The night air was cool against Shen Mo's face as he walked back to the tannery, but his mind was burning.
Shen Feng. The name circled in his thoughts like a trapped thing looking for escape. The original occupant of this body. A registrar who'd supposedly transferred out twenty years ago, but left no records of where he'd gone. A man whose name had been partially erased from the blood-stained page and replaced with Shen Mo's own.
They didn't just write me into existence, he realized. They overwrote someone. Killed him, erased him, and put me in his place.
But why? And who had the power to do such a thing?
The seal from Liu Yue's father was warm in his pocket, its thread still leading somewhere into the night. He hadn't followed it yet—too many variables, too little information. But he would. Soon.
First, he needed to understand the system better. The rules. The costs. The debts that everyone kept mentioning.
He was still turning this over when he reached the tannery's back stairs and climbed to his room. A light glowed beneath the door—Liu Yue, probably, still awake. He pushed open the door and found her exactly where he'd left her: sitting on the bed, her father's ledger open in her lap, her expression a mixture of fear and determination.
"Well?" she asked.
"Well, I have more questions than answers." Shen Mo sat at the desk, pulled out the blood-stained page, and spread it flat. "Your father knew something. He was connected to the dead registrars, to Shen Feng, to... something big. The question is what, and whether anyone else knows you have his records."
Liu Yue's face tightened. "My uncle knows. He's been asking about my father's papers since the funeral. That's why I came to you—I thought if I could get someone with authority to look at them, maybe—"
"Authority won't help if the system itself is compromised." Shen Mo tapped the page. "Someone high up is shutting down investigations. Yan Li tried to open a formal inquiry into the registrar deaths and was denied. That means the conspiracy reaches beyond District Seven. Beyond the Registrarate, maybe."
"Then what do we do?"
We? Shen Mo noted the word but didn't comment. In his experience, "we" was usually a trap—a way to share risk without sharing reward. But Liu Yue had information he needed, and she had nowhere else to go. For now, "we" was useful.
"We learn," he said. "We watch. We wait for them to make a mistake." He pulled a blank sheet of paper toward him. "Tell me everything about your uncle. His business, his habits, his associates. Anyone he meets with regularly. Any debts he might have. Any secrets."
Liu Yue hesitated only a moment, then began to talk.
---
She talked for two hours.
By the time she finished, Shen Mo had filled four pages with names, dates, and connections. Lin Fu—her uncle—was more than just a greedy relative. He was a player, connected to merchants in three districts, to at least two registrar offices, and to something called the Shadow Auction.
"The Shadow Auction?" Shen Mo interrupted.
Liu Yue nodded. "It's... not talked about openly. A black market, but not for goods. For names. For memories. People go there to buy and sell pieces of themselves."
Shen Mo remembered the voice in the fire, the sensation of being weighed and measured. Memories are currency, it had said. Or something like that.
"How do you know about it?"
"My father mentioned it once. Said it was dangerous—that people who went there often came back... wrong. Missing pieces of themselves." She shivered. "He made me promise never to go near it."
"But your uncle does business there."
"I think so. He has more money than his legitimate trade could explain, and he's always meeting with people who won't give their full names." She met Shen Mo's eyes. "Do you think that's connected to the registrar deaths?"
Shen Mo considered. A black market for names and memories. Registrars investigating tampering, then dying. A conspiracy that reached into the highest levels of the Registrarate. It fit—a pattern of corruption and murder to protect something valuable.
The Shadow Auction, he thought. I need to learn more about that.
He was about to ask another question when the lamp flickered.
Both of them looked at it. The flame had been steady, fed by good oil. Now it guttered and danced as if caught in a draft—but the window was closed, the door shut, the room still.
Then the pages on his desk began to rustle.
Shen Mo stood slowly, his new senses flaring. He could feel something—a presence, cold and hungry, pressing against the edges of his perception. It was like the threads he'd been learning to see, but darker. Thicker. Hungrier.
"Don't move," he whispered to Liu Yue.
The lamp flame went out.
Darkness flooded the room, absolute and complete. For a moment, there was nothing—no sound, no light, no sensation but the cold and the hunger pressing closer. Then, slowly, a faint glow began to emerge from the pages on the desk.
The blood-stained page was burning.
Not with fire—with light. Golden light, rising from the names written there, illuminating the room in sickly pulses. And in that light, Shen Mo saw something that made even his cold heart skip a beat:
A figure, standing in the corner. Made of shadow and ink and hunger. Its face was a smear of darkness, but its eyes—its eyes were names. Hundreds of names, written and rewritten, flickering and fading, each one a life it had consumed.
Liu Yue gasped. Shen Mo heard her scrambling back on the bed, but he didn't look away from the figure.
"You're a ghost," he said. His voice was steady. He was proud of that.
The figure's head tilted. When it spoke, its voice was the sound of pages tearing, of ink spilling, of names being erased forever.
"You see me."
"I see a lot of things I shouldn't."
"The marked ones always do." It took a step forward—not walking, but flowing, like ink spreading across paper. "You have something that belongs to the hungry. Give it back."
Shen Mo's mind raced. The hungry. The names. Master Wei's dying words echoed in his memory: The names are hungry tonight.
"What do you want?"
"The page. The names. The debts." Another step. The cold intensified. Shen Mo could feel his own thoughts slowing, his memories growing distant, as if something were trying to pull them out of his mind. "Give them back, and we will not eat you."
Shen Mo looked at the blood-stained page, still glowing on his desk. Hundreds of names. Hundreds of lives. And at the bottom, his own name, freshly written.
Debt: None, it said. But that was wrong. He owed a debt now—to Master Wei, who'd given him the page. To Holt, who'd died investigating. To Liu Yue, who'd come to him for help. To Shen Feng, whose erased name might be screaming somewhere in the darkness.
Everyone owed. Everyone paid. That was the system.
He reached out and touched the page.
The moment his fingers made contact, the world lurched.
He was somewhere else. Not the room—somewhere vast and terrible, filled with shelves that stretched to infinity, each one stacked with ledgers that groaned under their own weight. The Archive. He was in the Archive.
And he was not alone.
A presence surrounded him, vast and patient and utterly without mercy. Not a person, not a god—something older than both. Something that had been watching since the first name was written, and would continue watching until the last name was erased.
"You are observed," it said. Not a threat. A statement of fact.
"I know."
"You carry a debt you do not remember incurring. A life you did not live. A name that was never yours."
Shen Mo's blood ran cold. "Shen Feng."
"The name that was. The name that could have been. The name that was traded for yours." The presence shifted, and suddenly Shen Mo could see—a transaction, recorded in golden light. A name being erased. A name being written. A trade.
Someone had traded Shen Feng's existence for Shen Mo's arrival.
"Every name has weight. Every weight has a source. Every source has a debt." The presence's attention focused, sharpened, became something almost like curiosity. "You are the debt, Shen Mo. You are what was bought. And now you must pay."
The vision shattered.
Shen Mo was back in the room, the glowing page beneath his fingers, the shadow-figure frozen mid-step as if time had stopped. But something was different. The figure was... fading. Dissolving. Its hungry eyes were wide with something that might have been fear.
"The Archive," it whispered. "You spoke to the Archive."
Then it was gone.
The lamp flickered back to life. The room was warm again. And Shen Mo stood at his desk, his hand still on the blood-stained page, his mind reeling from what he'd just learned.
Liu Yue was staring at him, her face pale as paper. "What... what was that?"
Shen Mo looked at his hand. At the page. At the name at the bottom—Shen Mo. Debt: None. Weight: Unmeasured. Observed.
"Something hungry," he said quietly. "And something much, much hungrier that's watching us both."
He pulled his hand away. The page was cool now, ordinary. But he knew—knew—that nothing about it was ordinary. Nothing about him was ordinary.
He was a debt. A transaction. A name bought with someone else's existence.
And the Archive was waiting for him to pay.
---
Liu Yue didn't sleep that night.
She sat on the bed, her father's ledger clutched to her chest, watching Shen Mo with eyes that had seen too much. He didn't try to comfort her. Comfort was a lie, and they both knew it.
Instead, he worked.
He read through her father's ledger again, this time with his expanded senses. The threads were clearer now, brighter—the Archive's touch had sharpened something in him. He could see connections he'd missed before: Liu Yue's father had been a witness to something important, yes. But more than that, he'd been a recorder. He'd kept copies. Hidden them.
Somewhere in this city, there was a second set of records. A private ledger that held the truth about whatever Shen Feng had been investigating, whatever had gotten him erased, whatever had brought Shen Mo to this world.
He needed to find it.
"We need to go to the Shadow Auction," he said.
Liu Yue's head snapped up. "My father said—"
"Your father is dead. The men who killed him are still alive, and they're still operating. If we want to stop them, we need to understand them." He turned from the desk. "The Auction deals in names and memories. Someone there knows what happened to Shen Feng. Someone there knows why I'm here."
"And if they decide to add you to their collection?"
Shen Mo almost smiled. "Then they'll learn that some debts are more expensive to collect than others."
He crossed to the window, looked out at the pre-dawn darkness. Somewhere out there, the conspiracy was moving. Killing registrars. Erasing names. Building something.
And somewhere out there, the Archive was watching. Waiting.
You are the debt, it had said. Now you must pay.
Shen Mo had spent his entire life making others pay. Now, for the first time, the debt was his.
He intended to survive it.
"Rest while you can," he said to Liu Yue. "Tomorrow, we start fighting back."
She nodded slowly, her eyes still wide but her jaw set with determination. She reminded him of someone—a younger version of himself, perhaps, before the years had filed away everything soft.
We'll see if she lasts, he thought. Most don't.
But as he turned back to the window, watching the first grey light creep over District Seven's rooftops, he felt something he hadn't felt in years.
Hope. Or something like it.
The game was on.