Lei spent four days chasing down every attendant, guard, and messenger who had passed through the shrine's outer gates in the hours surrounding the attack, building a timeline with the same meticulous, unhurried patience that had once cracked the forged seal against Yuan Wei months earlier.
He returned to Jian's recovery chamber on the fifth evening with a stack of carefully organized testimony, his expression carrying the particular grim satisfaction of a man who had finally assembled something solid enough to act on.
