The room above the tannery was small, clean, and smelled faintly of leather even through the closed window. Shen Mo didn't mind. After years of sterile penthouse apartments and anonymous hotel rooms, the smell of honest labor was almost refreshing.
He stood at the window now, watching the street below as evening settled over District Seven. Lanterns were being lit, their warm glow pushing back the shadows. Merchants were closing their shops. Workers were heading home. Normal life, continuing despite the deaths of two registrars and the conspiracy that had killed them.
Normal life, Shen Mo thought. I wonder what that feels like.
He'd been in this world less than two days. In that time, he'd survived a magical fire, been registered as a ghost, solved a contract dispute, witnessed a murder, been framed for it, and recruited as an unofficial investigator by a man who might be friend or enemy or both.
His corporate career had been intense, but this was ridiculous.
He turned from the window and surveyed his new quarters. A bed. A desk. A washbasin. A small chest for clothes. And, most importantly, a stack of ledgers that Yan Li's people had delivered while he was settling in.
Case files, the note attached had read. Wei. Holt. And three others you should know about. Study them. Report tomorrow.
Five registrars dead in the past month. All officially ruled ledger backlash. All with small inconsistencies that someone had noticed—inconsistencies that had been quietly buried until Yan Li started digging.
Shen Mo sat at the desk and opened the first ledger.
---
Master Wei's file was thickest.
He'd been a registrar for forty-three years. Assigned to Hall 47 for the last twenty. No family, no debts, no enemies—at least, none recorded. His name had been moderately heavy, the weight of decades of witnessed contracts and resolved disputes. A solid, unremarkable career.
Until the night of the fire.
The official report was brief: Ledger audit revealed tampering. Attempted correction triggered backlash. Registrar Wei deceased. Hall destroyed. No other casualties.
But the notes Yan Li had added told a different story. Tampering source unidentified. Multiple entries altered in ways that suggest outside knowledge of ledger architecture. Possible conspiracy. Recommended further investigation—DENIED by District Registrar.
Someone had shut down the investigation. Someone with authority to override an Inquisitor.
Shen Mo made a mental note: Find out who denied Yan Li's request.
He moved to the next file. Registrar Holt—the man who'd died that afternoon. Similar profile: long career, moderate weight, no obvious enemies. Also investigating ledger tampering. Also killed before he could report his findings.
Also had his investigation shut down by higher authority.
Pattern, Shen Mo thought. Someone's cleaning house. Eliminating registrars who get too close to something. And someone above Yan Li is helping them.
He read through the other three files. Same story, same pattern, same official denial of further investigation. Five registrars, all dead, all silenced, all buried under paperwork and bureaucratic indifference.
And at the center of it all, one question: What were they investigating?
Shen Mo closed the last file and sat back, thinking. In the corporate world, when you wanted to hide something, you buried it in complexity. Too many documents, too many players, too many moving parts for any one person to track. But here, in this world of ledgers and names, complexity was harder to maintain. Debts left trails. Names left threads. Everything was connected.
Which means, he realized, the conspiracy has a shape. A structure. A name at its center.
He closed his eyes and reached for that strange sense—the ability to feel threads, to see connections. It was easier now, after the day's events. Like a muscle he'd just discovered, growing stronger with use.
He focused on the five dead registrars. Let their names form in his mind: Wei. Holt. Chen. Maran. Vell. Five men, five threads, all leading...
...to the same place.
His eyes snapped open.
The threads all converged on a single name. A name he'd seen before, in the blood-stained page from Hall 47. A name that had been added to the list of survivors, even though its owner had died in the fire.
Shen Mo.
His own name. The conspiracy's threads all led to him.
But that was impossible. He'd been in this world for two days. He had no history, no connections, no weight. How could he be the center of something that had been killing registrars for a month?
Unless...
Unless the original Shen Mo wasn't as blank as I thought.
He looked at his hands—the young hands, the wrong hands—and wondered for the first time about the man whose body he now occupied. Who had he been? What had he known? What had he been investigating before Shen Mo's consciousness woke in his place?
The blood-stained page was still in his robe. He pulled it out, spread it on the desk, and studied it with new eyes.
Hundreds of names. All from Hall 47's primary ledger. All ordinary—merchants, workers, minor officials, the usual population of a provincial district. But at the bottom, his own name, freshly written: Shen Mo. Registrar, Third Class. Debt: None. Weight: Unmeasured. Observed.
And above it, one name that had been partially erased. Not completely—just enough to make it hard to read. He'd barely noticed it before, distracted by his own entry. But now, looking closely, he could make out the original characters beneath the erasure:
Shen... something. Shen Mo? No—Shen Feng. That was it. Shen Feng.
Two Shen names, one above the other. One partially erased. One newly written.
They replaced someone, he realized. The original Shen Mo—Shen Feng—was on this page. Someone erased him and wrote me in. But why? And how?
He thought about the voice in the fire: New name entered. Weight: unknown. Origin: unregistered. The Archive notes your arrival.
The Archive had noticed him because someone had written him into existence. Replaced a dead man with a living ghost. Given him a name, a status, a place in the ledger.
But who? And why?
The questions circled in his mind, none of them finding purchase. He needed more information. He needed to know who Shen Feng had been, what he'd been investigating, who might have wanted him erased.
And he needed to find out before the conspiracy decided that framing him wasn't enough—before they came to finish the job.
---
He was still studying the page when a knock came at the door.
Shen Mo's hand moved instinctively toward a weapon he didn't have. Then he relaxed. If they wanted him dead, they wouldn't knock.
"Come in."
The door opened to reveal a young woman—maybe nineteen, maybe twenty—with sharp eyes and a wary expression. She wore simple clothes, merchant-class, and carried a small ledger under one arm. Her name, when Shen Mo looked at her with his new senses, was faint but steady. Not heavy, not light. Just... present.
"You're the new scribe," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I'm Shen Mo. And you are?"
"Liu Yue." She stepped inside, closed the door behind her. "I heard what you did for Old Chen at the tannery. He's my cousin's husband's uncle. Word travels."
Shen Mo filed that away. In a district like this, everyone was connected. Information moved through family networks faster than any official channel.
"I solved a contract dispute," he said. "That's my job."
"That's not what I heard." Liu Yue moved to the desk, looked at the ledgers spread across it, the files, the blood-stained page. Her eyes widened slightly, then steadied. "I heard you knew the inspector was dead before anyone told you. I heard you made a merchant confess just by looking at him."
"People hear a lot of things."
"People hear what's true." She met his eyes directly. "I need your help."
Shen Mo studied her. Not desperate—not yet. But something close. The kind of edge that came from running out of options.
"With what?"
"My uncle. He's trying to erase me from the family ledger."
That got his attention. "Explain."
Liu Yue sat on the edge of the bed, her ledger clutched in her lap. "My father died three months ago. He was a merchant, small trade, nothing special. But he had accounts—debts owed to him, contracts with suppliers, a name with some weight. When he died, everything should have passed to me. I'm his only child."
"But?"
"But my uncle—his younger brother—claims my father was never properly married to my mother. Says I'm illegitimate. Says the family name should pass to him." Her voice stayed steady, but her hands were white-knuckled on the ledger. "He's been altering records. Paying scribes to change dates, to lose documents, to make it look like I don't exist."
"Can he do that?"
"In this district?" She laughed bitterly. "He can do whatever he wants. He has money. He has connections. He has weight. I have... this." She held up the ledger. "My father's private records. The real ones. But they're not registered, so they don't count."
Shen Mo understood. In this world, unregistered records were just paper. The only reality was what the ledgers said.
"Your uncle. What's his name?"
"Lin Fu. He's a merchant too—bigger than my father was. Has contacts in three districts, maybe more."
Shen Mo filed the name away. Lin Fu. He'd seen it somewhere recently, in one of the files...
He flipped through Registrar Holt's notes until he found it. A single line, buried in a list of ongoing investigations:
Lin Fu, merchant, District Seven. Suspected ledger tampering in family succession case. Referred to district registrar—no action taken.
Holt had been investigating Liu Yue's uncle. And now Holt was dead.
Pattern, Shen Mo thought again. The conspiracy touches everything.
He looked at Liu Yue—at her steady eyes and white-knuckled hands, at the desperation she was trying so hard to hide. She was a node in the network, connected to Holt, to her uncle, to the tampering that had gotten a registrar killed. And now she was here, asking for help from a man who might be the center of it all.
Coincidence? In the corporate world, he'd learned that coincidence was usually just undiscovered connection.
"Let me see your father's ledger," he said.
She handed it over. He opened it, let his senses expand, felt the names inside. Most were ordinary—debts paid, contracts fulfilled, the small transactions of a modest merchant's life. But a few... a few had threads. Thin threads, almost invisible, leading out of the ledger and into the world.
He followed one. It led to a name he recognized: Registrar Holt.
Another led to Master Wei.
A third led to Shen Feng—the erased name from the blood-stained page.
Liu Yue's father had been connected to all of them. Connected to the dead registrars. Connected to the man whose name had been erased so Shen Mo could exist.
He looked up. Liu Yue was watching him with an expression he recognized—the look of someone who'd just realized they'd stepped into something much larger than they'd expected.
"What did your father really do?" he asked quietly.
She swallowed. "He was a witness. To something. He never told me what—he said it was safer if I didn't know. But before he died, he gave me this." She pulled a small object from her pocket—a seal, made of jade, carved with a name Shen Mo didn't recognize. "He said if anything happened to him, I should find the person whose name was on the seal. That they would protect me."
"And did you find them?"
"I tried. But the name... it's not in any ledger. It's like the person never existed." She held out the seal. "Do you know what it means?"
Shen Mo took it. The jade was warm, almost alive. And when he held it, he could feel something—a thread, thin as spider silk, leading out of the room and into the night. Leading somewhere.
Leading to something.
He looked at Liu Yue. At her desperate hope, her fragile courage, her complete ignorance of the danger she was in. She was connected to dead registrars, to erased names, to a conspiracy that had already killed five people. And now she was connected to him.
The threads all lead to me, he thought. Wei. Holt. Shen Feng. And now this girl. All connected. All pointing in the same direction.
He didn't know what that direction was yet. But he intended to find out.
"Stay here tonight," he said. "The tannery owner owes me a favor. He'll give you a room."
Liu Yue blinked. "But my uncle—"
"Your uncle is part of something bigger than a family dispute. I need to understand what before I can help you." He met her eyes. "Do you trust me?"
She hesitated. Then, slowly, she nodded.
"You solved Old Chen's case. You didn't have to—he's nobody, with no weight. But you did it anyway." She stood, tucking her father's ledger back under her arm. "I'll stay. But I want to help. My father's dead, my uncle's trying to erase me, and someone killed Registrar Holt because he got too close. I want to know why."
Shen Mo almost smiled. She reminded him of someone—a younger version of himself, perhaps. Before the years of corporate warfare had filed away everything soft.
"We'll find out together," he said. "But first, I need to visit a tea house."
---
Silk Street was quiet at this hour, most of its shops closed, its tea houses still serving the last customers of the evening. Shen Mo found the one Yan Li had mentioned—a small establishment tucked between a paper merchant and a closed tailor's shop—and slipped inside.
The Inquisitor was already there, seated at a corner table with a pot of tea and two cups. He didn't look up as Shen Mo approached.
"You're early."
"I'm thorough." Shen Mo sat, accepted the cup Yan Li poured. The tea was bitter, strong, exactly what he needed. "I read the files."
"And?"
"And I found a connection. Liu Yue's father—a merchant, dead three months. He was connected to Holt, to Wei, and to a name that's been erased from the ledgers. Shen Feng."
Yan Li's hand paused, cup halfway to his lips. "Shen Feng."
"You know the name."
"I know of it. Shen Feng was a registrar. Assigned to Hall 47, about twenty years ago. Transferred out—officially. But I could never find records of where he went." Yan Li set down his cup. "You think he's connected to the current deaths?"
"I think he is the connection. His name was on the blood-stained page from Hall 47. Partially erased. Replaced with mine."
For the first time, Yan Li's cold composure cracked—just slightly, a flicker of surprise that was gone before it could settle.
"Replaced with yours," he repeated.
"Yes." Shen Mo pulled out the page, spread it on the table. "Look. Here—Shen Feng, fifth entry from the bottom. Partially erased. And here—Shen Mo, bottom entry, freshly written. Same hand, same ink, same day."
Yan Li studied the page for a long moment. When he looked up, his eyes were different—sharper, more focused, more alive.
"This changes things," he said quietly. "If someone has the power to erase and rewrite names at this level—"
"—then they can do more than kill registrars," Shen Mo finished. "They can rewrite reality. Create people. Erase people. Change the past."
"Exactly." Yan Li folded the page carefully, handed it back. "Keep this safe. Don't show it to anyone. And find Liu Yue's father's witness—the one whose name is on the seal. If anyone knows what's really happening, it's them."
Shen Mo nodded, stood to leave. At the door, he paused.
"Yan Li. Why do you care? You're an Inquisitor. Your job is to enforce the rules, not investigate conspiracies."
Yan Li was silent for a moment. Then: "Forty years ago, I was a probationary scribe. I survived something I shouldn't have. The Archive marked me, the same way it's marked you. And I've spent four decades wondering why."
He looked up, and for the first time, Shen Mo saw something beneath the bureaucratic mask. Something that might have been fear, or hope, or both.
"Maybe you're the answer I've been waiting for."
Shen Mo held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded once and walked out into the night.
Above him, invisible but ever-present, the Archive watched.
Observed, it whispered. Always observed.