He didn't get far.
Three blocks from the registrar's office, Shen Mo rounded a corner and ran directly into a wall of grey uniforms. Registrarate agents—a dozen of them, moving in formation, their leader a lean man with eyes like winter ice.
Inquisitor Yan Li.
Shen Mo stopped. Considered running. Calculated the odds—twelve trained agents, unknown capabilities, his own untested body and half-understood powers. The odds were not favorable.
"Probationary Scribe Shen Mo." Yan Li's voice was flat, administrative, utterly devoid of surprise. "You're wanted for questioning in the death of Registrar Holt."
"I didn't kill him."
"Then you have nothing to fear." Yan Li gestured, and the agents moved forward, forming a loose circle around Shen Mo. Not aggressive—just... final. "You'll come with us voluntarily. Or you'll come with us restrained. The choice is yours."
Shen Mo chose voluntarily. Resistance was information, and information was leverage—but only when you understood the game. He didn't understand this game yet. Not fully.
Better to play along until he did.
---
They took him to a different building this time—not the temporary station, not the ruined hall, but something more permanent. The District Registrar's Headquarters, a four-story structure of grey stone that squatted in the center of District Seven like a toad on a log. Inside, it smelled of old paper and newer fear.
They put him in a room with no windows.
It was small, maybe ten feet square, furnished with a wooden table and two chairs. A single oil lamp hung from the ceiling, casting just enough light to read by—and not enough to hide in. The walls were covered in ledgers. Thousands of them, spines out, filling every inch of space from floor to ceiling. Not for storage, Shen Mo realized. For pressure. The weight of all those names, all those debts, all those lives—it pressed down on you, made it hard to think, hard to breathe.
He sat in one chair and waited.
He'd been in rooms like this before. Not literally—corporate interrogations favored comfortable furniture and indirect lighting, the illusion of partnership—but functionally. Rooms designed to make you uncomfortable, to strip away your defenses, to remind you that you were small and the system was large.
The trick was to remember that the system was made of people. And people could be read.
The door opened.
Yan Li entered alone, carrying a folding ledger-panel like the one he'd used at the fire. He sat in the other chair, placed the panel on the table between them, and studied Shen Mo with those flat grey eyes.
"Three hours," he said. "That's how long Registrar Holt has been dead. In that time, you've been identified as a person of interest, located, and detained. Do you know how we found you so quickly?"
Shen Mo considered several answers. Chose the most neutral: "I assume you have methods."
"Your name was entered in the district ledger as a suspect approximately ten minutes after Holt's death. The entry itself created a trace—a debt-thread connecting you to the crime. We followed the thread." Yan Li's expression didn't change. "Ledgers don't lie, Scribe Shen. They only record."
"Someone entered my name. That doesn't make me guilty."
"No. But it does make you connected." Yan Li unfolded his panel, touched it. Names appeared in golden script. "Tell me what happened after you left the tannery."
Shen Mo told him. Not everything—he omitted his ability to sense threads, his vision of Holt's investigation, the burning name at the center of the conspiracy. But he described the walk back, discovering the body, the registrar's dying words, the altered ledger. He described running—and why.
"When I saw my name listed as wanted, I knew someone was framing me. Staying meant giving them time to finish whatever they started. Running meant I could investigate."
Yan Li's eyes flickered—something that might have been interest. "You thought you could investigate faster than the Registrarate?"
"I thought I could investigate while the Registrarate was focused on catching me. Misdirection. Divide their attention." Shen Mo leaned forward slightly. "It's what I would do if I were planning something. Create a distraction. Draw attention away from the real target."
"And what, in your professional opinion, is the real target?"
The name being rewritten, Shen Mo thought. The conspiracy Holt was investigating. But he wasn't ready to share that. Not yet.
"I don't know. But Holt knew. He was working on something when they came for him. Papers everywhere, ledgers open. He'd been investigating."
Yan Li was silent for a long moment. Then he did something unexpected: he closed his panel and leaned back in his chair.
"You see more than you should," he said. "Most survivors of ledger events remember nothing. Most probationary scribes couldn't find their way back to the office without a guide. Most people, when confronted by twelve armed agents, don't start calculating odds and planning counter-strategies." He almost smiled. "Who are you, Shen Mo?"
A corporate strategist from another world, Shen Mo thought. A man who's spent thirty years learning to read people and systems. A ghost in every possible sense.
"A probationary scribe who wants to stay alive," he said instead.
Yan Li nodded slowly. "That's honest, at least. Honesty has weight." He stood, moved to the wall of ledgers, ran his fingers along the spines. "Registrar Holt was investigating a pattern. Multiple ledgers across multiple districts, all showing signs of tampering. Small changes at first—names altered slightly, debts adjusted, weights redistributed. Then larger ones. Then..." He pulled a ledger from the shelf, opened it to a marked page. "Then this."
He held it out. Shen Mo took it, read.
The page listed a single name: Master Wei, Registrar, Hall 47. His death entry. Date, time, cause: Ledger Backlash (confirmed). But below that, in a different hand, someone had added a note:
Preliminary investigation suggests external interference. Case referred to Inquisitorial oversight. Status: OPEN.
Master Wei. The dying registrar from the fire. The one who'd pressed a blood-stained page into Shen Mo's hands and warned him about hungry names.
Shen Mo looked up. "Wei was murdered too."
"Possibly. The evidence is... unclear." Yan Li took back the ledger, returned it to its place. "What is clear is that someone is targeting registrars. Wei. Holt. Possibly others we haven't found yet. And in each case, the official record shows ledger backlash—a convenient, uninvestigable cause of death."
"But you don't believe it."
"I believe in evidence. And the evidence suggests that someone with considerable skill is altering ledgers to cover their tracks." Yan Li turned to face Shen Mo fully. "The same someone who entered your name in Holt's death ledger. The same someone who, I suspect, knows exactly who you are and why you survived the fire at Hall 47."
Shen Mo's mind raced. The connection was clear now: Master Wei's death, Holt's death, his own framing—all part of the same pattern. Someone was eliminating registrars who got too close to something. And they'd noticed that Shen Mo had survived when he shouldn't have.
"Why me?" he asked. "I'm a probationary scribe. I have no weight, no connections, no power. Why frame me?"
"Because you're a loose thread." Yan Li returned to his chair, sat heavily. "You survived a ledger fire. You remember details you shouldn't. You're connected to two dead registrars. And you have no history, no family, no debts—no handle for the system to grip. You're a ghost, Shen Mo. And ghosts are hard to kill cleanly."
"Hard, but not impossible."
"Nothing is impossible. But murdering you would create its own evidence, its own debts, its own weight. Framing you is cleaner—it lets the system do the work. You're arrested, tried, erased. The loose thread is removed, and no one questions it because the system itself has judged you."
Shen Mo sat with that for a moment. It was elegant, in a terrible way. Use the victim's own world against them. Make the system the weapon.
He'd done it himself, more times than he could count.
"So what happens now? You arrest me? Try me? Erase me?"
Yan Li was quiet for a long moment. Then he reached into his coat and produced a familiar object: the blood-stained page from Hall 47, the one Master Wei had pressed into Shen Mo's hands. He placed it on the table between them.
"I've been a registrar for forty years," he said. "I've seen ledger fires, ledger ghosts, ledger births and ledger deaths. I've seen names eat their owners and owners eat their names. I've seen things that would break lesser men into pieces small enough to fit on a single page." He touched the blood-stained sheet. "But I've never seen a page from a primary ledger survive a fire. I've never seen a probationary scribe walk out of a burning hall without a scratch. And I've never seen a ghost with golden threads."
He looked up, and for the first time, something like genuine emotion flickered in those cold grey eyes. Curiosity. Hunger. Interest.
"You're not just a loose thread, Shen Mo. You're a pattern. And patterns this unusual don't happen by accident." He slid the page across the table. "The Archive is watching you. That much is clear. What's less clear is whether it's watching as a predator or a cultivator."
Shen Mo picked up the page. His name was still there, at the bottom: Shen Mo. Registrar, Third Class. Debt: None. Weight: Unmeasured. Observed.
"I don't know what the Archive wants," he said. "I don't even know what the Archive is."
"No one does. That's what makes it terrifying." Yan Li stood. "But I know what I want. I want the people killing my registrars. I want to know why they're doing it. And I want to know what makes a probationary scribe interesting enough to frame."
He moved to the door, paused with his hand on the latch.
"You're free to go, Shen Mo. For now. The charges against you will be... delayed. Investigated. And while they're being investigated, you'll work for me."
Shen Mo raised an eyebrow. "Work for you?"
"You survived a ledger fire. You see threads. You think like a strategist. I need someone who can move through districts without attracting attention, who can read situations as well as ledgers, who can find what others miss." Yan Li looked back. "You'll be my unofficial asset. You investigate Holt's death, Wei's death, and any other irregularities you find. You report directly to me. And in exchange, I keep your name out of the execution ledger."
It wasn't a request. It wasn't really an offer. It was a calculation—Yan Li's calculation that Shen Mo was more useful alive and cooperating than dead or on the run.
Shen Mo understood calculations. He'd made them himself, thousands of times.
"I'll need resources," he said. "Access to ledgers. A place to stay. Information about the victims."
"You'll have what you need. Within reason." Yan Li opened the door. "There's a room above the tannery—the owner owes you a debt now. Use it. Report to me at the end of each day, sunset, at the tea house on Silk Street. Don't be late."
He was gone before Shen Mo could respond.
Shen Mo sat alone in the ledger-lined room, the blood-stained page in his hands, his mind already turning over possibilities. A conspiracy. Two dead registrars. A framing that had failed—or had it? Yan Li was using him, certainly. But use was a form of relationship, and relationships could be leveraged.
He thought about Master Wei's dying words: The names are hungry tonight.
He thought about Registrar Holt's last moments: They'll come for you. They always come.
And he thought about Yan Li's parting gift: freedom, of a sort, with a leash attached.
Let them watch, he thought. Let them all watch. I've worked with worse constraints.
He stood, tucked the page into his robe, and walked out into the fading afternoon light.
The game was on.