The first sign Greyfang had bled wasn't on a board.
It was in the yard.
A chain cart rolled in at midmorning with wheels caked in road mud that didn't match the compound's. The runner pushing it had a split lip and eyes that kept darting like he'd left half his skin on the road. Two escorts walked behind—no sect robes, no talisman glow—just hired bodies with battered spears and the posture of men who knew "mostly safe" still killed.
The cart carried crates that should have looked ordinary: hooks, links, shackles, hardware that existed so weight stayed honest.
Except one crate had been pried open.
The lid hung crooked. The wax seal was torn in a way that didn't happen by accident. Inside, metal lay in an ugly spill, as if someone had dumped it in a hurry and stopped caring how it looked.
And right in the middle of the tangle, a hook sat snapped clean in half.
Li Shen wasn't close enough to smell blood. He didn't need to be.
He watched the way attention moved—fast, silent, synchronized—toward the escorts' boots, toward the broken lid, toward the runner's split lip. He watched how a clerk appeared too quickly, brush already wet, as if the system had been waiting for permission to sprint.
In a sect, speed wasn't Qi.
Speed was paperwork when somebody with stamps could invoice you for failure.
The story arrived the way it always arrived at the bottom: in fragments that made you do your own arithmetic.
A wagon on the road. A jolt. A chain taking weight. A hook failing when it shouldn't.
A crate shifting enough to pin a man's leg long enough for purple to become an argument. Somebody screaming for leverage. Somebody else screaming at a merchant. A merchant screaming at a clerk. A clerk screaming at an under-clerk who didn't exist to scream back.
Then the only part that mattered to servants:
The cost would move downhill.
Not because anyone said it out loud.
Because it always did.
Li Shen returned to the forge lanes with the same neutral face he used for smoke. He didn't stop near the crowd. He didn't stare long enough to look curious. Curiosity was a good way to get assigned more information than you could afford.
He just listened as he walked, letting the yard's noise sort itself into signal.
Greyfang had lost face on the road.
That meant the Pavilion would make someone else pay for it.
The policy shift arrived in the only language the sect trusted.
Not a lecture.
A notice.
It was pinned beside the rotation list at the forge junction like it had always belonged there.
GREYFANG — QUALITY CLAMP (IMMEDIATE)
DESTRUCTIVE PULLS — RANDOM
FAILURE = HOLD + EXTENDED AUDIT
LANE LIABILITY ACTIVE — BONUS MAY BE FROZEN
Below it, in smaller handwriting that looked like an afterthought, but wasn't:
SHARED WINDOWS PROHIBITED — STRICT ENFORCEMENT
That last line wasn't about quality.
It was about excuses.
It didn't name Li Shen, but it sliced directly through the "just once" people had been trying to sell him.
Li Shen read it once, then stepped away as if it was the weather.
Boring was armor.
Inside, the math tightened until it felt like a strap across his ribs.
Lane liability meant somebody else's failure could splash onto him, not because it was fair, but because it was efficient.
Under a clamp, the system didn't punish one person.
It punished patterns.
He went back into lane three and worked like the notice had been posted a month ago.
That was how you survived new rules: behave like you were already compliant.
The forge mouth breathed heat like a patient animal. Heat didn't care about policy.
Hands did.
Two stations down, a man over-tempered three pieces in a row because his eyes kept flicking toward the corridor, half-expecting a clerk to materialize with a stamp and a reason.
Fear didn't make people careful.
Fear made them hurry.
Hurry made defects.
Defects made audits.
Audits made disappearances.
Li Shen tightened his process without looking like he'd tightened it.
Smoke-Sealing stayed in micro-cycles:
Seal. Work. Release.
Not because the smoke stopped being poison, but because breath was timing, and timing was control.
Iron Grip stayed in bursts:
Lock. Execute. Relax.
Only when precision paid. Never as a habit. Never to prove anything.
Then he did the only escalation the system couldn't punish him for, because it looked like prudence:
He increased micro-tests.
Not every ten.
Every eight.
Sacrificing labor was cheaper than sacrificing a stamp.
The destructive pull arrived three days later.
No announcement. No warning bell. No "inspection today."
It came the way a storm came: you felt the pressure first, then you saw the clouds.
A Seal Circle tester walked into lane three with an iron bracket and a lever bar. Older. Clean hands. Bored eyes. The kind of boredom that made a man dangerous, because he didn't need to prove anything to himself anymore.
A clerk followed, brush ready.
The tester didn't pull eight samples.
He pulled one.
He pulled it from the middle of the rack—neither the newest hook Li Shen had watched like a hawk, nor the oldest hook that had cooled long enough to hide flaws. A piece chosen to answer one question:
Is the batch still good when you stop staring at it?
He locked the hook into the bracket and began to bend.
Not gently. Not the normal "let's see if it holds" courtesy.
He bent it the way you bent a thing you wanted to break.
Metal complained. A thin groan that cut through the forge noise.
Li Shen kept his face empty and his hands still, even though his body wanted to mirror the strain. It was a stupid reflex—muscles tensing as if tension could help.
The hook held.
The tester increased the angle.
It held.
He increased it again.
Li Shen felt heat rise in his forearms, not from Iron Grip—he wasn't using it—but from restraint. From the effort of not reacting.
The hook held.
The tester stopped just short of a snap and stamped:
PASS
Then he walked away as if he hadn't just taught the lane that survival could be decided by one bored wrist and one mood.
The clerk's brush scratched notes into a ledger nobody would ever show Li Shen.
Paper-layer. Mapping.
Li Shen exhaled only after they were gone.
Not relief.
Release.
Rumors didn't die under clamp.
They evolved.
The old line—he refused a sick kid—got stale. It had been useful when the yard needed moral pressure.
Now the rumor shifted into something more poisonous, because it explained procedure without sounding like it understood it.
He's protected.
Protected was a word that implied payment. Favors. Deals. Hidden hands.
It didn't matter if anyone believed it fully.
It mattered that the word made people justify resentment as righteousness.
Li Shen heard fragments in the wash lane, in ration lines, in the thin quiet outside the exchange window. He didn't answer them.
He did something the yard couldn't easily turn into leverage, because it created no hook to pull.
He bought boring items in public.
At the internal exchange window, he slid points across the counter and asked for two things that looked like nothing:
a low-grade packet of lung-clearing powder
a roll of treated cloth for mouth wrap
The clerk stamped the receipt without looking at him.
Li Shen took the stamped paper and walked—alone—to the servant clinic shelf outside the infirmary's side lane. Nothing dramatic. Just a plank with a lockbox under it and a brush-written notice:
AID DROP — STAMPED ONLY
No names. No pledges. No debts.
He set the powder and cloth on the plank. Slid the receipt into the lockbox slot.
Then left.
If anyone asked later, there was no story to sell.
No "Li Shen helped my cousin."
No "Li Shen refused my nephew."
Just procedure. Anonymous. Unexploitable.
The rumor didn't stop.
It just lost its cleanest edge and had to become messier.
Messy rumors were harder to weaponize.
Two weeks into the clamp, the yard stopped asking.
It started taking.
Not with fists. Not with knives.
With paper.
Li Shen noticed the theft because boring men noticed boring details.
The fold in his apron lining sat wrong when he reached for his slips. The cloth seam didn't resist the way it usually did.
Smoke-Sealing and Iron Grip were still there.
But the small secondary slip—the one documenting his green tag renewal—was gone.
Stolen cleanly. No tear. No mess. No evidence of struggle.
A theft like that wasn't about reselling paper.
It was about engineering a future moment.
A moment where someone could say, You can't prove you're authorized.
And under clamp, "can't prove" was a throat.
Li Shen didn't hesitate.
Silence was leverage for someone else.
He reported.
At the clerk window, he kept his voice flat and procedural, like he was requesting stock.
"Green tag renewal slip missing. Reporting same day."
The clerk didn't look up. "Tag."
Li Shen placed the green tag itself on the counter.
The clerk checked wax seals. Checked ink. Checked the cord knot. Compared it to a ledger column without expression.
Brush scratched.
Stamp fell.
A replacement slip slid back under the bar.
"Keep it on-body," the clerk said, as if delivering generic advice to a tool.
Li Shen didn't thank him. Thanking bought familiarity, not safety.
He took the replacement slip and tucked it inside his shirt against skin.
Paper trace increased.
But the leverage attempt failed.
That was the cost structure of survival here: every defense left evidence. Every evidence made you more mapped. Every map made you easier to manage.
Survival was not clean.
It was controlled damage.
By the end of the month, the clamp had done exactly what it was designed to do.
Not "improve quality."
Increase fear.
Reduce margins.
Force everyone to compete for clean output while inputs stayed imperfect.
Li Shen's board line stayed boring.
GREYFANG — PASS
INDEX: 0/2
CYCLE STATUS: ACTIVE
QUALITY CLAMP: ON
GREEN TAG: ACTIVE
No public drama.
Which meant the drama had moved into the invisible layer:
The way runners watched his hands.
The way certain men stood a little too close in corridors, just testing where his space began.
The way clerks' eyes paused on his name half a beat longer than they needed to.
The yard had learned it couldn't own him through favors.
So it would try to make him look guilty instead.
Li Shen wrote it down that night by weak lamplight, keeping it as dry as possible.
Month Δ (≈ 4 weeks):
Greyfang incident → Quality Clamp.
Destructive pulls began.
Aid drop made (stamped, no names).
Green tag slip theft attempt → reported same day.
Output stable. Eyes on lane increased.
He stared at the last line for a moment, then added one more constraint—short, cold, usable:
Next attempt will be framing, not pressure.
He blew out the lamp and lay back.
In the dark, his calves still carried the heaviness of Grey Step drills.
Not pain.
Preparation.
Half a meter.
Margin.
Because the next move wouldn't be a request.
It would be proof manufactured fast enough that the system wouldn't bother checking who had built it.