The Nameless Epoch

Chapter 6: What the Shield Cracks Preserved

After the seventeen hundred voices stopped claiming missions, the mission wall yielded no further word. The Array Nexus Pavilion laid three isolation arrays over the gray stone. The Law Hall separated everyone present and recorded their statements one by one. It was well past midnight before Jiang Linyuan was escorted to a temporary interview room in the eastern side court.

There was no bed inside, only a low couch and a brazier gone cold. The seal remained across his cave dwelling, and the three suspended privileges on his sect identity tablet were still gray. At times his right arm insisted that Chishan remained hooked around his wrist. Whenever he raised it, however, only an empty sleeve followed.

Jiang did not circulate his cultivation to suppress the phantom pull. Three times, he wrote down the sequence in which he had heard the voices the night before. The first seventeen had been separated by slight gaps. After that, they had overlapped more and more densely, until the final count stopped at seventeen hundred. At the corner of the page he added a line: Whether the number of voices equals the number of missions remains unproven.

The hour of the rabbit was approaching when three light knocks sounded outside. Ye Zhaoshuang entered carrying a projection mirror and a public duplicate of the file. A faint darkness lay beneath her eyes. She did not ask how long he had slept. She first set the duplicate on the table, two paces beyond his reach.

“Your records access remains suspended,” she said. “This is the public unsealing record the duty adjudicator promised last night. It is not a case file I retrieved on your behalf.”

“Has Chishan been opened?”

“Not yet. The secure evidence vault is verifying both keys. I retain the remote external seal.” Ye turned the projection mirror toward the wall. “You may not direct the unsealing, and you may not request contact with the shield face. If you see an anomaly, you may only state grounds for reexamination.”

Jiang pressed down his acknowledgment imprint. “That is enough.”

Within the mirror, Chishan lay flat on a black-stone inspection table. Separate locks still secured its shield ring and shield face. The duty supervisor of the Enforcement Office opened the outer chest first. The evidence recorder from the Adjudication Office then verified the inner locks. The silver-white lightning seal Ye had left on the chest corner remained unbroken from beginning to end.

The evidence recorder recited the chest number, time of unsealing, and number of witnesses. The two artificers did not touch the shield at once. Instead, they spread a translucent pliant membrane above and below Chishan, using a mist of low-temperature spiritual energy to press out a condition rubbing. The membrane preserved indentations, attached particles, and the faintest spiritual pressure. One was taken before inspection and one afterward, specifically to prevent anyone from altering the evidence during examination.

When the first inspection-rubbing membrane lifted away, the seven welds from Chishan's reforgings appeared against its gray-white surface. The second recorded the shield's inner face. Apart from indentations left by old impacts, it showed almost nothing unusual.

After comparing both against the twelve duplicate images, an artificer shook his head at the evidence recorder. “No new structural damage to the shield. No stone dust from the mission wall detected. The reverse-reflected light altered only the surface spiritual pressure. It left no legible writing.”

The duty supervisor raised his brush to enter none under anomalous traces.

“Do not write that yet,” Jiang said.

Several people on the far side of the projection mirror looked up at once. The duty supervisor frowned. “A person under investigation has no authority to halt the examination.”

“I am not halting it.” Jiang pointed to the image of the front-face rubbing suspended on the wall. “I request that an objection from the shield's holder be entered. The third weld extends half an inch too far to the left. That is not one of Chishan's original cracks.”

The artificer magnified the image. A very fine gray line reached diagonally from the old weld, resembling a hairline fracture born from years of fatigue in the black iron. He measured it at a distance with a probe. “Less than a filament deep. It may have formed under last night's pressure.”

“All seven cracks in Chishan curl inward from the shield face. Their mouths are broad outside and narrow within. That stroke is broad within and narrow outside,” Jiang said. “It is not a c***k. Something was pressed into the c***k. Look two inches to the right of the fifth weld. There is a square corner. Black iron can split. It can bend. It does not turn a square corner on its own.”

The duty supervisor did not lower his brush. Ye Zhaoshuang asked, “What exactly do you want reexamined?”

“Do not touch Chishan. Turn over the front-face membrane that has already been removed and shine neutral cold light through it from behind.”

“Your grounds?”

“The writing in the rewrite layer reached the shield through reverse-reflected light last night. It was reversed when it landed. Viewed normally on the rubbing, the strokes look like fractures. Reverse them once more, and they become the original characters.”

Ye did not vouch for him. She addressed the evidence recorder instead. “The requested method, predicted result, and risk of contamination have all been stated. The membrane has its own evidence number, and the object to be reexamined is not the original shield. You may put it to a vote.”

The duty supervisor still did not yield. “He carried that shield for nine years. He knows every old wound. His identification alone cannot rule out subjective pattern-making.”

“Then run a blank control,” Jiang said. “Take an old shield of the same material from the vault. Press a membrane with the same spiritual mist, then illuminate it from behind. Natural hairline fractures branch and narrow at the end of their stress path. If the control also produces square corners of uniform width, then the membrane process created them. If it does not, give the third and fifth welds of Chishan to two artificers separately. Do not tell either what I said.”

The method required no one to believe him. The evidence recorder ordered an old shield brought from the training arsenal. Its number was verified, its surface cleaned, and its rubbing taken before everyone present. Every fracture in the control image branched. Even the deepest ended in a ragged shadow. Not a single stroke maintained a uniform width across two bands in the iron. The two artificers were separated for their reviews. They used different words in their findings, but both circled the same three squared turns.

The evidence recorder approved the reexamination. After a moment's hesitation, the duty supervisor added his imprint to the record. The first membrane was moved into an empty suspension frame without passing through anyone's hands. The artificer extinguished the inspection lamps and sent a thread of neutral cold light through the membrane from behind.

At first, only the seven welds turned black. The cold light dimmed further. Then the fine lines dismissed as hairline fractures began to brighten one by one. They did not follow the grain of the black iron. They crossed old cracks, turned, and stopped, forming reversed characters smaller than grains of rice.

The duty supervisor's brush froze in midair.

“Magnify them. Do not reconstruct them,” Ye Zhaoshuang said. “Display the original image beside the enhanced one. Enter every enhancement parameter into the file.”

The artificer divided the membrane into twenty-four sections and projected them cell by cell. Once the reversed characters were turned upright, the first things to appear were not mission numbers, but three square seal frames arranged side by side. The frames possessed boundaries but no names, titles, or personal spiritual signatures. Their dimensions nevertheless matched the official seals commonly used by the Personnel Office of the Sect Affairs Hall.

“Three blank Personnel Office seals,” the evidence recorder murmured.

“Record only that their form and dimensions match. Their source is undetermined,” Ye corrected. “Blank does not mean ownerless, nor does it prove the Personnel Office is involved.”

Jiang was not looking at the three seals. His attention remained on the fine cells spreading out behind them. Each cell held four columns. The first contained a name, the second a sect-registry number, the third the time of death in battle or natural passing, and the fourth only a dim horizontal stroke.

The seventh line on the first page read Jiang Linchuan.

The sect-registry number matched the old record preserved behind the honor wall. The time of death was precise to the thirteenth breath after the defensive array at Snowbreak Pass had failed eleven years before. That time had never been disclosed by the sect. Xuangang Ironshield Bastion recorded only that the pass fell during the hour of the boar, because the battle report sent back that night had never been precise to individual breaths.

Jiang remembered that hour of the boar. He had been carrying wounded people through the outer city. The sect bell had tolled only once, and He Zhenbei's report had not been posted to the Merit Hall wall until the hour of the rat. His mother had read the four words entire squad lost without shedding a tear. She had asked only when the people recovering the bodies would return. No one had told them in which breath Jiang Linchuan died. No one had said who might awaken his soul registry after his death.

Jiang's right hand slowly closed until his knuckles pressed into his palm. He did not say what the record was enough to prove. He only asked the evidence recorder, “Since the membrane left Chishan, has it remained within your sight at all times?”

“Yes. Removal, numbering, suspension, reverse illumination—the entire process was recorded.”

“Has it come into contact with any of the mission wall's twelve duplicate images?”

“No. The duplicates are in another evidence-recording chamber.”

“Then enter that lack of contact into the master file.”

The evidence recorder looked up at him, then lowered his brush. The mission wall had self-purged. The twelve duplicate images could prove only that a hidden layer had appeared. This membrane, however, had been taken from Chishan's present condition during a dual-key opening under three-party witness. It was not a copy Jiang Linyuan had retained in private, and it did not depend on the wall that had already gone blank. Someone had used the self-purge to destroy the first chain of evidence. The Law Hall's own unsealing procedure had pressed out a second one for them.

At last, the duty supervisor abandoned the words no anomaly. He opened a new evidence number and classified the membrane as a newly generated procedural original. He ordered every message array in the secure evidence vault sealed while they tested whether words could be projected onto the membrane from afar. The two artificers disconnected the array lines one by one. The fine cells continued to spread through the cold light, dense as a field of grave markers pressed into the shield's cracks.

To rule out the projection mirror itself, the evidence recorder covered the mirror and ordered the three people inside the secure vault to write what they saw on separate sealing slips. Only after all three slips had closed did he reconnect the image. Each record gave the same first name, sect-registry number, and time of death. Even the measured distance between the three blank seals and the membrane's edge agreed. Jiang could not enter the secure vault. Chishan had not been returned to him. That was precisely why his hands could no longer reach this new chain of evidence.

Ye Zhaoshuang placed the previous day's spiritual-signature count beside the projection. The full number of entries had not yet unfolded, but the counter advanced by one hundred for every hundred lines exposed. When the last section of the membrane lit, the number stopped at exactly seventeen hundred.

No one in the room spoke.

The dim stroke along the far-right column—until now mistaken for a dividing line—suddenly brightened. Two small words appeared in the empty cell following Jiang Linchuan's name: Reactivated. After them came yesterday, hour of the rat. An invisible brush seemed to strike the time through and replace it with the third quarter of the present hour of the rabbit.

The evidence recorder jerked his head up. “Every array line has been severed.”

One breath later, a new blank row inscribed itself at the bottom of the register.

What the rubbing held was not mission content at all.

It was a death register that was still updating itself.