He woke choking on incense smoke.
Not the clean smoke of a dying fireplace, not the acrid smoke of the fire he'd just escaped—but something thick and sweet, burning his throat, making his eyes water. Shen Mo rolled onto his side, coughing, and nearly fell off the narrow sleeping platform he'd somehow been lying on.
Sleeping platform?
He forced his eyes open. The world swam into focus: a small room, wooden walls, a single shuttered window. A brass incense burner on a low table, sending up thin coils of scented smoke. His clothes—not his clothes—a simple grey robe, rough fabric, stained with ink at the cuffs.
His hands. Still young. Still wrong.
Not a dream, then.
Memory returned in fragments: the boardroom, the signatures, the pain in his chest. The fire, the dying registrar, the blood-stained page. The voice—The Archive notes your arrival—and then nothing until now.
He sat up slowly, testing his body. No injuries. No pain. Just the lingering disorientation of waking somewhere unfamiliar, compounded by the fundamental wrongness of being someone else.
Transmigration. Has to be. I've been isekai'd.
The thought should have been more shocking. But Shen Mo had spent thirty years adapting to new situations, new threats, new opportunities. Shock was a luxury. Survival required assessment.
He assessed.
The room was small but not poor—good quality wood, clean floor, the incense burner was brass, not clay. A scribe's quarters, maybe, or a junior official's. A desk in the corner held brushes, ink stones, stacks of paper. A small chest at the foot of the bed probably held clothes.
On the desk, something caught his eye: a folded piece of paper, held down by a smooth stone. He crossed to it, unfolded it.
It was a list. Names, dates, what looked like account balances. At the top, in careful calligraphy: Registrar Hall 47 - Daily Ledger Summary.
Below that, dozens of entries. And at the very bottom, a single line in a different hand—fresher ink, shakier strokes:
Shen Mo - on probation - report to Master Wei for assignment
His own name. His new name. Written by someone who expected him to report to a dead man.
Master Wei. The registrar who'd died in the fire. The one who'd pressed a blood-stained page into his hands and warned him about hungry names.
Shen Mo looked down at his robe. No blood. No burn marks. If he'd been in that fire, if he'd crawled out of that burning hall, he should be covered in soot and ash. But he was clean. Someone had cleaned him, dressed him, put him in this room.
Who? And why?
The incense burner caught his attention again. The smoke was thick, purposeful—the kind of smoke used to mask other smells. Like the smell of a body that had recently occupied this space.
The original occupant, Shen Mo realized. The real Shen Mo. They burned incense to cover... what? His death? His disappearance?
He crossed to the window, unlatched the shutter, pushed it open.
Morning light flooded in, revealing a street below that belonged in a different world entirely.
Not steel and glass. Not concrete and asphalt. Stone buildings with tiled roofs, wooden shop fronts with painted signs, a cobblestone street already busy with merchants and porters and women in long robes carrying baskets. In the distance, he could see what looked like a temple—curved roofs, multiple stories, something golden gleaming at its peak.
And floating above it all, impossibly, a structure that shouldn't exist: a tower made entirely of paper and light, hovering a thousand feet in the air, connected to the ground by chains that glowed like spun gold.
Shen Mo stared at it for a long moment. Then he did something he hadn't done in thirty years.
He laughed.
Not a happy laugh—more like the laugh of a man who'd just realized the game had changed entirely, and he had no idea what the new rules were.
"Well," he said to the empty room. "This is going to be interesting."
---
He found Registrar Hall 47 by following the smoke.
It rose from a district about a mile away, a black column against the morning sky. As he walked, he saw people notice it—pointing, whispering, crossing themselves in gestures he didn't recognize. A woman grabbed her child's hand and hurried the other direction. A merchant began hastily closing his shutters.
Fear, Shen Mo noted. They're afraid of whatever happened there. Good to know.
The hall itself was a ruin. Stone walls still standing, but the roof was gone, the interior a mass of charred beams and ash. A crowd had gathered at a safe distance, kept back by a line of men in grey uniforms—the same uniforms Yan Li's riders had worn.
Shen Mo approached the line. A guard held up his hand.
"No entry. Registrarate business."
"I'm assigned here." Shen Mo kept his voice calm, professional. "Shen Mo, junior scribe. I was supposed to report to Master Wei today."
The guard's expression shifted—surprise, then something like pity. "Master Wei's dead. Hall's destroyed. Report to the temporary station around back. They're processing survivors."
Survivors. Interesting word choice. There had been at least one other person in that hall, according to his fragmented memories. The dying registrar. Possibly others.
He circled the ruins to the back, where a tent had been erected. A line of people waited—scribes, probably, based on their ink-stained robes—all looking dazed and frightened. Shen Mo joined the line, using the wait to observe.
The survivors were mostly young, early twenties at most. Junior staff. They clutched ledgers or personal seals like talismans. A few had burns, hastily bandaged. Most just looked... empty. Like something had been taken from them.
The trauma erases itself, Yan Li would later tell him. Survivors remember nothing.
But Shen Mo remembered. He remembered the fire, the screaming names, Master Wei's dying words. He remembered the voice. He remembered everything.
Why?
The line moved slowly. When he finally reached the front, the registrar behind the table barely looked up.
"Name?"
"Shen Mo."
The registrar—a tired-looking woman with ink-stained fingers—flipped through a stack of papers. Frowned. Flipped again.
"You're not on the survivors list."
"I was inside when the fire started. I got out."
"You should be on the list." She looked up now, really looked at him. "What's your registration number?"
Registration number. He didn't have one. The original Shen Mo might have, but that information was gone.
"I'm new," he said carefully. "On probation. I was supposed to report to Master Wei today for assignment."
The woman's expression cleared. "Probationary scribe. That explains it. You're not in the system yet." She pulled a fresh sheet of paper. "We'll need to register you now. Full name?"
"Shen Mo."
"Family?"
"None."
"Birthplace?"
He hesitated. What would the original Shen Mo have said? What was even plausible in this world?
"The eastern provinces," he said. A guess, based on nothing. But the woman didn't question it.
"Eastern provinces. Fine. Age?"
Early twenties, based on the body. "Twenty-three."
She wrote it all down, then reached for a small iron stamp. "This will feel strange. First registration always does. Try not to move."
She pressed the stamp to the paper, then to the back of his left hand. For a moment, nothing happened. Then—
Pain.
Not physical pain, but something deeper. A sensation of being weighed, measured, added to some vast accounting. He felt his name—Shen Mo—lift from his mind and attach to something immense, something that stretched across the entire world, connecting him to every other name ever written.
And he felt something else, too: a thread, thin as spider silk, connecting him to a point high above. The floating tower. The Archive.
Observed.
The sensation faded. The woman was looking at him with mild surprise.
"Most people flinch," she said. "You didn't move."
"I've been through worse."
She handed him a small wooden token with his name carved into it. "Your registration seal. Don't lose it. Without it, you don't exist." She glanced at a list on her desk. "You're assigned to temporary quarters in District Seven. Report to the registrar there for duty assignments. Next!"
Shen Mo stepped aside, clutching the token. It felt warm in his hand, almost alive. When he looked at it closely, he could see the same golden shimmer he'd noticed around Yan Li's name—fainter, much fainter, but present.
A thread. Everyone has a thread. Connecting everyone to... what?
He tucked the token into his robe and began walking toward District Seven, whatever and wherever that was. Behind him, the ruins of Registrar Hall 47 smoldered on, and somewhere above, the Archive watched.
Observed.
---
The walk gave him time to think.
Three facts were immediately clear:
First, this world ran on rules he didn't understand. Names had weight. Registration made you real. The Archive watched everything. He needed to learn those rules, and fast.
Second, his survival of the ledger fire was anomalous. The registrar's surprise, Yan Li's interest, the missing survivors list—all of it pointed to him being different, special, noticed. That could be leverage. It could also be a target.
Third, someone had cleaned him, dressed him, and put him in that room after the fire. Someone who knew he'd survived. Someone who hadn't reported him to the authorities.
Who? And why?
He filed the questions away for later investigation. For now, he had more immediate concerns: food, shelter, information. The token in his hand would get him assigned to a registrar. From there, he could start building.
Building was what he did. In the corporate world, he'd built networks, built leverage, built power from nothing but information and strategy. This world was different, but the principles were the same.
Find the weak points. Identify the players. Accumulate leverage. Wait for the right moment.
And above all: never let them see you coming.
District Seven, when he reached it, was poorer than the area around the registrar hall. Narrower streets, more crowded buildings, more people with the look of hard labor and little reward. The registrar's office was a small stone building wedged between a tannery and a tavern, its sign barely legible.
He pushed open the door.
Inside, a cluttered room filled with paper. Stacks of ledgers on every surface, more spilling from shelves that lined the walls. A single desk buried under even more paper, behind which sat a man who looked like he hadn't slept in weeks.
The man looked up. Bloodshot eyes, ink-stained fingers, a face that had given up on hope somewhere around middle age.
"What?"
"Shen Mo. New assignment. From the temporary station."
The man gestured vaguely at a stack of papers. "Somewhere in there. Find your own assignment. I'm too busy to—" He stopped. Looked at Shen Mo again, more carefully this time. "You were at Hall 47?"
"Yes."
"You survived."
"Apparently."
The man's expression shifted—something between respect and wariness. "Not many do. Ledger fires don't leave survivors. They leave... empty spaces." He stood, crossed to a shelf, pulled down a ledger. Flipped through it. "Shen Mo. Eastern provinces. Probationary. No family, no debts, no weight." He closed the ledger. "You're a ghost."
"So I've been told."
"Ghosts don't last." The man returned to his desk. "But they're useful. No connections means no conflicts of interest. You can handle cases that registrars with family ties can't." He scribbled something on a piece of paper and held it out. "Report to the tannery next door. They've got a contract dispute with a supplier. Standard stuff. Handle it, report back, I'll sign your duty sheet."
Shen Mo took the paper. "And if I don't know how to handle it?"
The man laughed, a hollow sound. "Learn fast. That's what probation means. Sink or swim, ghost." He turned back to his papers, already dismissing him.
Shen Mo left, the assignment in his hand. Outside, the street smelled of tanned leather and cheap wine. He looked at the paper—names, dates, amounts, the bare bones of a dispute he knew nothing about.
Learn fast, the registrar had said.
Shen Mo smiled. Learning fast was what he did.
He walked toward the tannery, already planning his approach.