The vendor rule didn't stay a rule.
It became a season.
At first it was just a sheet under iron bars—clean ink, hard stamp, a list that didn't include the stalls people actually used unless they enjoyed paying extra for the privilege. For a week, servants treated it like an irritation.
Then the forge runner quota posted.
Then deductions started landing on men who came back with the "wrong" stamp.
Then the arguments stopped—not because anyone agreed, but because the system had finished onboarding the lesson.
In the Pavilion, you didn't win against paper.
You learned how to route inside it.
Li Shen's name rotated onto runner duty twice in the first month.
Oil. Twine. Quench sand. Cheap flux. The unglamorous inputs that kept the Circle of Fire from turning into a funeral.
Daylight-only. Logged like salvage: sign out, stamps, sign back in. It wasn't punishment. It was a funnel—movement narrowed into approved paths and priced like compliance.
On his first run, the gate clerk slid the approved list under the slit without being asked.
Not kindness. Throughput.
Li Shen didn't study it like a man hunting loopholes. He studied it like a station tray: what holds, what fails, what gets you docked.
The list shifted week to week.
Not the top names—the Pavilion-linked quarter merchants stayed pinned like nails—but the margins moved. One twine seller vanished. Another appeared two streets over. A lamp oil vendor dropped from "approved" to "pending" without explanation.
Greyhaven wasn't random.
It was managed.
And management always had hands behind it.
Those hands weren't sect elders. They were local: market houses, street guards, contract enforcers—families with tokens, not robes. Not everyone cultivated, but enough stood adjacent to cultivation—charm users, talisman runners, hired muscle that held posture like armor—to make the market feel like it ran on invisible rails.
Li Shen saw a Hearthscale cart roll past the seam twice in the same hour, clean wheels, quiet men. He saw young men with family tokens stop at a vendor stall and speak in low voices. He saw stamped strips of paper change hands.
By the next week, that vendor's stamp appeared on the approved list.
Nobody called it bribery.
They called it standardization.
Servants called it what it was: a fee paid up front so you didn't pay it later as deductions.
Li Shen bought what the slip demanded, took hard stamps, kept the receipts in wax, and kept his face boring.
Boring meant cheap.
Cai Shun didn't waste a season like this.
He leveraged it.
Issued tags had started as "recommended" on verification days.
Then "strongly recommended."
Then "expected," the way expectations became rules without ever being written as rules.
He didn't threaten. He didn't need to. He simply made sure the stations that paid for issued tags got the better furnace windows—cleaner burn, steadier heat, slightly less sour smoke.
Not enough to prove intent.
Enough to create incentive.
Li Shen paid once.
Not because he liked it, but because he could do arithmetic.
Two points for an issued tag on a verification day where a deduction could cost more than two points—plus a silent mark that would follow him into the next rotation.
Sometimes you bought time.
Not comfort.
Time.
He treated it like a tool purchase. Something you used when the alternative was worse.
Then he refused the next time, just to keep Cai Shun from pricing him as a permanent customer.
Cai Shun noticed.
He always noticed.
He didn't retaliate with violence. He adjusted allocations: more hook runs, more dirtier batches, more work where a cough at the wrong second turned into a ruined curve and an argument you couldn't win.
Li Shen accepted it the way he accepted smoke.
Hooks paid in points. They also paid in social physics: men who could make hooks cleanly were harder to replace.
Harder to replace meant more attention.
Attention wasn't always lethal.
It was lethal when you couldn't afford it.
Bai Ren stayed in yard lanes, and yard lanes got stranger as salvage became routine.
Beast Yard expanded intake. Clearance chits appeared more often. The smell of blood and hot fat drifted closer to servant quarters on some mornings, and people complained until they realized complaining didn't change wind.
Bai Ren didn't chase salvage like a gambler.
He took it once, on a day his shoulder felt stable enough to tolerate rope work, and returned with four points and palms that needed salve.
He didn't brag. He sat down across from Li Shen, opened his hands, and said flatly, "It pays. It also eats you."
Li Shen nodded. "Everything pays and eats."
Bai Ren's usefulness deepened in this season.
He became a low-tier sensor grid: which board was being watched, which clerk had started stamping harder, which yard foreman had turned careful because a market-house representative had been seen near an inner gate.
He didn't dress it up as intrigue. It was just labor noticing pressure.
One night, Bai Ren said, "Hearthscale's people are here more."
Li Shen didn't look up from scraping soot out of his nails. "Greyhaven contracts."
Bai Ren frowned. "Contracts with who?"
Li Shen paused, then answered the only safe truth from the bottom.
"With whoever can pay," he said. "And whoever can enforce."
Bai Ren stared at him, then gave a short sound. "That's useless."
"It's safe," Li Shen replied. "It keeps you from picking the wrong enemy."
Bai Ren didn't like it.
He accepted it anyway.
Yun Xue stopped being a presence entirely.
Her mat stayed empty. Her name stopped being spoken casually. Servants learned that if you repeated her name too often, someone with cleaner cuffs would notice.
Li Shen saw her once in passing near a service corridor, flanked by two older women in simple robes—Elder Yan's household servants, not yard labor.
Yun Xue looked smaller inside better cloth.
Not weaker.
Contained.
Her eyes flicked to Li Shen for the briefest moment, and he saw something new: practiced stillness. The kind learned by standing in rooms where mistakes had consequences.
He didn't wave.
He didn't speak.
He let her pass as if she belonged to a different lane now.
Because she did.
That was the price of being claimed.
Li Shen's body shifted over the months in ways the forge recognized before anyone else did.
His cough didn't vanish.
It became predictable.
Predictability was the difference between weakness and management.
Smoke-Sealing held longer in the same windows. His throat didn't burn as fast. The heaviness behind his navel—Qi fatigue—still arrived, but later in shifts, and it cleared faster after sleep.
He paid for that progress with maintenance that never looked glamorous.
Tea. Paste. Powder. Small, consistent.
And cultivation that stayed ugly and controlled.
He didn't sit for hours like a storybook disciple.
He sat long enough to keep the cord from thinning back into thread.
Night after night, he ran the loop through the rib snag until it stopped behaving like a fixed obstacle and started behaving like a variable.
Sometimes it caught.
Sometimes it didn't.
That variability wasn't failure.
It was structural change.
Late in the third month of the season, he guided Qi through the rib channel and it flowed as a steady cord for ten cycles without snagging.
Ten cycles.
Not a breakthrough.
A baseline.
He stopped there because stopping while you still had control was part of control.
He slept.
He woke with his chest expanding cleanly enough that he didn't need to pause before standing.
In the forge, that translated into function:
He could hold Smoke-Sealing through a full hook bend and still have Qi left to steady his hands through quench.
He could work a dirty batch without coughing hard enough to lose rhythm.
His output didn't become miraculous.
It became reliable at a higher level.
That was the signal.
Not aura.
Not light.
Reliability.
Qian Mei remained what she was supposed to be: a function.
No dramatic scenes. No appearances inside the wall. No miracles.
Just cost reduction.
On one runner day, Li Shen paid copper for twine he didn't need and left with a bundle that weighed like twine plus nothing—tea and paste nested under the knot.
On another, he bought lamp oil and came back with dried herb folded into the oil seller's wrapping paper, indistinguishable unless someone tore it open for entertainment.
Nobody did.
The Pavilion didn't search every servant's purchases.
It didn't need to.
It only needed to make mistakes expensive when caught.
So Li Shen minimized mistakes.
That was the strategy.
In the fourth month, he met Qian Mei once—briefly, not seated, not at Stone Lantern, not lingering. In the seam where crowds made you invisible as long as you behaved like everyone else.
She didn't hand him a bundle.
She handed him news.
"Your letter reached Haoyang," she said, voice small and steady. "From Haoyang, it reached your village."
Li Shen didn't ask for the chain. Logistics didn't need romance.
"How long?" he asked.
"Three weeks," Qian Mei said. "Could be four next time. Roads are being 'secured.' That slows everything."
Secured. Merchant language. Tolls and checkpoints and paid escorts.
"And the village?" Li Shen asked.
Her eyes held him long enough to make the answer land.
"Old He is still alive," she said. "Stubborn. Working anyway. Your father's keeping the roof sealed. Luo Yao's still there."
Li Shen let that settle.
Then he asked the question behind the question. "Why are the roads being secured?"
Qian Mei's mouth moved slightly. Not humor. Disdain.
"Haoyang is tightening," she said. "The magistrate posted a 'stability contribution.' Grain first. Copper after. Collecting early."
Li Shen didn't pretend surprise.
"Bandits?" he asked.
"Bandits are the excuse," Qian Mei replied. "The mechanism is contracts."
She didn't name a clan like an oracle. She named what merchants actually touched.
"Haoyang notables are running escort papers now," she said. "New seals on receipts. Same routes, different hands."
Li Shen's gaze sharpened. "Army?"
Qian Mei nodded once. "An unit's attached to collections. The kind that doesn't argue with villages."
Li Shen remembered how an unit could turn a road into a courtroom and a yard into an audit. He didn't need more description.
"And cultivators?" he asked.
"One," Qian Mei said. "People say one. Doesn't matter if it's true. Villages believe it's true, so they don't resist."
Li Shen understood. One low-tier cultivator attached to an unit was enough to bend an entire district's behavior.
"If you ever send medicine," Qian Mei added, "don't send coin. Coin gets counted. Send trade goods. Tea bricks sell without questions."
Li Shen didn't commit. Commitment was expensive.
He nodded once, because it was operationally correct.
Then she closed the exchange with a lever, not comfort.
"Haoyang isn't Greyhaven," she said. "Different hands. Different appetites. Your village gets squeezed by Haoyang's paper, not ours."
"I know," Li Shen said.
Qian Mei flowed back into the crowd as if she had never stopped.
Li Shen finished the run, returned before sun-lower, got clean stamps, and handed supplies over without drawing eyes.
Inside the wall, nobody asked about Haoyang.
Because nobody cared.
That was why he had to care without becoming sloppy.
The season produced one more effect Li Shen couldn't ignore.
It created factions among servants.
Not ideologies. Micro-economies.
Men who could afford approved vendors and kept credits clean started acting like they were safer than the rest. Men who got voided once began taking salvage more often to compensate. Men who couldn't do either became desperate in the dormitory world—stealing twine, stealing oil, stealing anything that could be converted into points.
Zhao Kun didn't disappear.
He evolved.
He stopped trying to sabotage in ways that left evidence at the Seal Circle table.
Instead, he started circling runner rotations, asking questions that sounded innocent.
"How far was the vendor?"
"Did the clerk stamp hard today?"
"Which stall gave you clean wax sleeves?"
Information capture.
Not a strike.
Preparation.
Li Shen didn't confront him.
Confrontation was expensive and public. It turned a rival into a story.
He treated Zhao Kun the way he treated smoke: controlled windows, reduced exposure, steady hands.
Some fights were won by refusing to become reactive.
By the end of the sixth month after the Conclave, the season thinned.
Not because the rules vanished.
Because everyone had adjusted.
Vendor lists stabilized. Runner quotas became routine. Verification days stayed sharp, but tags got waxed and procedures tightened until there were fewer cheap gaps to exploit.
The system had learned where the leaks were.
It closed them.
Li Shen had done what he could do.
He learned how to live inside a tightened world without losing movement.
Forge lane remained his engine.
Salvage lane remained his buffer.
Greyhaven lane remained his outside lever—quiet, functional, controlled.
His lungs didn't heal.
They stayed managed.
His Qi didn't surge.
It condensed.
And that meant one thing going forward:
The next year wouldn't be about learning lanes.
It would be about climbing them.
Stage 2 was no longer a distant concept. It was a boundary close enough to feel in his breath and in his hands.
Not official.
Not yet.
But real enough that the Pavilion's paper would start treating him differently—subtle at first, then sharp the moment he became profitable.
The installation was over.
The machine was running.
And Li Shen was inside it, building leverage one clean stamp at a time.