The probation yard didn't run on pain.
Pain was common. Cheap. Uninformative.
It ran on loss.
Loss of tools.
Loss of time.
Loss of food to mold.
Loss of bodies to sickness, mistakes, or the slow failure of nerves.
In the morning, the foremen didn't ask how people felt.
They asked how much was missing.
Li Shen found out because his lane changed.
No warning.
No explanation.
An attendant with a slate walked down the stone-haul line and tapped Li Shen's tag once with the end of a stick.
"Supply support," the attendant said. "Tool-cage. Drying shed. Back and forth. Don't stop moving."
Li Shen nodded once and stepped out of his team without looking at Bai Ren.
Bai Ren noticed anyway.
He leaned forward as Li Shen passed and whispered, "You're getting promoted?"
Li Shen didn't slow. "I'm getting relocated."
Bai Ren's mouth twitched. "That's not as fun."
"It's safer," Li Shen replied.
Bai Ren looked offended by the word safer, then swallowed it because he had learned what marks felt like.
Li Shen crossed lanes with a coil of rope slung over his shoulder and a crate of hooks balanced against his hip. The route took him past the ash pits, past the waterline repairs, and toward a long low shed that smelled different from the rest of the yard.
Not rot.
Not latrine.
Plant matter.
Dry, bitter, faintly sweet in places, as if the air was holding onto the memory of leaves.
The drying shed sat behind a second fence, not because it was precious like a treasury, but because it was sensitive. Too much damp, too much theft, too much careless handling, and the whole stock turned into waste.
Waste was loss.
Loss drew attention.
Attention was expensive.
Inside, racks held bundles of herbs tied in rough bunches. Baskets sat in rows, labeled in charcoal marks. Some were full of stems. Some were full of leaves. Some were full of brown mush that had once been usable.
A supervisor stood near the center with a slate, face tight.
Not angry.
Calculating.
He was the kind of man who didn't curse when something spoiled.
He simply adjusted who would pay for it.
Li Shen delivered the hooks to the tool-cage clerk at the shed entrance and waited for the return assignment.
The clerk barely glanced at him.
"Carry these," he said, pushing a crate of empty baskets forward. "Return to wash yard. Then bring clean cloth to rack three."
Li Shen lifted the crate and moved.
As he passed the racks, he saw the problem.
Rack one smelled wrong—sharp and sour. Leaves clumped where air hadn't reached. A dark fuzz hugged the stems like a quiet infection.
Two girls were picking through it with their hands, trying to salvage what could still be counted as usable.
Their eyes were red.
Not from crying.
From smoke and exhaustion.
The supervisor snapped, "Faster."
One girl bowed her head. "Yes."
The other didn't answer.
Her hands kept moving because that was safer than speaking.
A few steps away, on rack three, the air changed.
Still bitter.
But clean.
Leaves spaced better. Bundles tied looser. The rack looked… cared for in a way that didn't waste effort.
The baskets beneath it held sorted stems and leaves with less debris, less damp, less hidden rot.
A small figure stood near that rack with her sleeves pinned up and her hair tied back tightly.
Yun Xue.
She didn't look dramatic. She didn't look proud.
She looked focused.
As if the rack was the only thing in the yard that responded predictably to attention.
Li Shen didn't stop.
Stopping drew eyes.
But he slowed half a breath, just enough to register details:
She turned bundles so air could reach the underside.
She discarded soft stems before they touched the main basket.
She spread thin layers instead of stacking thick ones.
Not genius.
Not magic.
Process.
The supervisor walked down the row with his slate, checking each rack like a man checking wounds.
He paused at rack one, pinched a bundle, and frowned.
"Rot," he said flatly. "Loss."
He didn't yell.
He marked something on the slate.
One of the girls flinched like she'd been struck anyway.
He moved to rack two, repeated the pinch, repeated the frown.
Then he reached rack three.
His fingers pinched a bundle, tested it, then released.
He leaned closer. Smelled.
His expression didn't soften.
But it changed by a fraction—less irritation, more neutral.
"This one doesn't rot," he said.
It wasn't praise.
It was a metric.
He looked at the tag hanging from the rack post—a small wooden marker tied with cord, not a wrist tag, but the same logic.
"Who's on this rack?" he asked.
Yun Xue didn't lift her head all the way.
She answered like she was afraid of the sound of her own voice.
"Yun Xue."
The supervisor's eyes flicked to her hands, then to the slate.
He made a small mark.
Not a star.
A decision.
"Stay on three," he said. "Don't switch."
Yun Xue nodded once. "Yes."
The supervisor walked away without another word.
The rack stayed.
The loss stayed down.
The system didn't care why.
It cared that it worked.
Li Shen carried his crate to the wash yard, returned with clean cloth, and did the assigned back-and-forth until his arms felt like rope that had been soaked too long.
On his third pass, Bai Ren appeared at the edge of the drying shed fence like a man approaching a shrine he didn't believe in.
He was carrying a bin of ash that left gray streaks up his sleeves.
His face was smeared with soot.
His eyes were bright with irritation.
He spotted Li Shen and mouthed silently, What is this place?
Li Shen didn't answer with words. He pointed his chin once toward the drying racks.
Bai Ren followed the line of sight.
He saw the moldy rack.
He saw the girls picking through rot.
He saw Yun Xue's rack—cleaner, more controlled.
Bai Ren's expression shifted into confusion.
He leaned toward the fence and whispered, voice low enough to be safe.
"Why is hers… better?"
Li Shen set the cloth down and replied without turning fully.
"Because she makes it better."
Bai Ren stared as if that didn't compute.
"She's tiny," he whispered. "She looks like she'd snap if someone sneezed on her."
Li Shen lifted the next bundle of cloth. "Tiny is irrelevant."
Bai Ren's mouth opened, ready to argue.
Li Shen added, "Loss rate matters."
Bai Ren blinked, then—surprisingly—went quiet.
Not because he agreed.
Because he understood that this was how the yard spoke: not with emotion, with numbers.
A commotion rose from rack one.
A boy—probationary, assigned as extra hands—had tried to "speed up" by stacking bundles thicker, tying them tight to look neat.
Neat meant nothing if it trapped moisture.
A girl caught him doing it and slapped his wrist away.
The boy snapped back, loud enough to turn heads.
"Don't touch me."
Bad move.
A supervisor's head turned.
Not angry.
Interested.
Interested was deadly.
The supervisor walked over, eyes dropping to the thick stacks, then to the boy's face.
"You did this?" he asked.
The boy straightened, trying to look strong. "I was making it faster."
The supervisor's gaze didn't change.
"Faster," he repeated, then pinched a bundle and felt the damp trapped inside.
He turned his slate and made a mark.
Then he held out his hand.
"Tag."
The boy hesitated, then offered his wrist.
The supervisor didn't take the tag.
He touched the notch, then said one sentence that made the air colder.
"Back to buffer labor," he said.
No argument.
No appeal.
A simple demotion.
The boy's face went pale.
"But I—"
The supervisor cut him off. "You increased loss."
That was the charge.
Not disrespect.
Not noise.
Loss.
An attendant stepped in, took the boy by the sleeve, and guided him toward a side lane that led away from the drying shed and back toward the harsher tasks—the kind that broke bodies into silence.
The girl who had slapped his wrist lowered her head and returned to sorting rot, because surviving meant ignoring what you couldn't fix.
Bai Ren watched the demotion happen and swallowed hard.
He leaned toward Li Shen again, voice thinner now.
"So… she's safer here because she keeps the leaves from dying?"
Li Shen adjusted the cloth roll. "She's safer because she reduces waste."
Bai Ren's eyes flicked to Yun Xue.
For the first time, his expression wasn't teasing.
It was respectful in the crude way he had: surprise that something small could be useful in a system that hated weakness.
Yun Xue didn't look up. She didn't bask in anything.
She just kept turning bundles so they could breathe.
That was her entire trick.
Let things breathe.
Li Shen felt the irony like a dry taste in his mouth.
The yard had nearly killed them by refusing to let them breathe.
Now it rewarded the girl for doing the opposite—quietly, efficiently, without asking for credit.
By late afternoon, Li Shen's assignment shifted again.
He was sent back to his stone-haul lane with a short note on a slate.
Not an explanation.
A mark indicating he had completed "support duties."
Bai Ren was waiting when Li Shen returned, shoulders slumped, eyes soot-darkened.
He fell into step beside Li Shen as they lifted stones again.
"I hate ash pits," Bai Ren muttered.
Li Shen didn't answer.
Bai Ren added, quieter, "But I hate being demoted more."
Li Shen glanced at Bai Ren's wrist tag—still present, still braided cord, still on the record.
"Then stop giving them reasons," Li Shen said.
Bai Ren snorted softly. "You say that like it's easy."
"It's simple," Li Shen corrected. "Not easy."
They hauled stone until their arms forgot how to relax.
At dusk, points were marked again.
Li Shen didn't see the numbers. He felt their effect when the ration portion came—slightly larger than the buffer belt, but still calibrated, still reminding them that food was never a right here.
In the dorm shed, the air held less panic than it used to.
Not because life was gentle.
Because life was predictable enough that the mind stopped burning itself on uncertainty.
Bai Ren lay down and stared at the ceiling as if he wanted to punch it.
"She didn't say 'I can' today," he whispered.
Li Shen, already pulling his ledger free, paused half a breath.
It was true.
Yun Xue had stopped repeating the phrase like a shield.
She didn't need it as much now.
She had a rack.
A place.
A function that reduced loss.
Li Shen wrote anyway—because writing made the world stay in place long enough to measure.
Work: stone haul. support duty (drying shed).
Observation: drying rack #3 lower spoilage. supervisor marked it.
Rule: loss creates punishment. loss reduction creates stability.
He hesitated, then added one more line—small, clinical, but unmistakably personal in the way he phrased it:
Yun Xue: hands steady. work clean. place fixed.
Across the shed, on the women's side, Yun Xue's voice rose briefly—not a plea, not an apology.
A simple statement to someone nearby, low and matter-of-fact:
"Don't tie them that tight. They need air."
Li Shen closed the ledger and lay back.
In the probation yard, that counted as a miracle.
Not because it was kind.
Because it worked.
And for the first time since the buffer belt, Li Shen felt something like the outline of a future forming—not as destiny, but as a chain of small advantages:
A stable rack.
A reduced loss rate.
A girl with a hand that made things live longer.
A system that noticed results even when it didn't care about people.
He stared at the lantern lines outside the shed and let one thought settle with cold clarity:
If Yun Xue kept making things better, someone higher would eventually want to know why.
And in this place, being noticed was always dangerous—
but it was also the only way a door ever opened.