The stamped notice didn't feel heavy in Li Shen's hand.
It felt final.
Final wasn't weight. Final was a direction the world didn't ask permission to impose.
He reached the first gathering point by late morning—a road station that wasn't a village and wasn't a town, just a fenced yard built where paths collided often enough to justify permanence.
A water trough. A lean-to shed. A hard-packed square of dirt with old wheel ruts like scars.
And people.
More than he had ever seen gathered for anything that wasn't famine.
Boys with bundles tied too tight, as if squeezing cloth could squeeze fear. Men with hollow cheeks and eyes trained to watch hands. A few women with the kind of stillness that meant they'd already buried someone and learned how to keep moving.
They didn't look like recruits.
They looked like surplus.
A table had been set near the gate.
Not ceremonial. Administrative.
A clerk sat behind it with ink and paper, brush moving in short, efficient strokes. Beside him stood two men in plain travel robes—no bright colors, no sect banners, no need to advertise what everyone in line already knew: this wasn't a market, it was intake.
One of them raised his voice once.
"Listen."
Not shouted. Carried.
"Today is not recruitment," he said. "Today is the first cut."
The phrase landed wrong in the mouth—too clean, too calm.
It made the crowd shift.
A boy near the front scoffed, trying to hold face with sound. "Cut for what?"
The man didn't even look at him.
"To reduce waste," he said.
Waste.
Bodies that broke on roads. Bodies that stole. Bodies that fought. Bodies that arrived sick and made everyone else sick. Bodies that consumed rations and produced nothing.
Waste was a number problem.
The clerk kept writing.
The man continued, voice flat.
"You will walk five days to the second point. Not to reach the sect. To reach the next table."
He tapped the ledger with one finger.
"If you cannot keep up, you are removed."
A murmur crawled through the line, half fear, half anger.
A man barked, "Removed how?"
The answer came without emotion.
"Off the record," the robed man said.
That was worse than punishment.
Punishment acknowledged you existed.
Off the record meant you were solved.
The crowd quieted.
The second robed man spoke then—older, eyes like a tool.
"No fighting," he said. "No theft. No leaving the column. No bargaining for wagons. Wagons are for paper and water. You are not paper."
Someone laughed nervously.
It died fast.
Li Shen stood inside the line and forced his breathing to stay even.
In. Hold. Out.
His pulse was too fast.
Not fear.
Not excitement in the childish way.
A system being tested by a new variable: a door exists, and it can close.
When his turn came, he stepped forward and placed his stamped notice on the table.
The clerk didn't look at his face. He checked the stamp, checked the name, and wrote.
Brush. Ink. Fiber.
Li Shen became an entry.
The robed man's gaze dropped to Li Shen's hands—cracked knuckles, rope scars, grain dust lodged in skin.
Then to his posture.
Then to his breathing.
No praise.
No reaction.
Just a silent confirmation that he was at least physically usable.
The clerk slid a thin wooden tag across the table.
A number carved into it.
No surname.
No village.
No story.
"Keep it," the clerk said. "Lose it and you don't exist."
Li Shen closed his fingers around the tag and felt something cold settle in his chest.
Existence had rules now.
The robed man lifted his hand and pointed toward the road.
"Column," he said.
The line moved.
Not like villagers walking together.
Like goods being shifted.
They counted heads as they left the yard. They counted again at the first bend. They wrote the count down as if bodies were sacks.
The first day wasn't hard in distance.
It was hard in discipline.
The column moved at a steady pace that punished anyone who walked by emotion.
Boys surged forward when they felt watched, then fell behind when the surge burned their legs.
Men tried to conserve, then panicked when the column didn't slow for them.
Li Shen kept a pace that didn't change.
Not because he was strong.
Because he refused to spend himself early.
They stopped at dusk at a relay yard that belonged to nobody important—just a fenced square with straw, a trough, and a keeper who accepted coins without asking names.
The robed men didn't negotiate.
They paid.
Not for comfort.
For containment.
The clerk counted tags.
The older robed man counted bodies.
Two didn't match.
A boy's tag was found on the ground near the road.
The boy was nowhere.
No one searched for him.
The clerk made a small mark.
Off the record.
Li Shen ate ration grain and slept with his ledger pressed against his ribs.
That night, excitement tried to climb up his throat like laughter.
He crushed it with breath.
In. Hold. Out.
---
The second day taught them what "cut" really meant.
A boy with a limp tried to hide it until noon.
By midday his leg gave out.
He went down hard and grabbed at another man's sleeve.
"Help me," he begged, voice raw. "Just—just slow down—"
The column did not slow.
The older robed man stepped out, looked down at the boy for one heartbeat, then lifted his hand.
Two assistants—plain men with ropes and hard expressions—pulled the boy to the side of the road.
No beating.
No screaming.
Just removal.
The clerk wrote.
The column kept moving.
Li Shen didn't look back.
Not because he didn't feel it.
Because looking back didn't change the rule.
---
The third day was where hunger made people stupid.
A man stole from a water barrel at the relay stop, thinking night would hide him.
It didn't.
The column had eyes trained by poverty.
Someone grabbed him. Someone else hit him. Pride tried to become violence.
The older robed man stepped between them without raising his voice.
"Enough," he said.
Silence fell like a lid.
He pointed at the thief. "Off the record."
He pointed at the man who hit first. "Off the record."
He pointed at the one who kept hitting after the thief stopped moving. "Off the record."
Three removals.
Not dramatic.
Just clean.
That night, the column was quieter.
Not because people had become virtuous.
Because they had learned the machine didn't punish to teach.
It removed to reduce.
Li Shen wrote one line by candle stub, charcoal ugly from cold fingers.
Day 3: rule = removal is cheaper than correction.
---
The fourth day was where the column stopped pretending it was only walking.
They crossed a stretch of road where stakes held private marks and men watched like wolves in coats.
Not Stonehide by name, maybe—Stonehide by shape.
They wanted to know if this was a shipment worth touching.
The older robed man exchanged a sealed slip with them.
No argument.
No raised voice.
Money or authority—either way, the result was the same:
The road bent its neck and let the column pass.
Li Shen understood something then, deep and quiet:
The first cut wasn't meant to protect them.
It was meant to prove that the institution could move bodies across other people's territory without delay.
A logistics demonstration.
A power demonstration.
That night, a boy tried to run.
Not because he was brave.
Because he was terrified and stupid in the way terror made you stupid.
They found his tag in the mud near the fence line by morning.
The clerk made the mark.
Off the record.
No one said his name.
---
The fifth day broke the column down into what it really was:
Those who could repeat, and those who couldn't.
Feet blistered. Shoulders bowed. Voices disappeared.
And yet the column moved.
Because the pace didn't care about suffering.
It cared about arrival.
By late afternoon, they reached the second gathering point.
It wasn't a relay yard.
It was a camp.
Fenced wide. Marked. Organized.
A place that had been built specifically to receive human flow—and it showed in the way everything was already moving before they arrived.
Inside the outer fence, people were already there.
Not just a handful.
Dozens.
Some sat in tight rows with their bundles between their knees, eyes hollow, waiting for their numbers to be called. Others stood in lines that didn't drift or wobble—their shoulders slumped, but their spacing stayed clean, as if the rules had been hammered into them by fatigue.
They had made it earlier.
They had passed the first cut days ago.
They were no longer on the road.
They were in processing.
Li Shen felt the shift immediately.
The road had been hunger and pace.
The camp was procedure.
There were tables—more tables than he expected.
Clerks in sequence, not a single gatekeeper with a brush. Each table had a function, each function had a queue, and each queue fed the next like a machine designed to never stop.
"Tags," a clerk called, voice bored.
Hands lifted wooden numbers.
Brushes moved.
Names were confirmed, struck, copied, sorted.
A man with a swollen ankle tried to lean on the fence like it was nothing. A uniformed servant saw it, pointed, and two assistants guided the man toward a side lane marked with a simple sign.
Not "punishment."
Not "mercy."
A different bin.
Li Shen saw uniformed servants—older, cleaner, faces empty with practiced obedience—moving along the lines with water ladles and cloth strips like maintenance workers keeping gears from overheating.
They didn't speak unless necessary.
They didn't look curious.
They looked like parts.
Beyond them, wagons waited.
Not the creaking carts of bourgades.
Wagons built in matching frames, wheels reinforced, canvas covers treated against weather. Their axles were greased. Their lashings were standardized. Their teams were already harnessed as if departure was scheduled, not hoped for.
And the beasts pulling them—
They weren't mounts of glory.
But they moved with a smooth strength that made ordinary draft animals look sickly by comparison.
A step up.
A tier change.
Some wagons were already loaded.
Not with goods.
With people.
Men and boys sat shoulder-to-shoulder inside, knees drawn up, bundles tucked beneath them. A servant stood at the rear with a short pole, tapping the wagon side twice—signal—then the team shifted and rolled forward toward an inner gate.
No fanfare.
Just throughput.
Li Shen's column shuffled to a stop at the outer registration lane.
And while they waited, another sound rose behind them—footsteps.
A second column.
Then another.
From a different road mouth, cutting into the camp like a new vein feeding a heart.
Li Shen turned his head just enough to see it.
A stream of bodies coming in, dust-caked, faces cracked by cold, led by the same kind of plain-robed handlers with the same blank authority.
They arrived the way his group had arrived.
Not as individuals.
As inventory.
The camp didn't react.
It absorbed.
Clerks didn't look up. They just called numbers faster.
Servants shifted water barrels.
Assistants redirected lanes to prevent tangles.
The machine had been built for this.
The older robed man—who had led Li Shen's first cut—turned and looked over the survivors.
Not many.
Less than half.
Maybe far less.
The cut had done what it was designed to do.
He spoke once, voice flat, procedural.
"You made it to the next table," he said.
He gestured toward the inner fence, where uniformed servants stood in two lines like a throat.
"This is where the sect starts spending," he continued.
A pause.
Not dramatic.
Precise.
"Which means the next cut is sharper," he said. "Because it costs more to keep you."
Li Shen tightened his grip on his wooden tag.
He felt excitement again—hotter this time, sharper, almost painful.
Because the world had widened into something he hadn't been able to imagine from a village.
Because the door hadn't closed.
Because his discipline had bought him one more step.
He forced his breathing to stay even.
In. Hold. Out.
Then he stepped forward with the survivors—past the first tables, toward the inner lane—while another column filed in behind him and the camp kept running like it had never known any other purpose.
Toward the next grade of the machine.
Toward the next cut.
Toward the question that mattered more than distance now:
Not can you arrive—
but can you stay on the record.