The first time a Greyfang hook failed on the testing table, it didn't sound dramatic.
It sounded small.
A thin ping—sharp enough to cut through the forge's constant roar. Metal letting go without apology.
Li Shen froze with the tongs still in his grip.
Across the table, the Seal Circle tester held two halves of a hook that should not have been two halves. He didn't look surprised. He didn't look angry.
He looked occupied—the way a man looks when something confirms what he already expected.
He set the pieces down like broken chopsticks.
"Batch tag," he said.
A clerk stepped forward and read the wax seal aloud, voice steady, performative in the way procedure had to be.
"Greyfang. Hooks. Furnace lane three. Maker: Li Shen."
The words landed with the soft weight of dirt.
Li Shen's throat tightened—not from smoke this time.
The tester tilted the fractured surface into the light. The grain across the break was wrong—too bright, too clean, like the metal had chosen to give up rather than bend.
"Brittle," the tester said.
No accusation. No curiosity. Curiosity implied the outcome could change.
He lifted his stamp.
Not PASS.
Not FAIL.
A third mark, smaller, uglier.
HOLD — RETEST.
Ink scratched. The clerk's brush didn't hesitate.
Behind Li Shen, someone asked in a voice that was trying not to be a plea, "Does that count as defect?"
The tester shrugged without looking up. "If it leaves the table with HOLD, it exists. That's enough."
Li Shen felt the defect budget tighten around his ribs.
Two defects per hundred wasn't a safety net.
It was a leash with a little slack—just enough slack for someone to yank it when they felt like it.
Cai Shun arrived an hour later, because Cai Shun always showed up after the first blood was visible.
He didn't come with guards. He didn't need them. The forge had been trained to straighten itself the moment his shadow touched it.
He stopped beside Li Shen's station and watched the furnace mouth breathe like an animal that would never get tired.
"Hold stamp," Cai Shun said, as if he were commenting on the weather.
Li Shen kept his face neutral. "Retest."
Cai Shun's eyes moved to the rack where finished hooks sat in clean rows—curves consistent, eyes measured, each piece tagged and tied with disciplined twine.
"Your output is clean," Cai Shun said. "That's why this is interesting."
Interesting was the word they used when you became a file worth keeping open.
Li Shen wiped his hands on his apron. "I want a fresh temper cycle. New quench. Replacement lot for retest."
Cai Shun's mouth twitched—almost a smile, almost not. "You want control."
"I want certainty."
"Certainty costs," Cai Shun replied. "Greyfang doesn't pay for effort. They pay for passing."
He leaned a little closer, voice dry as ash. "You'll remelt the next set and produce a replacement lot. Same week. Same quota."
Li Shen's gaze sharpened. "That doubles the work."
Cai Shun didn't blink. "Then don't waste a second."
He turned to leave, then paused as if he'd remembered something minor.
"The approved stock for this rotation is fixed," he added. "No substitutions. Vendor list is sealed."
Then he walked off and the forge went back to being heat and smoke—except it wasn't.
Now it was a timed trap with his name on the hinge.
Li Shen moved like a man doing arithmetic with his lungs.
He stopped stacking techniques. Stacking was how you bought a good hour and sold the rest of the day.
Smoke-Sealing became micro-cycles: seal, work, release. Short enough to stay sharp. Clean enough that his breath didn't turn shallow and stupid.
Iron Grip stayed surgical: bend angle, eye, extraction.
Lock. Execute. Relax.
Anything longer and heat in the forearms became tendon tension.
Tendon tension became tremor.
Tremor became defects.
Defects became review.
The chain didn't need imagination. It was literal.
He pulled a scrap hook blank from the same approved bar stock and ran a crude stress test the way workers did when paper refused to listen.
A vise.
A lever.
Pressure until the metal either spoke or lied.
First held.
Second held.
Third held.
The fourth snapped—not at the eye, not at the tip, but at the inner curve where the bend asked the most honest question.
Li Shen stared at the break.
Clean grain.
Wrong grain.
Not his hammering. Not his quench water. Not "servant error."
Input contamination.
Sick iron.
And because it was approved, it was his liability.
That was the Pavilion's genius: push the cost downhill until it reached a man who couldn't argue with a stamp.
Li Shen didn't have rank to challenge the vendor list.
So he rewrote the process.
He backed off hardening aggression by a hair. He extended temper time until it felt insulting. He added micro-tests every ten hooks, burning one piece of labor to protect nine pieces from becoming a stamp.
It slowed him down.
Slowing down was still cheaper than review.
The sabotage tried to arrive dressed as "communal variance."
He stepped out for more water and caught it: a boy tipping a pouch over the communal quench barrel, powder falling into the surface like fine ash.
The boy jerked back when he realized he'd been seen, eyes wide, mouth already running.
"It's— it's ash," he blurted. "For smell. For— for the stink."
Li Shen recognized him. Not Zhao Kun.
One of Zhao Kun's orbiters. The kind of hands that did deniable work and got paid in plausible ignorance.
Li Shen didn't shout.
Shouting was a public accusation, and public accusations belonged to people with robes.
He stepped closer, voice low enough that it didn't travel.
"Tell Zhao Kun," Li Shen said, "that if my line gets reviewed because of patterns, I'll report patterns."
The boy blinked, slow—confused by the idea that a threat could be made of ink instead of fists.
Li Shen kept it cold and clean. "Patterns trigger audits. Audits don't care who started it. They care who gets caught. And the people who get caught don't get to choose who they drag down with them."
He didn't threaten violence.
He threatened the only weapon the bottom had that could still punch upward:
procedure.
The boy's face drained. He backed away and disappeared.
Li Shen didn't watch him go. Watching made it personal.
He returned to his station and kept working, because surviving at the bottom wasn't about winning.
It was about making sabotage expensive.
Retest day came with forced timing, as always.
Li Shen delivered two sets:
the original lot under HOLD
the replacement lot built on extended temper and micro-tests
He hadn't slept properly. Not from fear.
From arithmetic.
There were only so many hours in a week, and quota didn't care you were human.
The Seal Circle tester laid out eight hooks from the replacement set and started the bored ritual.
Bend test. Pressure. Release. Move on.
One held.
Two held.
Three held.
Li Shen kept his face empty. Empty faces made fewer ripples.
Four held.
Five held.
Six held.
Seven—
a sound, not a snap.
A faint tick.
The tester paused.
The room tightened around that noise.
He turned the hook and ran his thumb along the inner curve. His nail caught—barely—on a line that shouldn't have existed.
Microfracture.
Not a break yet.
But "yet" wasn't a category the Pavilion recognized.
The tester reached for his stamp.
Li Shen spoke before it fell.
"Scrap," he said.
The clerk blinked. "You can't scrap a sampled piece—"
Li Shen didn't look at the clerk. Clerks were scenery.
He looked at the tester.
"Count it," Li Shen said. "Count the defect. Don't hold the batch."
The tester's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Why would I not hold the batch?"
Li Shen reached into his apron and produced a thin strip of cloth with small marks on it—nothing dramatic, nothing that read like a diary.
Just method.
Bar-lot marks. Temper timing. Which pieces came from which segment of stock.
Not official.
But disciplined.
"The failures cluster," Li Shen said. "Same bar lot. I marked the suspect bars and stopped using them. Everything after was built off clean stock. Micro-tested every ten."
The tester stared at the strip for a beat.
Then he did something that wasn't kindness.
It was verification.
He grabbed a ninth hook—outside the sampled eight—and tested it.
Held.
A tenth.
Held.
An eleventh.
Held.
He looked at the clerk. "Record one defect. Pass the batch."
The brush scratched.
The stamp fell.
PASS.
Li Shen felt his lungs unclench so fast it almost hurt.
The tester tapped the defect line without looking up. "One defect. You have one remaining."
No praise. No sympathy. Just math.
By evening, the points board updated.
Li Shen didn't rush it. Boards were where you learned how the Pavilion felt about you without anyone wasting words.
GREYFANG — PASS — +2
DEFECT COUNT: 1 / 2
And beneath it, in smaller writing—the kind of attention that changes your life without asking permission:
GREEN TAG ISSUED — LANE PRIVILEGE
Access.
Spotlight.
A cleaner route through the forge's internal bottlenecks.
And a sharper file with his name on it.
He stared until the letters blurred.
Bai Ren appeared beside him the way pressure summoned him.
"Well," Bai Ren said, dry as old wood, "congratulations. You're valuable enough to be stolen."
Li Shen didn't look away. "Or removed."
"Same category," Bai Ren replied, because Bai Ren never pretended categories had morals.
A runner passed behind them carrying a pouch with a wax seal. He hung it on the messenger peg without meeting anyone's eyes and kept walking.
Li Shen waited until he was gone, then took the pouch.
His name.
A market seal.
Greyhaven relay.
Inside was a short note—no wasted ink, no drama:
The city increased the "stability contribution" again.
Grain early. Copper short.
Notables hiring escorts.
Keep quiet. Keep stamps clean.
—Qian Mei
In the margin, smaller, like she regretted writing it:
Haoyang.
Legitimate channel. Legitimate stamp. Legitimate fear.
Li Shen folded the note and tucked it deep, where smoke couldn't touch it.
Bai Ren watched his face shift and didn't joke this time.
"Bad?"
Li Shen nodded once.
Bai Ren exhaled through his nose. "So the world tightens everywhere. Great. Love that for us."
Li Shen didn't answer.
He turned away from the board and started walking back toward the forge lanes, because tomorrow wasn't a story.
Tomorrow was another week.
And now he only had one mistake left.