The tannery stank of death.
Not the clean death of slaughter, but the slow, chemical death of hides rotting in vats, of lime eating flesh, of tanning liquor that burned the nostrils and made the eyes water. Shen Mo had spent thirty years in boardrooms and corner offices, places that smelled of leather chairs and expensive cologne. This was something else entirely.
He stood in the doorway, watching.
Workers moved through the gloom—muscular men in leather aprons, their arms stained dark from years of labor. They paid him no attention. At the back of the building, a small office had been constructed, half-walled, open to the main floor. Inside, two men sat across from each other, papers spread between them, their postures screaming deadlock.
Shen Mo approached.
"—been three months!" The speaker was the tannery owner, a bull-necked man with a scarred forehead and hands the size of hams. He slammed a fist on the table. "Three months and no payment! I've got workers to pay, hides to buy, and you're sitting there telling me next week?"
The other man was thin, nervous, dressed in better clothes than the surroundings warranted. A merchant, probably, based on the soft hands and the way he kept adjusting his collar. "The leather was defective. Everyone knows it. You can't expect full price for—"
"The leather was fine. Your inspector signed off. I have the contract." The tannery owner shoved a paper across the table. "Right there. His signature. Your company's seal. Pay me."
The merchant didn't look at the paper. "My inspector was bribed. Everyone knows that too."
"Then prove it!"
"I don't have to prove it. I just have to not pay until you take me to court, and we both know how long that takes." The merchant leaned back, a smug smile spreading across his face. "By the time the Registrarate hears the case, I'll have sold the business and moved to the coast. You'll get nothing."
Shen Mo watched the tannery owner's face cycle through emotions: rage, frustration, despair. The man was outmatched. He knew it. The merchant knew it. Everyone in the room knew it.
Classic leverage play, Shen Mo thought. Delay, obfuscate, outlast. The weak player bleeds while the strong player waits.
But the merchant wasn't strong. He was just patient. And patience, Shen Mo knew, was just another form of debt—one that compounded interest the longer you waited.
He stepped forward.
"Excuse me."
Both men looked up. The merchant's expression shifted to annoyance; the tannery owner's to vague hope.
"Who're you?" the owner asked.
"Shen Mo. Probationary scribe. District Seven registrar sent me to handle your dispute."
The merchant laughed. "A probationary scribe? They send a child to mediate? This is a waste of time." He stood, gathering his papers. "Tell your registrar I'll see him in court. In about two years."
"Sit down."
The words were quiet. Not loud, not threatening. Just... final. The kind of words that expected obedience.
The merchant sat.
Shen Mo moved to the table, pulled out the third chair, and sat between them. He placed his hands flat on the scarred wood, the way he used to in boardrooms when he wanted everyone to understand who was really in control.
"Let me understand the situation," he said. "You"—to the tannery owner—"delivered leather. You"—to the merchant—"accepted delivery with a signed inspection. Now you're refusing payment, claiming the inspector was bribed. Is that correct?"
The merchant nodded, wary now. "That's right."
"And the inspector? Where is he?"
"Gone. Disappeared the day after the delivery."
"Convenient." Shen Mo turned to the tannery owner. "You have the inspection document?"
The owner pushed it across the table. Shen Mo studied it—names, dates, a scrawled signature, a company seal pressed into wax. Standard stuff. In the corporate world, this would be a simple breach of contract case. Here, he suspected, it was more complicated.
He closed his eyes. Reached for that strange new sense he'd discovered—the ability to feel names, to see the threads connecting them. It was faint, unreliable, but there.
And there it was: a thin golden line connecting the merchant to the inspector's name. Not a debt, exactly. Something else. Something that felt like... knowledge.
He knows where the inspector is, Shen Mo realized. Or he knows what happened to him.
He opened his eyes.
"Your inspector isn't missing," he said to the merchant. "He's dead."
The merchant's face went white. "That's—that's absurd. I have no idea—"
"You paid him to sign off on the delivery. Then you paid someone else to make sure he couldn't testify about it." Shen Mo leaned forward. "The thread between you and his name is still there. It's thinner now—he's dead—but it's still there. And it knows what you did."
He was bluffing. Partly. He'd felt something between them, but whether it was murder or just a bad debt, he couldn't say. But the merchant's reaction told him everything he needed to know.
The man was trembling. Sweat beaded on his forehead.
"That's—that's not—you can't prove—"
"I don't need to prove it." Shen Mo's voice was calm, almost gentle. "I just need to witness it. And then I need to report to my registrar that I've identified a possible homicide connected to a contract dispute. They'll investigate. They'll find the body—they always do, eventually. And when they do, they'll trace it back to you." He smiled. "You were planning to be on the coast in two years? Try two days. That's how long you have before the Inquisitors arrive."
The merchant's papers slid from his nerveless fingers. He stared at Shen Mo with something like horror.
"What do you want?"
"I want you to pay the tannery owner. Full price, plus interest for the three months' delay. I want you to sign a statement admitting the inspector was paid—not murdered, just paid—and that you're settling in good faith. And I want you to leave this district and never come back."
"And if I refuse?"
Shen Mo gestured vaguely at the door, at the world outside. "The Inquisitors are very thorough. They'll take your name apart piece by piece. By the time they're done, you won't exist anymore. Not legally. Not socially. Not... anywhere."
It was a guess. A calculated threat based on what little he'd learned about this world's systems. But the merchant's face told him it was accurate.
The man signed. Wrote the statement. Counted out payment in heavy silver coins that seemed to shimmer with their own internal light. And then he fled, pushing past the tannery workers, disappearing into the street.
The tannery owner stared at the coins on his table. Then at Shen Mo.
"How did you... I mean, the inspector really is missing, but I didn't think—"
"The inspector is dead." Shen Mo stood, brushing off his robe. "I didn't guess. I could feel it. The connection between their names... it's different when someone's dead. Colder. Emptier."
The owner's eyes widened. "You're a natural reader."
"A what?"
"A natural. Someone who sees ledgers without training." He crossed himself in that gesture Shen Mo had noticed earlier. "I've heard of them, but never met one. They say the Archive marks naturals. Claims them early."
Observed, Shen Mo thought. The mark on his hand, the voice in the fire. The Archive notes your arrival.
"I need to report back," he said. "The payment—you'll need to register it properly. Have the registrar witness the settlement."
The owner nodded, still staring at Shen Mo with a mixture of awe and fear. "Of course. Of course. And... thank you. No one's ever—I've been fighting him for months. Everyone said I'd lose."
"Everyone was wrong." Shen Mo moved toward the door, then paused. "The inspector. Do you know where they might have buried him?"
The owner shook his head. "I didn't even know he was dead until you said it."
"Someone does. Think about who might have helped the merchant. Who stood to gain. Who's been acting differently lately." He met the owner's eyes. "The truth has weight. Eventually, it collects."
---
He walked back to the registrar's office through streets that were beginning to feel almost familiar. The encounter had taught him several things:
First, his ability to sense names and connections was real, and valuable. People called it "natural reading," and it marked him as different. That could be useful. It could also be dangerous.
Second, the threat of Inquisitors was powerful leverage. Yan Li's cold efficiency wasn't just personal—it was systemic. The Registrarate inspired fear, and fear could be weaponized.
Third, this world ran on the same principles as the corporate one. Leverage was leverage. Information was power. And people, whether they were CEOs or tanners or nervous merchants, all broke the same way when you found the right pressure point.
He was still cataloging these insights when he rounded a corner and saw the registrar's office ahead.
And the blood on its steps.
---
He ran.
The door was ajar. He pushed it open, heart pounding, mind already calculating. Inside, the chaos was worse than before: papers everywhere, furniture overturned, a smell of iron and fear that hadn't been there an hour ago.
And on the floor, half-hidden beneath a collapsed shelf of ledgers, the registrar who'd sent him to the tannery. The tired man with bloodshot eyes and ink-stained fingers. His chest moved—barely—a shallow rise and fall that meant he was still alive.
Shen Mo was at his side in seconds, lifting the shelf, throwing ledgers aside. The registrar's robes were soaked with blood, a wound in his side that gaped and wept. Not a knife. Something else—jagged, uneven, like he'd been torn.
"Registrar. Registrar, can you hear me?"
The man's eyes fluttered open. They focused on Shen Mo with an effort that seemed to cost him everything.
"Ghost," he whispered. "You came back."
"Who did this?"
"Ledger... backlash. Tried to... stop them. Couldn't." He coughed, blood flecking his lips. "The names... they're hungry tonight. So hungry."
The same words Master Wei had used. The names are hungry.
"Who was trying to alter the ledger?"
But the registrar's eyes were already losing focus. His hand reached up, grabbed Shen Mo's robe with surprising strength.
"You're... marked," he breathed. "I see it now. The golden thread. You're... Archive-touched. They'll... they'll come for you. They always... always..."
His grip loosened. His eyes went glassy.
And on the wall behind him, Shen Mo saw it happen again: the registrar's name, written on a wooden plaque, flickering once and then going dark. Flaking away. Ceasing to exist.
Shen Mo sat back on his heels, breathing hard.
Two deaths, he thought. Two registrars dead, both from "ledger backlash." Both warning me about hungry names. Both seeing something in me that marked me as different.
He looked at his hands—young hands, wrong hands, hands that could somehow see threads and feel debts and sense when names were about to die.
The Archive's mark was still there, faint but present. Observed.
And somewhere in this city, someone had just killed a registrar to alter a ledger. Someone who was still out there. Someone who might come back to finish the job.
Shen Mo stood slowly. Looked around the ruined office. At the dead registrar. At the scattered ledgers, some of them still smoking faintly as if burned from within.
He should run. Find somewhere safe. Hide until this blew over.
Instead, he walked to the main ledger—the massive book chained to the lectern—and opened it to the most recent entries.
Names. Hundreds of names. All shimmering faintly in the afternoon light that filtered through the broken window. And there, at the bottom of the page, an entry that hadn't been there before:
Shen Mo. Registrar, Third Class (probationary). Debt: None. Weight: Unmeasured. Status: Wanted for questioning in the death of Registrar Holt.
He stared at it for a long moment. Then he laughed—that same hollow laugh from the morning, the laugh of a man who'd just realized the game had changed again.
"They're framing me," he said to the empty room. "Someone's framing me for a murder I didn't commit."
The ledger pulsed once, as if in agreement.
And in the distance, he heard it again: the voice from the fire, vast and patient and utterly without emotion.
New debt recorded. Interest begins accruing. The Archive continues to observe.
Shen Mo closed the ledger. Looked at the door, where footsteps were already approaching—Registrarate agents, probably, drawn by the disturbance.
He had maybe thirty seconds to decide: run, or stay and try to explain.
In the corporate world, running meant guilt. But in this world, staying meant being measured, weighed, and quite possibly erased.
He ran.
---
Through back alleys and crowded markets, over walls and through buildings, Shen Mo fled. His body was young, fit, capable—but more importantly, his mind was already working, already planning.
Someone had killed a registrar to alter a ledger. They'd made it look like backlash, but the registrar's dying words suggested otherwise: Tried to stop them. Couldn't.
Them. Plural. A group, not an individual.
And they'd added Shen Mo's name to the list of suspects, probably to buy time, to create confusion, to give themselves room to finish whatever they'd started.
What were they altering? What name was worth killing for?
He ducked into a narrow passage between buildings, pressed himself against the wall, and forced himself to think.
The registrar—Holt, the ledger had called him—had been working on something. The chaos in his office wasn't just from the attack; papers had been spread everywhere, ledgers open, notes scattered. He'd been investigating something when they came.
And he'd sent Shen Mo to the tannery. Sent him away. Kept him safe.
He knew. He knew they were coming, and he sent me out so I wouldn't be here when they arrived.
Shen Mo closed his eyes. Reached for that strange sense again. Felt for the threads connecting him to Holt, to the office, to the crime.
And there it was: a thin golden line, stretching back the way he'd come, pulsing faintly. Holt's name—still present, still connected, even in death.
The dead don't let go, Shen Mo realized. Their debts remain. Their connections remain. They just... can't collect anymore.
He followed the thread with his mind. Not back to the office—that was where it started—but forward, toward whatever Holt had been investigating. The thread split, multiplied, connected to other names. A network. A conspiracy.
And at the center of that network, one name that burned brighter than the rest. A name with weight. A name with power.
A name that, even as Shen Mo watched, was being rewritten.
He opened his eyes. He knew where they were. He knew what they were doing.
And he knew, with the cold certainty of a man who'd spent his life reading leverage, that he was the only one who could stop them.
The Oblivion Scribe—he who writes endings—was about to write his first chapter.