limbs halted mid-tightening, a dozen half-completed subparagraphs hanging in the water like rusted hooks. Characters began to fray and unmake themselves, strokes unlooping with a dry, papery crackle that he felt more than heard.
The ghost turned, not with the sluggish drag of the drowned but with the crisp pivot of a clerk called to witness. Its gaze locked to Wei Lun’s, and in that instant he felt something in his own erased name tug free, as if a missing entry in a ledger had just found the hand that wrote it. Recognition, cold, professional, and furious, flared in those tally-mark eyes, not at him but past him, up through the black glass toward the ford above, like an accusation rising to the surface.
The river’s surface, split between panic and stillness, transmitted the shock upward: the half-capsized ferry froze in the act of overturning, its passengers suspended mid-scream with ropes stiff as carved wood and spray arrested around the hull like a halo of glass beads. Oars hung motionless above the water, their dripping arcs carved into the air as if caught in an unseen engraver’s plate. A fallen crate hovered just above the river’s skin, scattered grain locked in a radiant burst between deck and dark. A guard’s whip hung mid-snap, lash-tip a single black stroke poised over a cowering slave’s bare back. Breath, spittle, tears. Every fleeing droplet became a fixed character in a sudden, terrible script of halted consequence.
On the south bank, the toll pavilion shuddered as if its beams remembered drowning. Mei Rong’s hanging ledgers flared with corpse-pale light; columns of figures bled loose, ink jerking from paper in staccato strokes that clawed the air. Tally-slips snapped open against his grasp, paragraphs rearranging themselves into accusatory glosses he had never penned. Across the ford, at the smoke-blackened shrine, the River Registrar’s worn tablet throbbed once like a buried heart. Hairline script, long effaced by rain and greasy offerings, rose in faint relief; ash heaped in brass bowls rippled without wind, incense-stubs toppling to spell broken clause-marks along the rim. Bronze bells quivered on their rotted cords, chiming only in the bones of those who had ever signed this river’s name.
Spines arched; hands spasmed on rope, pole, abacus bead. For one flensed instant, all along both banks, breath became petition. Then stopped. Han Yu’s fingers whitened on his sword-hilt, veins rising like inked tributaries as his unvoiced warning flattened into silence. Below that suspended inhalation, something vast and clerkly yawned awake: seals unseated, boundary-stones brightened, and the ford’s invisible docket crashed open, re-stamping the mud, water, and watching souls as “Present, obligated, answerable.”
The pale-blue scripts that had always flickered fitfully on Wei Lun’s arms flared, lines thickening and joining until they formed bands of living calligraphy that unspooled from his skin like pennants in a storm. Each stroke curved with deliberate intent, no longer wild sparks of stray cultivation but ordered characters that wound around his wrists, chest, and throat before lashing outward into the drowned dark.
They did not blaze like fire; they seeped like cold ink into water, each character trailing a wake of hoarfrost that pearled along his veins. Under the river’s crushing weight, his hemp sleeves shredded soundlessly, fibers parting around the script as if the cloth had never truly owned his flesh. New lines etched themselves across tendons and bone, narrow strokes biting in with the precise pressure of a clerk’s brush on damp paper. The pain came late, like a belated seal-strike: a deep, grinding ache as if his very registration in the world was being redrafted.
The bands did not stop at his skin. They coiled once around his heart, tightening until his pulse stuttered and fell into an alien cadence. Gong beat, brush tap, tally click. Each thud sent ripples through the water-qi in his meridians, forcing it into neat columns and ledgers instead of formless currents. Breath fled his lungs; in its place rose the metallic taste of old ink and yellowed bamboo slips, as though he were inhaling a thousand forgotten memorials dissolved in the riverbed below.
Characters brushed the inside of his skull, skimming memories that were not his: dim archive corridors lined with bone-white shelves; a bent figure hunched over an endless river of scrolls; a seal-press descending like a hammer onto some unlucky name. Wei Lun’s teeth chattered as those alien images collided with his own half-drowned childhood: whips cracking over the ford, slaves slipping under, bubbles breaking the surface without a single name called after.
The calligraphy tightened, sensing that shared crease of pain. Strokes that had once been stamped into him as ownership-marks shivered loose, rising from scar and scalp as faint, ghostly negatives. They hovered for a heartbeat (chains spelled in cramped clerk-hand) then broke apart, their segments snapping into place among the new flowing bands. What had been command-script reassembled into clause-script, the grammar of bargains rather than branding. Every loop and hook that had once marked him as property bent, almost stubbornly, toward a different syntax: not “owned” but “bound with.”
Above him, somewhere beyond the frozen surface, the halted ford pressed down like a lacquered lid. Below, in the colder dark where the river met its shadow, something smiled through split ink-stains and waterlogged seals. The bands, feeling that answering pull, sharpened their course: no longer merely radiance bleeding into depth, but deliberate filings drawn toward a buried magnet of authority waiting to be claimed.
Those streaming bands plunged into the dark like thrown seals, threads of living calligraphy arrowing unerringly toward the pressure in the depths. They struck the shackled clerk-ghost’s cracked tally board and chipped inkstone with the soundless force of a thousand stamped decrees. Where they touched, old restraints did not merely fall away. They fissured along hairline clause-marks, shuddered, then burst apart in flaking shells of obsolete ordinance, lacquered chains splintering into sleet.
Rust-brown binding script that had crusted the tally for decades liquefied into bright, running strokes, reversing direction mid-flow. One by one, the ghost’s half-faded registration marks, blurred seals at cuff and collar, the smudged emblem at his brow, brightened, lines thickening to crisp sigils of properly vested office. Behind the ink-cloud of his face, socket-shadows kindled with the cold gleam of bureaucratic recognition: not a stray haunt, but Clerk-of-Record, temporarily unaccounted for.
At the same time, heatless ink surged back along the bands into Wei Lun. The talisman-brands on his shaved scalp twisted against his skin, their slave-scripts convulsing as if offended, then bending under unseen brush-pressure. Strokes unhooked and rejoined, ownership radicals shedding like scales to reveal a new structure beneath. Inverted, cross-grained, and redrafted against every legal precedent, they knit themselves into a fine, humming lattice that linked his pulse to the ghost’s lingering mandate. A mesh of joint authority between bondman and missing scribe that no office had ever authorized, yet the river, and something above it, grudgingly acknowledged.
His fingers no longer felt like flesh; they were brush-tips jammed into an invisible inkstone, dragged by a calligrapher who knew neither mercy nor pause. Each joint snapped through a practiced curve that he had never been taught, only watched from shadows: filing-stroke, witnessing-stroke, the hooked turn that, in office manuals, marked “joint liability.” In the black water between his palms and the ghost’s half-seen hands, pale strokes flared and sank, layering upon one another until they formed not a sigil but a clause, then not a clause but an edict. Line by line, it rewrote his status from “chattel, transferable” to “co-signatory, indivisible,” lashing his mortal breath to the clerk’s interrupted tenure beneath a single, veiled invocation of the River Registrar’s true style.
Cold hammered through his meridians as river-qi fused with bureaucratic qi; his muscles locked, then hollowed, as if he were being rewritten from the inside out by some invisible clerk. Breath would not come. In place of air, he dragged in the weight of drowned petitions and unsigned warrants, the thrash of unreported deaths, the chill of names never inked on spirit rolls, filling his lungs with the press of all that unacknowledged record until his ribs creaked like overburdened shelves and his spine arched under a catalog no living chest was meant to house.
His last heartbeat ticked like a gavel in the frozen dark. Wei Lun opened his mouth and let that amalgam pour out. Not breath, not speech, but a single, resonant declaration that traveled as stroke and seal. The riverbed convulsed. Mud peeled back from buried contracts; worm-eaten bamboo, stone-slabs, silk scrolls rose in tiers, translucent, every falsified clause and omitted name dragged into stark, spectral testimony.
For a heartbeat Mei Rong tried to ride the revelation, lips curling in practiced disdain as he snapped his sleeve back and thrust the jade tally high, as if he could lift himself above the muck now rising around his name. The carved seal at its base flared in answer, veins of pale gold racing along the jade’s grain; the invisible circuits linking tally to ancestral altar and prefectural office lit all at once. He willed those lines to harden into precedence, into jurisdiction. Above him, faint script boiled out of the tally like incense smoke and snapped into disciplined columns: an idealized version of his ledgers, immaculate and cold.
Tribute entries assembled in gleaming ranks over his head, each line-worked boat icon and grain-jar ideogram standing crisp as fresh-cut bamboo. Marginal notes knotted themselves into tidy annotations of merit and exemption, seals blossomed like orderly red chrysanthemums, date-stamps marched in unbroken sequence. To the watching crowd it looked, for a flicker, like a conjured defense brief drafted by the river’s own hand: no erasures, no hesitations, no gaps where a name might slip through and vanish. Mei Rong’s back straightened under the familiar reassurance of structure. The golden sigil at his brow burned a little brighter, casting needle-thin beams through the descending mist.
He jabbed the tally toward the suspended registries that had risen from the ford, trying to overlay his projection atop the spectral shelves, to smother the ghost’s accusing finger beneath the sheer weight of documented order. “These,” his narrowed eyes and tightening jaw seemed to say, though his tongue dared not shape the words before the sub-auditor, “are the true accounts. My accounts. Properly witnessed, properly sealed. What can a slave’s babble or a wayward shade weigh against this?” For that instant, wrapped in script-light and inherited procedure, Mei Rong moved as if he still believed the river would accept his copy as more binding than its own record.
But as Wei Lun’s declaration reverberated through stone and current, those pristine rows convulsed. The neat columns shuddered as if struck by an unseen gong; characters wavered, then broke formation, radicals twisting against their own strokes. Numeral tallies fattened grotesquely, then burst, their place values smearing sideways to swallow neighbors that had never been paid. Honorifics stripped themselves from Mei forebears’ names, drifting away like torn scales. What had been immaculate bookkeeping curdled into a fevered palimpsest: double-stamped dates overlapping years apart, seals imprinting over seals in impossible succession.
Ink thickened from pale gold to a bruised, oil-slick sheen. Clauses denoting “emergency levy” and “disaster mitigation” kinked upon themselves, exposing cramped sub-lines of script that had been riding hidden in the stroke-gaps, like worms under bark. Entire entries sloughed off, dripping from the glowing ledger as viscous, black runoff that pattered into the suspended river below. Where it fell, the water hissed, recoiling. Watching fish-spirits, their translucent fins banded with tally-marks of seasons, flared in alarm; they snapped up the tainted drops and dragged them down toward the undercurrent like seized contraband, to be weighed elsewhere.
Each citation struck like a hammer on wet stone. With every impossibility he named, the golden seal at Mei Rong’s brow guttered, its lines fuzzing as if embarrassed to be seen. The clerk-ghost, emboldened, snapped its sleeve; whole bundles of slips flipped, exposing cramped side-columns in crabbed, different hands. Amendments added years after the supposed event, yet bearing the same “original” witness marks. Wei Lun read those too, not as a slave mouthing ink, but as if delivering sentence: clauses declaring “temporary conscription until waters recede” that carried no termination stroke, indemnities that excused drownings before the bridges they cited had even been planned. Each word he spoke dragged another strand of legal qi out of Mei Rong’s ledgers and braided it back into the river’s own.
Names flared and sank within those slips each briefly visible before the mist swallowed them back. Wei Lun, body half-dissolved into roiling vapor, recited: reign titles that could not coexist in a single decade, seals of abolished bureaus affixed to fresh decrees, cross-references citing volumes the ghost hissed had “never been drafted, never numbered, never ratified.” His syllables caught and amplified that forgotten authority, braiding clerk-qi through every flaw he named until the very grammar of Mei Rong’s defense began to come apart.
With every irregularity named, the defensive halo around Mei Rong’s jade tally dulled, its radiance mottling like tarnished brass. Hairline fractures of dim light spidered through the golden seal at his brow, his scribe’s privilege sputtering as annotations in harsh cinnabar script burned themselves across his phantom ledgers each notation a punitive stamp weakening the borrowed rectitude he was about to hurl into open, violent contest, stripping his authority to its raw, panicked core.
Mei Rong’s composure snapped; with a guttural curse that shredded his cultivated diction, he raked his brush across the air, snapping open the bamboo scroll case at his hip. The breath he expelled steamed black, lacquer-thick with killing intent. Bundled talismans leapt free like startled bats and unfurled mid-spin, paper bones cracking as they straightened. Each strip shuddered once, then erupted into a single, blade-bright character (刃, 斬, 绝) ink bleeding outward until the strokes thickened, hardening into ink-steel. They hung for a heartbeat, glistening with wet script, then scythed through the congealed mist in sweeping, judge’s strokes.
The very air shrieked as they passed, shavings of frost and vapor spinning off their edges. Where 刃 cut, mist parted down to raw, exposed river, the wound bordered by fine hairlines of black that burned like cauterized grammar. Where 斬 fell, whole ribbons of spectral desk and ledger were sheared away, clauses neatly decapitated mid-phrase, their severed halves twitching before dissolving into illegible smear. 绝 spun end-over-end, a final-stroke glyph given edge and momentum, seeking not bodies but continuities: threads of qi, lines of causation, any linking mark that tied Wei Lun to ghost, ghost to record, record to crime.
Every stroke carried the weight of a scribe’s killing intent, an executioner’s brush stripped of pretense. These were not vulgar blades but verdicts hammered into form, each character a ruling sharpened to sever names from ledgers and flesh from spirit. As they carved through the overlapping registries, they left behind erasures: blank gaps in the mist where words had been, sudden silences in the murmuring pages above. Even the river flinched, currents stuttering as those killing-glyphs tried to inscribe a single, brutal outcome across water, stone, and soul alike.
The overturned inkstone at Mei Rong’s feet answered like a breached reservoir. Viscous black overflow did not fall but heaved upward in a slow, obscene boil, beading into globes that flattened, stretched, and snapped into strokes. Hooks, bars, and slashes of script shook themselves free of the stone, knitting together into serpentine ink-spirits, each scaled in tiny, crawling radicals that rearranged with every flex. Their eyes were hollow ovals of uninked paper, their jaws gaping like blank columns in a ledger hungry for redaction.
They lunged through the silver mist toward Wei Lun and the hovering clerk-ghost, moving with the precise rhythm of a brush drawing canceling lines. Wherever Wei Lun’s voice shaped a clause, an ink-serpent snapped at it, trying to bite syllables from the air, to chew testimony back down into formless stain. One coiled round his throat, its body tightening with the dry rasp of pages turning, while others struck at the ghost’s ink-stained fingers, splattering themselves across phantom skin in frantic smears, sacrificing form in a last effort to blot clauses before they could settle onto the unfolding spectral ledgers overhead.
Beneath all of this, the Green Serpent River bucked as if in pain; currents snarled against the ford’s stones, wrenching the half-capsized ferry so violently that timbers screamed and nailed joints spat splinters. Spray burst in jagged veils as hidden eddies twisted, not with blind flood-rage but with the stilted cadence of clauses being forced against their own wording. From the shadowed bases of the toll pavilion’s boundary pillars, script-etched chains shot outward like thrown spears, each iron link stamped in cramped, clerkish hand. They wrapped cold around Wei Lun’s ankles and wrists, glyphs searing briefly through skin and qi alike, then dragging him toward the churning undercurrent with the bureaucratic neatness of a margin note: “evidence destroyed in transit,” ready to be justified later with a single dismissive stroke and a retroactive date.
On the sloping bank, the mortal fray detonated to match the spiritual one. A guard’s blade finally skidded from Han Yu’s braced forearm guard, leather splitting, skin beading red. With a roar more suited to storm-winds than court halls, he tore free, drawing steel in a single, fluid arc that caught river-glare along its edge. He planted himself between the hovering sub-auditor and Mei Rong’s panicked retainers, stance low, shoulders squared, his sword flashing in tight, disciplined cuts that batted aside stray talismans and knocked grasping hands from the bronze docket-seal at the official’s belt. Beside the nearest boundary stone, Zhi slapped his shaking palm, slick with the last of his revealing ink, across the carved scripts. The stone’s sigils flared, fissures of pale fire racing through them, swelling every crooked clause and missing counter-signature Wei Lun had named until they blazed overhead like indicting constellations no brush could ever quietly erase.
The ford cinched tight around that strain. Blade-characters shrieked as they struck uprushing columns of water-script, each impact bursting into spatters of black that fell as scolding marginalia, pinning themselves to armor, skin, even spray. Ink-serpents lunged at spoken clauses and were seared away by sudden slashes of punitive cinnabar, “Tampering,” “Malice,” “Unauthorised Amendment”, branding their dispersing bodies as rejected entries, their deaths recorded even as they tried to erase. The river’s hoarse bellow tangled with the dry rip of parting paper and the low, breathless sounds of grappling men, until the entire crossing felt less like stone and current than a single, overburdened ledger. Columns of “Order Preserved” and “Corruption Revealed” grinding against one another, tugging at bone, breath, and ghost-mark alike, stretching the world thin in readiness for the one deciding stroke.
The emergency erasure strip tore free of Mei Rong’s brush in a jag of blinding gold, its characters not merely written but alive, already uncurling like hunting eels. Each stroke forked and re-forked as it flew, testing the air, tasting for the thin, frayed flavor of Wei Lun’s name wherever it clung to the world: on slave tallies smeared with sweat, on damp work rosters tacked to barrack walls, on the wavering breath of overseers shouting roll-call, even on the ragged edge of a childhood blessing whispered over a fevered crib. Wherever a syllable of him persisted, the strip’s script lunged, ready to bite it cleanly out.
The air itself recoiled from its passage. Sound thinned, as if the roar of flood and shouted battle were being pressed behind an invisible paper screen. At the edges of Wei Lun’s sight, the ford began to blanch: prayer ribbons along the half-built bridge washed to colorless tatters; faces of shouting men and weeping women blurred into grey smudges, their features unpenciled one by one. Even the ghostly desks hovering above the stones flickered, a few ledger-corners already curling into ash-white vacancy where his case-heading should have been.
It was like watching a brush hover above the world, poised to cross his existence out with a single, elegant line.
Every instinct screamed at him to move. If he staggered sideways, if he broke the tenuous interleaving of mortal stones and spirit registers holding the ford in this impossible overlay, the strip might pass him by, might shear harmlessly into the river and disperse. His body twitched toward that animal dodge, shoulders hunching, fingers flexing against the bite of spectral chains.
He did not move.
He drove his bare feet deeper into the numbing shallows, letting the current slam against his shins until his bones hummed. He inhaled the taste of silt and iron, of ink and old incense washed thin, and let the river’s pull set the line of his spine. The cold weight of the clerk-ghost’s presence crowded close at his back, a pressure like a hand between his shoulder blades, warning without words that to flinch now would not be survival but surrender.
So he stood and watched his own unmaking approach, a falling stroke of golden script that carried not impact but omission, and braced himself in the ford as if for a blow that would land in every ledger the world had ever held of him.
Cold, ink-stained fingers clamped over his forearms with sudden, shocking solidity. The clerk-ghost, no longer half-faded but dense with borrowed authority, dragged itself fully into the narrowed slice of halted time. Its grip was wrong for a phantom, callused where brush had bit skin a thousand times, the faint grooves of tally-beads etched into its touch. It folded Wei Lun’s shaking hands together and then apart, forcing his fingers through a sequence of sigils he had never formally learned yet somehow recognized in his bones, as if an old examination he had once failed in another life were being sat again.
Strokes flared from his skin, not ink but condensed qi, blossoming in spirals of pale-blue and dead-black that crawled up his veins and over his shorn scalp. The characters twisted around one another like coiled seals being unscrewed, resolving into a counter-glyph shaped like a docket-stamp turned inside out, frame first, face last. Where Mei Rong’s talisman blazed to sever, their answer wrote to recall: a cramped, archaic script that reached backward through nested clauses, refusing the future until every originating contract, rider, and marginal note had been produced, verified, and read aloud.
The talisman met that counter-sigil not in a blast but in a slow, grinding lock, as if two colossal abacuses had been rammed together bead-to-bead and then refused to separate. At the point of contact, time pinched down to a pinhole. Droplets of riverwater hung mid-splash, each bead refracting a different draft of the same moment; a shout froze half-born in Han Yu’s open mouth, teeth bared around a sound that could not yet decide itself into protest or prayer. Even the spectral desks above the ford halted their fluttering, ledger-pages stiffening like startled wings. Within the burning strip, the erasure clause began to rewrite itself, stroke by agonizing stroke, as the counter-script levered tiny, vicious amendments into its margins: “Subject: Disputed,” “Authority: Contested,” “Prior Instruments: Unproduced,” “Lineage: Provisional, Await Confirmation.” Each new notation crawled outward like a crack through lacquer, dimming the talisman’s gold with bureaucratic dusk. At the very edge of the frozen circle, lingering dead and underworld runners leaned in, paper-skin rustling, eyes of lamp-flame narrowing, drawn by the iron-scent of a precedent being set and the rare, perilous possibility that a slave’s name might drag an entire river-district’s filings back to the docket.
Above and below him, invisible hierarchies strained: upstream auditors whose signatures glimmered like distant stars; downstream clerks already adjusting quotas in anticipation of a flood of revised souls. His own merit-threads tugged tight, humming with the risk of demotion for leniency or censure for blind obedience. Between ink and water, he understood that whichever groove he chose would rewrite not just ledgers, but karma.
Wei Lun’s vision tunneled. His cultivated qi, stretched past ascetic discipline into raw desperation, began to shred like damp talisman paper, fibers of light peeling away from bone. Around the narrowing circle of sight, a velvet black seeped inward, and beneath that darkness he heard (not with ears but marrow) the cold rush of the underworld’s side-channel, patient as an accountant, ready to slot him under some forgotten heading: “Unresolved, Awaiting Clarification.” The clerk’s ink-burned fingers crushed down, anchoring him. From the raw, abraded gap where his personal name had been scraped out of all ledgers, something else rose. Not the ghost’s identity, not any slave-brand, but an older, dust-choked designation that smelled of lamp-smoke and ancestral tablets. It forced his jaw open and laid itself, heavy as a seal-stone, on his tongue. He did not understand it, yet every syllable felt like coming home and breaking a lock at once. He spoke it whole. The sound cracked through the congealed second like a magistrate’s gavel on stone, sending a shudder through every manifested desk and ledger hovering above the ford; ink columns rippled, headings bowed. Mei Rong’s emergency erasure strip, already webbed with contesting notes, fractured along those hairline objections and burst into gray ash a finger’s width from Wei Lun’s chest, the aborted clause still glowing on its ruined edge. The concussion of that canceled fate slammed outward through frozen mist and script alike, striking the sub-auditor’s poised hand; his bronze docket-seal lurched, the wavering needle driven cleanly into the channel carved not for “Approved” nor “Nullified,” but the rarer, heavier groove: “Re-examination Mandated.” In that instant, every hidden abacus along the Green Serpent’s jurisdiction clicked of its own accord, sending a quiet tidal ripple of recalculation through both mortal rolls and the pale, whispering archives of the spirit courts.
For a breathless instant, no one moved.
Then the river exhaled, its roar collapsing into a hoarse, exhausted murmur, and the suspended droplets of mist loosened all at once. They fell as ordinary rain, cold and heavy, drumming on straw hats and bare scalps, streaking down the translucent backs of underworld runners until their lantern-eyes dimmed and slid back beneath the surface. The silver shimmer leaching from the spectral registry smeared under the downpour; lines of luminous script bled, ran together, and trickled off the hovering desks in pale rivulets that spattered into the current and vanished.
The ferry, which had hung at a crazed angle midstream like a beetle pinned on an invisible spike, shuddered. Ropes creaked back into motion, timbers gave a protesting groan, and then the hull lurched level with an almost indecent suddenness. The river, no longer locked in that glassy stillness, slapped against its sides in irregular waves, nudging it toward the shallows. A final twist of current eased it up against the mooring posts, as if some unseen clerk had gently corrected its line.
For a heartbeat, the passengers only clung where they were: hands white-knuckled around railings, eyes huge in rain-streaked faces. Then panic uncoiled. Men and women scrambled over the gunwales, skirts and sleeves dragging in the brown water as they splashed down into the knee-deep shallows. Someone screamed a late, hysterical shriek; a child wailed, hoisted high against a mother’s shoulder. Bundles, caged chickens, and jostling crates knocked together in a clatter of wood and muffled curses as people fought to reach stone.
Several, reaching the slick jade-colored rocks, simply dropped to their knees. Fingers splayed against wet stone, they bowed low, lips moving soundlessly in thanks to any god or river-spirit that might have jurisdiction over their continued existence. One old man pressed his forehead three times to the ford, then furtively checked his own shadow in the water, as if afraid it might not have followed him back.
Along the bank, the overseers and toll scribes, who had been statues under the frozen moment, jerked back into motion with the gracelessness of puppets whose strings had been suddenly yanked. Whips dangled useless from numb hands. Ink-stained clerks swore under their breath, clutching at loose scrolls and tallies fluttering in the damp gusts.
Above them, beneath the pavilion’s dripping eaves, the hanging ledgers moved of their own accord. One by one, in a rippling cadence that cut through the rain, each thick book snapped shut, thud, thud, thud, wooden covers slamming together like a row of judgment-hammers. Red cord-tassels writhed as if alive, snaking through their own loops, tightening into unfamiliar knots that made the watching scribes blanch.
Sheets of half-stamped tallies on the counters flared with a brief, sickly radiance. Characters lifted from their surfaces in wavering strokes, dissolved, then rained back down as altered words that did not match the memories of the men who had written them. A cargo levy became “Deferred Pending Review”; a slave transfer line lost the column for “Owner” and gained, in its place, a bare, unsettling blank.
Where a scribe’s hand still pinned a tally to the desk, the paper turned brittle and slid away from his grip, leaving his fingers clamped on empty air. Another clerk, trying to snatch a page mid-change, yelped as the ink itself recoiled from his touch, beading up and rolling to the edge to drip into the puddles at his feet.
Under the pavilion, human hands trembled, suddenly weightless, as the instruments they had relied upon for years refused their command. The ledgers no longer answered to them; something higher had reached down through mist and river and quietly taken the brush from their grasp.
Mei Rong tried to reassert his composure, straightening his soaked silk sleeves with fingers that would not quite obey him. The careful, accountant’s precision that had once made brushes dance now betrayed him; each attempt to summon a glyph produced only a smear of dead ink that beaded on his nails, then sloughed away and vanished into the puddles like dissolved authority. When he reached, by reflex, for his brush-case, the bamboo tube slipped from numbed fingers and rolled off the pavilion step, spilling useless, waterlogged bristles onto the stones below.
His jade tally of office, once humming with quiet authority at his belt, now hung mute and discolored, fine fractures radiating from its center like frozen lightning. When he lifted it, seeking reassurance in its familiar weight, the embedded seal-script flickered weakly, like a dying firefly in cloudy glass, and then went dark. A scattered intake of breath rippled through his own clerks. One took a half-step forward, then caught sight of the tally’s dead surface and recoiled as if from contagion.
Above Mei Rong’s brow, the formerly bright golden sigil of recognition guttered into a bruised, coppery stain. The unmistakable sign of an official placed under suspension and barred from invoking mandate or protection. The mark pulsed once, sullenly, then settled into dull permanence.
For the first time, the workers of the Jade Ford saw their master as something other than untouchable. The invisible canopy of his patronage had been yanked away, leaving him naked in the rain. Eyes slid from him not out of deference, but from the fearful instinct to avoid standing too near a man suddenly marked for audit, a man whose future line in the registries might read “Subject to Correction” or simply “Struck.” A whip-hand, long accustomed to shouting his orders, lowered its gaze and, almost unconsciously, loosened its grip.
On the slick jade-green stones at the water’s edge, Wei Lun rolled onto his side and retched up a mixture of riverwater and viscous, blackened ink that spattered his wrists before swirling away between his fingers like fleeing script. Each breath scraped his throat raw; his chest hitched on a ragged wheeze that tasted of rusted chains and old incense. Limbs shook with the effort of simply clinging to the present moment, yet the crushing weight that had lived between his ribs for as long as he could remember felt (if not gone) then pried partially open, ribs creaking as if some invisible filing-stamp had been levered out.
Beside him, the clerk-ghost’s form steadied, no longer stuttering between presence and absence. Its outline, once smudged like wet ink, resolved into the thin, stooped shape of a scribe in worn court-robes; the heavy spectral chains that had tethered it to invisible ledgers dissolved into drifting motes of cold light, coiling instead into a single, plain docket-tag hanging from its neck. Simple characters burned on its surface, lambent and official: “River Registrar’s Office, Jade Ford Annex – Case Status: Reopened, Provisional.” The tag’s seal-script pulsed in time with the river’s slow surge, echoing faintly in Wei Lun’s bones.
The ghost’s ink-stained hands hovered over him in something like a benediction, fingers crooked in half-remembered seal-gestures. Beads of black ink clung to its fingertips, then fell. Not onto Wei Lun, but into the stones around him, etching hair-fine lines that vanished as soon as they formed. Its gaze, once clouded by compulsion, shone clearer than he had ever seen it: less a haunting and more a tired, fierce recognition, as if being formally named had granted it back a measure of self. And with that self, a choice to stand beside him rather than over him.
The sub-auditor, whose brush-hand still trembled faintly from the jolt of redirected qi, cleared his throat and herded the stunned hush into something like a hearing. In a tone as thin and formal as rice-paper, he recited the interim findings: local Mei-clan authority over river-tithes and soul-registers at the Jade Ford was to be frozen pending higher review; all contracts bearing disputed clauses regarding lineage erasure, slave classification, and drowned-laborer dispositions were to be sequestered under seal in a temporary celestial annex; and, most startling to every mortal ear present, Wei Lun’s entry in the rolls was to be amended on the spot from “Movable Property, Mei Clan River Estate” to “Material Witness Under Protective Custody of the River Registrar’s Office.
Gradually, the extraordinary bled back into the ordinary. The luminous haze around the boundary stones thinned to a low, steady hum that only the most sensitive could feel; color seemed to drain from the air, leaving plain rain and river-mist. Familiar noises crept cautiously into the silence: vendors shouting hoarsely about hot millet cakes as if to prove commerce still existed, ropes creaking as crewmen tested lines with hands that shook, a child’s brief wail quickly smothered, a temple bell from a distant village tolling the hour over damp fields. Han Yu splashed through the shallows without ceremony and dropped to one knee beside Wei Lun, cold water soaking his layered robes, one strong hand bracing the slave’s back, the other hovering near his own sword-hilt in a wordless promise that anyone seeking to “correct” the new classification would have to pass through him first. Zhi stood a little apart, rain dripping from his tangled hair onto his patched robe, eyes wide and intent on the boundary stones now faintly inscribed with fresh, invisible circuits of qi; even in his shock, a crooked grin tugged at his mouth as he sensed contract lines unspooling and reknitting in patterns that left room for mischief, leverage. And maybe justice. Around them, the Jade Ford no longer felt like a mere checkpoint, but like a courtroom whose doors had just been flung open, the air taut with the awareness that an unfinished celestial trial now hung over every ledger and ripple. And with it, for the first time, the fragile, dangerous possibility that Wei Lun might one day walk these stones as a free man rather than a line item, no longer counted in ink but acknowledged in breath and name.