The next purge did not arrive with shouts or torches.
It arrived as numbers.
Mu-Hyuk crouched inside the hollow crawlspace beneath the servant
archives while Yoo Seol-Ah kept watch near the corridor junction. Above
them, shelves creaked under the weight of scrolls that had not been
updated in years, the administrative backbone of the Azure Sun Sect
quietly rotting in the dark.
[Archive Access Detected] [Security Level: Negligible]
This was not an accident. The sect guarded its treasure vaults and
cultivation halls with obsession, yet left its records to apprentices
too fearful to question orders. That fear was Mu-Hyuk's entry point.
He slid a bundle of thin bamboo ledgers from the lowest rack and
unrolled them on the stone floor. Each page represented lives — intake
numbers, training progression, discipline penalties, medical transfer
authorizations.
The Murim Dominator System consumed the data at a rate no human mind
could match.
[Data Assimilation – Structural Correlation in Progress]
Yoo Seol-Ah glanced back at him. "Why here? You already know how the
infirmary works."
"Knowing how it works isn't enough," Mu-Hyuk replied. "I need to know
how they lie about it."
He paused over a particular ledger. Three names were listed as
transferred to the main infirmary two weeks earlier. He remembered two
of those faces from the auxiliary hall — both still alive, both still
forgotten.
"They don't even erase people properly," he said. "They reuse their
existence to patch holes in their narrative."
[Anomaly Flagged: Identity Overlap] [Probability of Administrative
Collapse: Increasing]
Footsteps echoed faintly above.
Yoo Seol-Ah stiffened, fingers tightening around the small needle kit
she had begun carrying since leaving the medic hall. Mu-Hyuk did not
look up. He already had their cadence mapped — junior clerks, night
rotation, minimal alertness.
The footsteps passed.
When silence returned, Mu-Hyuk gathered the ledgers and began reordering
them. Not randomly. Precisely. He altered a few lines here, a date
there, creating inconsistencies too subtle to be noticed immediately but
too numerous to ignore once discovered.
He was not destroying the sect's records.
He was making them untrustworthy.
They returned to the abandoned watchtower before dawn, the sky paling
slowly over the mountains. Yoo Seol-Ah leaned against a fallen beam,
exhaustion finally breaking through her control.
"You're turning people into statistics," she said.
"Statistics are what they already are," Mu-Hyuk answered. "I'm just
making sure the numbers start screaming."
She closed her eyes briefly. "And when the elders notice?"
"They'll blame the clerks. Then the infirmaries. Then each other."
[Strategic Simulation – Internal Blame Spiral: 87% Probability]
Mu-Hyuk stared at the pale light creeping through the cracks in the
tower wall.
"They believe purges maintain order," he continued. "But order only
exists when reality matches record. Once that link breaks, authority
becomes noise."
By midday, confusion began surfacing across the outer sect.
Disciples were sent to collect trainees listed as 'transferred' only to
find empty cots. Medics received reprimands for missing patients they
had never discharged. A minor elder stormed into the auxiliary infirmary
demanding explanations that no one could provide.
Mu-Hyuk watched from a distance, standing atop the ridge line
overlooking the outer courts.
[Instability Index: Rising]
Yoo Seol-Ah stood beside him, silent, her expression unreadable.
"They'll start purging again," she said finally. "They always do when
they're afraid."
Mu-Hyuk's gaze hardened. "Then they'll only widen the cracks."
He turned away from the chaos below, already calculating the next
distortion point.
The Azure Sun Sect had begun accounting for shadows.
And soon, there would be more shadows than numbers.