The points board didn't look like money.
It looked like a warning.
A long plank near the ration pavilion, chalked and re-chalked so often the wood underneath had turned pale from abrasion. Rows of items. Columns of numbers. A few symbols that weren't explained, because the sect didn't explain things you could learn by paying for your mistakes.
Li Shen stood in front of it after morning shift, sweat cooling under his collar.
Bai Ren stood beside him, arms crossed, scowling like the board had insulted his ancestors.
"Soap costs points," Bai Ren muttered, reading slowly. "They want us clean and hungry."
Li Shen's eyes moved down the list.
Soap. Cloth strips. Needles. Salt. Lamp oil. Charcoal. Medicinal powder. Paper.
Paper was there.
Not cheap.
Not impossible.
Just expensive enough to punish waste.
The board was updated weekly. Sometimes daily. The numbers changed without apology.
And this week, everything tied to hosting was climbing.
Not sharply. Not dramatically.
A slow, steady inflation that felt like a hand tightening around a throat.
Salt up.
Lamp oil up.
Cloth up.
Even slaked lime was climbing—again—because sanitation didn't work on pride.
Bai Ren saw him tracking the deltas and snorted.
"So it's true," he said. "Conclave. That's why they're squeezing."
Li Shen didn't answer with certainty because certainty was expensive here.
He looked at the bottom of the board where a second list had been added in smaller script:
Priority Lane Items — Restricted Counters Only
Better medicinal powder. Better lamp oil. A thin paste that sounded like a real muscle salve.
Restricted.
Meaning: the sect wasn't just selling.
It was gating.
"You can't buy the good things," Bai Ren said, voice low.
"You can," Li Shen replied. "If you're allowed."
Bai Ren glared. "Same thing."
Li Shen's gaze stayed on the board.
Points were not reward.
They were control.
The sect paid you in a currency that couldn't leave its walls, then raised the cost of what you needed to live. It was elegant. It was brutal.
It was also a system.
And systems could be read.
He stepped away from the board and walked toward the service counters—wooden windows set into a long building, each with a hanging sign, each with a clerk who treated human bodies like inventory.
The signs were simple.
Rations
Cloth & Tools
Hygiene
Medicine
Writing Materials
Writing materials sat at the end, as if it were a luxury that didn't belong among necessities.
Li Shen went there anyway.
Not because he wanted to be a scholar.
Because he wanted his ledger to survive.
The clerk behind the window was a woman with tired eyes and ink stains on her thumb. She didn't look up at his face. She looked at his badge.
"Item," she said.
Li Shen slid a small bundle of points tokens forward. He had earned them by running sealed slips and returning with receipts. He had also saved by not buying what Bai Ren bought on impulse.
"Paper," he said. "And lamp oil. Small."
The clerk's brow twitched at the oil request, as if she approved of pragmatism without wanting to show it.
She counted his tokens, then pushed out a thin stack of rough paper wrapped in oiled cloth, and a tiny clay bottle with a cork.
"Don't spill it," she said. "If you spill it, you'll still be in the dark. And you'll still pay again."
Li Shen nodded and tucked the bundle into his belt where it wouldn't get damp.
Behind him, Bai Ren made a sound of disbelief.
"You bought paper," he said, half accusing. "We could buy meat."
"We can't buy meat whenever," Li Shen replied. "And we can't buy time. This lasts."
Bai Ren stared at him like he was trying to decide if that was wisdom or sickness.
Then his stomach growled, loud enough that he looked angry at his own body.
"Fine," he said. "I'm buying soap."
Li Shen didn't stop him.
Soap wasn't vanity in a place that judged you by smell and skin infections.
But Bai Ren didn't buy only soap.
He went to Hygiene, shoved his tokens forward, and added an extra item with a grin too sharp to be safe.
"Hair oil," he said.
The clerk blinked. "Why."
Bai Ren shrugged. "If I'm going to be furniture, I'll be polished."
The clerk didn't laugh.
She just took the tokens and slid him a small tin.
Bai Ren held it up like a trophy.
Li Shen watched without comment.
Points were not about morality.
They were about outcomes.
And outcomes would teach Bai Ren faster than Li Shen's words ever could.
On the way back, Bai Ren leaned close.
"You know what they call people who have too many points?" he whispered. "They call them 'fat'."
Li Shen kept walking.
"That means someone's skimming," Bai Ren continued, animated now. "Always."
"Not always," Li Shen said. "Often enough."
Bai Ren grinned like he'd won something.
Li Shen didn't argue because the truth was uglier than either of them wanted to admit.
In the afternoon, it revealed itself.
They were assigned to an extra sanitation push—priority lane shift. Slaked-lime distribution to drains. Cloth bundles to cleaning stations. A schedule that wasn't posted, only delivered through sealed slips.
Li Shen got the slip at the courier counter and ran it to the sanitation supervisor, received a receipt seal, and turned back toward Stores for the next leg.
He took the narrower service lane, the one that ran behind the counters where people didn't usually linger.
There, behind a stack of empty barrels, he heard a voice.
Soft.
Urgent.
Not a cultivator.
A servitor voice.
"…just two tokens," someone whispered. "It's not even theft. It's… adjustment."
Li Shen slowed without stopping. Slowing was normal. Stopping was suspicious.
He shifted his load so the slip was hidden under his palm and angled his body as if adjusting his belt.
Around the barrel edge, he caught a partial view.
Two servitors.
One older, one younger.
The older one held a small cloth pouch—points tokens inside, the clink faint but unmistakable.
The younger one had a sealed slip in hand.
The kind of slip that should never be in anyone's pocket except a runner's.
The older servitor spoke again, voice low.
"Swap the seal. One mark. Two tokens."
The younger hesitated.
"It's… protocol prep," he whispered. "They're counting."
The older servitor's tone turned flat.
"They're always counting. That's why you do it clean."
Li Shen walked past, face neutral.
He didn't glare. He didn't pretend shock.
He filed it.
A sealed slip could be swapped.
A receipt seal could be faked.
And points could be siphoned without a single knife drawn.
A system.
He delivered his slip. Returned with seal. Did not mention what he had seen.
Not because he liked theft.
Because accusations were weapons, and he didn't own one yet.
That night, Bai Ren sat on his platform and rubbed the hair oil into his scalp with exaggerated care.
"You see?" he whispered, leaning back with a smug smile. "Feels like I'm not dying."
Li Shen wrote by the light of his tiny bottle.
The flame was small, controlled. Enough to see, not enough to attract attention.
Points used: paper + oil.
Prices up: salt / slaked lime / charcoal. Conclave pressure.
Observation: slips + seals can be traded. theft is clean.
Rule: don't accuse without leverage.
Bai Ren watched the flame with envy.
"How much did that cost?" he asked.
"Less than replacing a ruined ledger," Li Shen said.
Bai Ren grunted, then lowered his voice.
"I heard something," he said.
Li Shen kept writing. "From where."
Bai Ren tapped his temple with one oily finger.
"The maintenance lane talks," he said. "They talk when they think no one important is listening."
That was the servant truth: being invisible made you present in every room.
"They're building extra latrine trenches," Bai Ren said. "Not one. Three. And they're lining them with clay. Like they expect it to be used hard."
Li Shen didn't look up. "They do."
Bai Ren frowned. "How many people do you think are coming?"
Li Shen paused his charcoal.
How many? It didn't matter as a number. It mattered as a load.
"A lot," he said. "Enough that they're afraid of smell."
Bai Ren made a face. "Face is… smell?"
Li Shen capped the oil bottle for a breath, then reopened it.
"Face is what visitors touch," he said. "They won't touch the training yard. They'll touch the water."
Bai Ren stared at him for a long moment.
Then he laughed quietly, bitter and impressed.
"You're disgusting," he said. "You make everything sound like buckets."
Li Shen didn't deny it.
Buckets didn't lie.
The following week confirmed what Li Shen had seen behind the barrels.
The sect didn't respond with shouting.
It responded with procedure.
One morning, at the service counters, an extra clerk stood beside each window. A second slate. A second seal.
Double verification.
Runners were forced to show tokens and slips at every turn.
It slowed everything down. Made people mutter.
It also made theft harder.
And in a machine, when theft becomes harder, the thieves don't stop.
They adapt.
But this wasn't probation anymore.
The sect didn't "vanish" people for small skimming.
It priced them.
A few servants were docked points so hard their badges might as well have been chains. Others were pulled off their lanes and reassigned without ceremony—ash line, waste line, night shifts where sleep stopped being a thing you could afford.
The punishment wasn't a mystery.
It was visible in the work.
Li Shen adapted first.
Not into theft.
Into positioning.
He made his runs clean and fast. He returned seals quickly. He built a pattern of reliability that clerks noticed without acknowledging.
A pattern was leverage.
Yun Xue's pattern showed itself too.
By midweek, a small bonus token appeared in her hand at ration time—slid across like an accident.
Not charity.
A calculation.
Bai Ren saw it and blinked.
"Why does she get extra?"
Yun Xue looked down at the token as if it might bite her. Her voice was small.
"The supervisor," she said. "He said… less spoilage."
Bai Ren stared at her, then at Li Shen, as if the concept of being paid for competence offended him.
Li Shen didn't respond with praise.
He responded with instruction.
"Save it," he told Yun Xue, quiet enough that no one else heard. "Don't spend it the first day."
Yun Xue nodded quickly, clutching the token.
"Yes."
Bai Ren rolled his eyes. "You talk like you're her father."
Li Shen's charcoal paused in his mind.
Father.
It was a word he didn't allow himself to touch too often in here.
He let it pass without reaction.
Instead, he asked Bai Ren the one question that mattered.
"Did you run your hands raw this week?"
Bai Ren flexed his fingers, wincing.
"Yes."
"Then buy medicine," Li Shen said. "Not hair oil."
Bai Ren bristled. "It's not perfume."
Li Shen's expression didn't change.
Bai Ren stared at him, then cursed under his breath and stood.
The next day, he bought medicinal powder.
Not because he had been convinced.
Because his hands hurt and pride didn't make skin close.
Late that week, Li Shen was sent to Stores for a sealed pickup.
The storehouse air was cooler, drier, controlled. The kind of place that made his body notice the difference without understanding it.
A store clerk handed him a sealed bundle and made him sign a mark—just a symbol, not a name.
Li Shen's hand moved without hesitation.
Writing was still rare enough here that it drew the clerk's eyes.
Not admiration.
Evaluation.
"You write," the clerk said, as if confirming a tool existed.
"Yes," Li Shen replied.
The clerk sealed the receipt and leaned closer, voice low.
"Don't get clever," he said.
Li Shen met his gaze for one heartbeat.
"I don't," Li Shen replied.
The clerk's mouth tightened.
"Good," he said. "Clever people cause shortages."
Li Shen left with the bundle tucked tight and the warning lodged under his ribs.
Shortages were the fastest way to lose face.
And Conclave pressure meant every shortage would be blamed on someone.
Sometimes the guilty.
Often the convenient.
That night, Li Shen wrote one more line under his daily entries.
Points aren't reward. They're blame with numbers.
He capped the oil bottle, wrapped it, and lay back.
Bai Ren whispered into the dark, quieter than he'd been before.
"If I had enough points," he said, "I'd buy a real pillow."
Li Shen stared at the roof beams.
In another life, that sentence might have been funny.
Here, it was a blueprint.
"I'd buy time," Li Shen said.
Bai Ren snorted softly. "You can't buy time."
Li Shen closed his eyes.
"Not directly," he said. "But you can buy what keeps your body from wasting it."
Across the shed, Yun Xue's breathing was thin but steady.
The oil flame was out.
The yard was dark.
Somewhere behind the counters, people were still trading seals behind barrels, shaving tokens off transactions, building private empires of points inside a system designed to starve them.
And overhead, unseen but felt in every price change, the Conclave moved closer like weather.
Not announced.
Not optional.
Just coming.
Li Shen's last thought before sleep was simple and cold:
If the sect was tightening its grip now, it was because it planned to be seen later.
And when it was seen, someone would pay for every missing seal.