By late spring, the yard stopped being mud and became dust again.
That didn't make it lighter.
It made everything carry—footsteps, voices, grudges. Dust didn't swallow sound the way wet ground did. It let it travel.
The talk around Li Shen didn't disappear. It simply learned better manners. No more loud "just once" requests. No more public moral hostage scenes. The clamp had trained people to be careful.
Careful wasn't kindness.
Careful was quiet hostility—designed to land without witnesses.
Li Shen kept doing what had kept him intact since Greyfang started counting him: he made his days boring on the surface and controlled underneath.
Smoke-Sealing stayed a valve—seal, work, release—never held long enough for his chest to turn dry, never stacked long enough for fatigue behind the navel to crawl into his hands.
Iron Grip stayed a scalpel—lock, execute, relax—used only where precision paid back the strain.
Grey Step stayed invisible—half-meters and angles in lines, corridors taken wide, shoulders never offered square.
No scenes.
No leverage.
And still, the system moved closer.
It always did when you stopped giving it noise to chase.
The audit arrived without a bell.
A junior clerk appeared at the forge junction just after midday, when heat made men sloppy and fatigue made them honest. He carried a thin ledger, a wax tablet for seal checks, and a brush that looked too clean for this lane.
Two others followed—an older clerk and a Seal Circle runner.
Not guards. Not enforcers.
Record keepers.
The junior clerk stopped at lane three and looked over Li Shen's station with the detached patience of someone sorting tools, not people.
"Technique slips," he said.
Li Shen didn't hesitate.
Hesitation was a confession you didn't get to take back.
He handed over Smoke-Sealing and Iron Grip. The ink was faded from soot and time, but the stamps were intact. The clerk checked them against the ledger and pressed them lightly to the wax tablet, as if what he wanted wasn't the paper—it was the impression.
Then the clerk held out his hand again.
"Green tag."
Li Shen unhooked it and set it on the stone.
The clerk checked the wax seals, the ink mark, the cord knot—because even a knot could become a story if someone wanted it to.
"All right," the clerk said, and made a mark without looking at Li Shen's face. "Continue."
Li Shen asked the only question that didn't sound like complaint. "Rotation audit?"
The older clerk's brush paused mid-stroke. He didn't look up. "Rotation."
That was all he got.
Rotation meant they could do anything and call it maintenance.
The trio moved on to the next station, leaving Li Shen with heat in front of him and a weight settling in his gut behind it:
They weren't checking whether he was lying.
They were building a map of how he functioned.
And once you were mapped, you were easier to manage.
A week later, the first tightening landed.
It was posted as a small notice where nobody could miss it and nobody could argue with it:
CHAIN OF CUSTODY — ACTIVE
ALL BATCH LOG TAGS MUST BE WAX-SEALED
UNSEALED LOGS = INVALIDATED (HOLD RISK)
No lecture. No explanation. No "for your protection."
Just a new requirement turned into a threat.
Li Shen read it once and felt the shape of the next move.
Wax seals weren't about honesty. They were about ownership.
If you sealed your log tag, you proved continuity.
If someone could mimic your seal, they could manufacture continuity.
And manufactured continuity was the cleanest kind of framing—no witnesses required, only paper.
That evening he went to the exchange window and bought the cheapest wax kit they offered. Low-grade, smoky, barely fit for official work.
He didn't need "good."
He needed "same."
Back at his bunk, he made a seal with the edge of a chipped coin—ugly, distinctive, and consistent. Something no clerk would choose, which was exactly the point.
Then he did what he always did when a rule tightened:
He built process around it.
Batch log tag. Wax seal. Initials. Time mark. Fold pattern.
Repeatable.
Boring.
Harder to steal without time.
And time was the one thing most saboteurs hated spending.
It still didn't stop the first attempt.
Because the first attempt wasn't stupid.
It was patient.
It hit in the most boring place possible: the log shelf.
Each lane had one—planks nailed to a wall where batch tags and sampling slips waited before clerks collected them. Neutral ground, in theory.
Neutral ground didn't exist under clamp.
Li Shen noticed it because boring men noticed boring objects.
One of his tags sat out of alignment—shifted by a finger's width, the fold wrong. Not torn. Not stolen. Just… handled.
A message written in paper language:
Someone can touch your chain.
He didn't look around.
Looking around told the room you'd been hit.
He took the tag, unfolded it slowly, and saw the addition: a second initial, faint but practiced, placed beside his time mark as if it belonged there.
Subtle. Easy to miss if you were tired. Easy to accept if you wanted the queue to move.
It created a future narrative without saying it out loud:
Shared window. Shared batch. Shared liability.
Li Shen felt the coldness bloom behind the navel—not Qi fatigue, not yet, but that internal weight that arrived when stakes became real.
He didn't erase it. Erasing looked like panic.
He did something more boring and more damaging to the setup:
He reported the pattern before it could become "evidence."
At the clerk window, he placed the altered tag down like he was placing stock draw paperwork.
"Chain-of-custody breach," he said, voice flat. "Unknown mark on my batch tag. Submitting before collection."
The clerk's eyes lifted for half a beat—not fear.
Interest.
Interest was worse.
She checked the wax. Checked the fold. Checked the ink.
Then she stamped a small mark in the corner—not PASS, not FAIL.
FLAGGED.
She slid it back. "Reseal. New tag. Record the time. Submit directly."
Li Shen nodded once. "Understood."
Her brush scratched something into a ledger he'd never see.
Paper trace deepened.
But the leverage attempt died before it could grow teeth.
And when a setup fails cleanly, it rarely stops.
It escalates.
Two nights later, Bai Ren spoke to him for the first time in weeks without leading with a joke.
Not in the forge lane. Not at the board.
Behind the dorms, where men dumped wash water and pretended privacy existed.
"They're collecting wax impressions," Bai Ren said.
Li Shen kept his face still. "How."
Bai Ren's eyes flicked away, scanning shadows out of habit. "Lines. Bumps. Someone 'accidentally' brushes your pouch. Or they lift a tag from a shelf just long enough to press it. Then it goes back like it was never touched."
Li Shen's fingers curled once, then relaxed. He killed the Iron Grip reflex before it could become tension.
"And why," Li Shen asked, already knowing the shape of the answer.
"Because the clamp turned paper into a weapon," Bai Ren said. His mouth twitched like he wanted humor back and couldn't force it. "And they want a weapon that doesn't look like a weapon."
Li Shen breathed out slowly—not Smoke-Sealing, just controlled breath.
If they could mimic seals, chain-of-custody didn't protect you. It trapped you.
He'd need a second layer that wasn't just "my stamp."
Something that relied on timing, handoff, and sequence—things harder to copy without being physically present.
Bai Ren leaned in a fraction. "Also—people are saying the next move won't be a rumor."
Li Shen didn't move. "An incident."
Bai Ren nodded once. "Something that forces a clerk to pick a culprit fast. And you're already the convenient shape."
That was the shift Li Shen had been expecting.
Rumors were slow.
Incidents were efficient.
And in this place, efficiency made people disappear.
The next morning, Li Shen changed one small thing in his routine.
Not a dramatic change. Dramatic changes got watched.
He stopped leaving batch tags on the shelf at all.
He kept them on his body until the last possible moment—inside his shirt, against skin—where theft required contact.
Contact required proximity.
Proximity created witnesses whether the saboteur wanted them or not.
Witnesses made framing expensive.
That week passed with no HOLD stamp.
No confrontation. No public accusation.
Just the steady feeling that lane three had become a stage where someone was rehearsing a scene and waiting for him to walk into the right mark.
That night, he wrote in his journal in the same flat format that kept him sane:
Rotation audit performed (technique slips + green tag checked).
Chain-of-custody tightened (wax-sealed log tags).
Tamper attempt on my batch tag → reported, flagged, resealed.
Wax impression collection rumored. Expect incident framing.
Adjusted routine: tags on-body until direct handoff.
He paused, then added the line that mattered for what came next:
Next they won't ask. They'll "prove."
He blew out the lamp.
In the dark, his breath stayed measured.
His legs felt heavy, but ready.
And somewhere in the compound, someone was pressing his ugly little seal into cheap wax, congratulating themselves on learning his signature—without understanding the difference between a stamp and a process.
A stamp could be copied.
A process—timed, disciplined, boring—was harder.
Not impossible.
But harder to break without exposing a hand.