The ninth day began the same way everything began here:
A bell.
A lane.
A number.
Li Shen woke before the sound could fully cut the air. Habit, not pride. He sat up in the dim dorm shed, felt the stiffness in his shoulders, and waited for the second ring.
It came.
Thin. Sharp. Wrong.
Bodies rose. Tags lifted. Bundles tightened. The shed emptied like a mouth spitting out what it had been forced to hold.
Outside, the buffer yard was already moving.
Lanterns still glowed in corners where work had never truly stopped. Water lines formed. Tool racks clattered. Overseers walked with slates in hand, chalk ready, faces flat from repetition.
No speeches.
No explanations.
Just throughput.
Li Shen took his place in the lane and kept his tag visible, cord looped around his wrist. The small oiled wrap around his ledger pressed against his ribs like a reminder: system first.
A foreman looked down the line and pointed without looking at faces.
"Carry lane. Supply run."
Li Shen moved.
So did Bai Ren, because the yard liked to keep friction close enough to manage.
Bai Ren rubbed his hands together as they walked, trying to bring life back into fingers that had stopped being his. "If I ever meet whoever invented bells," he muttered, "I'm going to—"
"Not here," Li Shen said.
Bai Ren's lips pressed together. He glanced toward the overseer's slate, then lowered his voice. "Fine. I'm going to write them a complaint."
Li Shen didn't answer. Bai Ren's jokes were an engine. They kept him upright. They also made him visible.
Visibility was expensive.
They reached the sorting courtyard.
Today it looked different.
Not cleaner.
Emptier.
The lanes were still full, but the density had dropped. The yard held fewer bodies in the same space, which meant the second cut had been working exactly the way it was designed to: quietly, efficiently, without letting anyone watch it happen.
A new wave arrived through the side gate as Li Shen passed the tool racks.
Different dust. Different wrap styles. Different accents colliding into the same exhausted silence.
A boy behind Li Shen whispered to a girl beside him, "Where're you from?"
"Chixia," she said. "Red dust. Iron poor."
Another voice cut in from the next lane. "Heimu," a man said. "Blackwood. Charcoal. Smoke."
Bai Ren leaned toward Li Shen and murmured, "So the whole world is poor."
Li Shen replied without turning his head. "The whole world is feeding this place."
They were assigned cloth rolls again—damp, heavy, stubborn. Work that made your shoulders hate you without making you stronger.
Li Shen lifted his end and started moving.
The lane turned. The flow merged with another team.
And there she was again.
The small girl.
Pale. Too thin for the size of her bundle. Hair tied back too tightly as if she believed neatness could compensate for weakness. Eyes on the ground like the ground might protect her from being noticed.
An assistant shoved a standard load at her—two stacked bundles of rope and a bucket hooked onto her wrist in the same motion, because efficiency didn't pause for anatomy.
"Move," the assistant snapped.
The girl swallowed, voice low. "I can."
She stepped forward.
And her body betrayed her immediately.
Not theatrically.
A tremor in her fingers. A hitch in her breath. A slight sway at the knees that told the truth: she was already deep into debt.
Li Shen saw the equation before it finished.
If she dropped the load, she'd be flagged.
If she slowed the lane, she'd be flagged.
If she asked for help, she'd be flagged.
The system didn't punish weakness.
It removed cost.
Li Shen didn't make a scene.
He didn't step out and announce his virtue.
He simply drifted half a step closer as the lanes crossed, caught the bucket handle with two fingers, and took a fraction of the weight as if it had always belonged to the flow.
The bucket steadied.
The sway reduced.
The lane kept moving.
No one looked.
That was the point.
He spoke without looking fully at her face.
"Breathe low," he said. "Slow."
The girl's eyes flicked up for a heartbeat—startled, ashamed, grateful, all at once. She nodded stiffly and obeyed, pulling air down instead of up, letting the breath stop panicking her body.
"Thank you," she whispered.
Li Shen didn't answer.
Answers turned moments into attachments.
Attachments were expensive too.
They separated in the next bend of the lane.
Bai Ren had seen it anyway, because Bai Ren saw everything that smelled like a story.
He waited until they were behind a stack of sacks where the overseer's eyes didn't linger.
"You're doing it again," he murmured.
Li Shen adjusted his grip. "I'm preventing a spill."
Bai Ren snorted softly. "That's a person."
Li Shen's voice stayed flat. "People spill. Then they're removed."
Bai Ren's grin faded. "You talk like an overseer."
Li Shen didn't bother denying it.
Overseers survived.
Work swallowed the morning.
Carry. Drop. Stack. Repeat.
Li Shen watched his own stop markers the way he'd learned to: tongue dry, vision narrowing, hands shaking, breath going too high.
Stop before the lie.
He didn't have the luxury of pride.
At the ration bell, the yard compressed into lines again.
This time, the small girl was close enough that the lanes forced proximity.
Bai Ren, of course, couldn't help himself.
He leaned toward her, voice low but bright. "You're going to break if you keep saying that."
The girl stiffened, eyes dropping further. "I'm sorry."
Bai Ren blinked. "Why are you apologizing? I—"
"Not here," Li Shen cut in, quiet and final.
Bai Ren shut his mouth with visible effort.
The girl glanced sideways—quick, frightened—and then looked down again.
The ration ladle dropped a thin portion into her bowl.
Not cruel.
Calibrated.
She stared at it for half a second like she was trying to negotiate with reality using her eyes.
Then she ate.
Because hunger didn't negotiate.
After the ration lines split, the lanes merged again.
The small girl moved with the flow, trying to stay invisible.
An assistant barked at her for hesitating at a corner.
She flinched, then bowed her head and said, "I can."
The phrase wasn't confidence.
It was refusal to be a problem.
Li Shen found himself walking close enough to hear her breathing.
She was doing what he'd told her.
Low.
Slow.
Still strained.
But controlled.
That control mattered.
They reached a water line where teams were assigned bucket runs.
The assistant checked tags and spoke like he was reading off a list.
"Women's lane—kitchen yard. Wash line."
The small girl stepped forward.
The assistant didn't look at her face. He looked at her tag.
Then, for the first time, he said something that made her flinch harder than any shout.
"Name," he said.
She hesitated.
Not because she didn't know it.
Because names were exposure.
But the assistant's brush was already poised.
If she didn't answer, she'd become trouble.
Her voice came out thin.
"Yun Xue."
The assistant wrote it without expression. A single stroke of ink making her existence slightly more specific than a number.
He shoved the tag back at her. "Move."
Yun Xue moved.
Her shoulders were tight, her fingers shaking around the bucket handle, but she didn't drop it.
Bai Ren watched her go, then leaned toward Li Shen and whispered, almost reverent in his own crude way, "She's tiny."
Li Shen lifted his own load and started walking again. "Tiny doesn't matter. Cost matters."
Bai Ren frowned. "You're really not going to say something nice, are you?"
Li Shen's answer was blunt. "Nice doesn't keep her on the record."
Bai Ren looked like he wanted to argue.
Then he didn't.
Because the bell rang again, and the yard demanded motion.
By dusk, Li Shen's hands were raw. His shoulders felt hollow. His stomach ached with a hunger that was never satisfied, only managed.
The dorm shed filled with breath again.
Less breath than before.
Li Shen lay down, ledger pressed against his ribs, and listened to the night.
Across the darkness, Bai Ren whispered, careful now, as if even the air could report him.
"You think she'll make it?"
Li Shen didn't answer quickly.
Not because he was dramatic.
Because he wasn't sure.
He had seen too many disappear without noise.
He finally said, quietly, "If she keeps her breath low… and doesn't become expensive."
A pause.
Then Yun Xue's paper-thin voice floated from the women's side of the shed, barely there, like someone practicing permission to exist.
"I can."
Li Shen closed his eyes.
He didn't speak to her.
He didn't promise anything.
He simply pulled one slow breath—low, steady—into the dark, and let it out the same way.
In. Hold. Out.
A rhythm.
A line.
Something repeatable enough that a smaller body could borrow it and survive one more day.