Kang had not slept properly in six days, and the accumulated exhaustion had begun, in small and troubling ways, to erode the careful discipline he had maintained across decades of patient, meticulous planning.
It had started with the northeast pillar. That single, careless slip, uttered in a moment of genuine relief at finding Jian still alive, had lodged itself in his thoughts like a splinter he couldn't quite work free, and the more he turned it over in the days that followed, the more it seemed to metastasize into something considerably larger than a single unfortunate detail.
