Gray's eyes opened.
He was already standing.
A stone corridor held him in place, warm and dry, carrying the faint bite of antiseptic herbs and old fear. Firelight pooled in shallow wall basins, steady and restrained, as if even flame had learned not to misbehave here.
The walls were carved with script. Not decoration. Not prayer. Records cut into stone with the stubbornness of a civilization that believed memory was a weapon.
There was no voice inside his skull.
Instead, a pale pane hovered at the edge of his sight, silent and perfectly still. Its letters were not modern. They looked older than ink, like serrated strokes etched by chisels and bone needles, a script that belonged to archives and tomb doors.
He did not truly read them.
He understood them.
The shapes held meaning the way a seal holds authority. His eyes traced the ancient characters, and comprehension arrived cleanly, as if interpretation was an automatic function the moment the pane recognized a living witness.
Li Xiao Bai did not react. Reaction became evidence in systems like this. Evidence became a handle.
He looked down at his hands.
The body was still Gray's. Black hair, longer than it should be, tied back with cloth. Lean arms. A chest that rose too fast from exhaustion that felt sharpened here, purposeful, like the environment had been built to test how long flesh could keep obeying.
Heat stirred under the skin of Gray's forearm.
Not pain. Recognition.
The mark was there, too clean to be injury, too natural to be ink. When Li Xiao Bai focused on it, pressure answered from inside, like a brand being pressed outward, as if the corridor itself had verified a signature it had been waiting for.
The pane refreshed. The archaic characters reassembled with ritual patience, then settled into rigid lines. He could not have spoken the language aloud. He could not have copied the strokes correctly. Yet he understood every verdict.
[ VESSEL: GRAY ]
[ STATUS: UNREGISTERED ]
[ SOUL SIGNATURE: INCONSISTENT ]
[ IRREGULARITY: CONFIRMED ]
[ TRIAL PHASE: PART ONE ]
[ OBJECTIVE: BE RECORDED OR BE REMOVED ]
[ WEIGHT: ESCALATED ]
Li Xiao Bai's thoughts tightened.
So that was the true inspection.
Not Gray alone.
The foreign will behind Gray's eyes was being weighed like contraband at a gate.
He kept his expression empty, revealing nothing.
Footsteps echoed ahead, steady and trained, like patrols taught that panic itself was a crime.
A door at the end of the corridor opened.
Two figures entered.
They wore pale masks with narrow eye slits. Their robes were plain, practical, colorless. Each carried a ledger of black wood bound with iron rings. Ink pots hung from their belts like weapons.
They stopped when they saw him.
Not in surprise.
In confirmation.
One raised a finger and pointed at Gray's forearm. The figure spoke, and the syllables that reached Li Xiao Bai's ears were foreign, clipped, shaped by a tongue Gray had never learned.
Yet the meaning arrived anyway, polished and immediate, as if a second line of invisible text had been placed over the sound.
Unregistered.
The second figure opened its ledger.
A quill scratched the page.
The corridor's torchlight seemed to sharpen, steadier than flame had any right to be, as if the corridor itself listened to the act of writing.
Li Xiao Bai watched their hands, not their masks.
Hands wrote truth here.
Masks delivered it.
The first figure stepped closer, careful and exact.
"Name."
The spoken word was not truly that word. It was something harsher. The pane did not translate sound. It translated intent.
Li Xiao Bai answered with no hesitation.
"Gray."
The quill paused.
Then scratched again.
The figure's posture changed by a fraction, as if the answer fit a slot but the weight behind it did not.
"Occupation."
Gray's memories offered a shallow answer. A real one. A survivable one.
Courier.
Runner.
A person allowed to carry sealed notes between inner gates and outer stations, never permitted to read them.
Li Xiao Bai gave the answer without ornament.
The quill wrote.
The corridor remained quiet.
Then the masked figure asked the real question, the one shaped like procedure and designed like a trap.
"Do you belong to this city?"
Li Xiao Bai's mind stayed cold.
This was not morality.
This was classification.
Yes meant binding himself to rules he had not seen.
No meant foreign.
Foreign meant removal.
He chose a third path.
"I was born beneath its shadow," he said, "and I live where its reach ends."
Not a lie.
Not the full truth.
A legal answer, the kind that survived in courts, formations, and ledgers.
The quill hesitated again, then continued.
For the first time, Li Xiao Bai felt the system behind the scene shift, not as emotion, but as recalculation. It did not like answers that refused clean edges.
The masked figure lifted the ledger so the page faced Gray.
A line of ink sat there, fresh and wet.
It was not a sentence.
It was a blank space with a single word above it, carved into the paper by authority rather than penmanship.
SIGN.
The characters were not the same style as the pane. This was a human tool imitating a system's certainty.
Li Xiao Bai did not reach for the quill.
He knew what signing meant in any world.
Signing was surrender dressed as procedure.
The first masked figure waited, motionless.
The second tapped the ink pot once, sharply.
"Sign."
Li Xiao Bai looked past them.
Far down the corridor, through an open arch, he saw a wide chamber with rows of stone beds. People lay on them, dozens, maybe hundreds. Some were asleep. Some stared at the ceiling with wet, desperate eyes, fighting their lids as if sleep were a blade hovering over their throats.
At the far end of the chamber, a tall stone pillar stood like a monument.
From the bodies ran threads.
Thin black filaments, faintly visible in firelight, stretching from chest and throat to the pillar, as if every sleeper had been tethered by their own record.
Not rope.
Not chain.
Something worse.
A record you could see.
Li Xiao Bai's gaze narrowed.
So that was the method.
The system did not need guards everywhere.
It anchored people through registration, then tracked them through threads.
The masked figure held the quill out again.
"Sign, Gray."
Li Xiao Bai did not take it.
Instead, he asked one question, the kind that sounded harmless and was never harmless in a place built on documentation.
"What happens if I do not?"
The second figure answered without hesitation, like a memorized line.
"Then the city will decide what you are."
The first added, quieter.
"And the city does not keep irregularities."
The chamber beyond the arch felt colder, as if the torch flames leaned away.
Li Xiao Bai understood the structure of this trial.
It was not testing whether he could win a fight.
It was testing whether he could survive a bureaucracy with permission to erase him.
A bureaucracy that looked like men with ledgers, but was in truth a rule set older than mercy.
He glanced at the stone beds again.
A boy not much younger than Gray was strapped down with cloth bands, eyes forced open with crude metal hooks. A healer stood beside him, dripping bitter liquid onto his tongue to keep him awake.
So that was how this city treated sleep.
Not as rest.
As a verdict.
A thought settled into place inside Li Xiao Bai's mind, heavy and calm.
This trial was designed to force obedience.
If he obeyed, he would be recorded.
If he was recorded, the system would own his definition.
And if the system owned his definition, it would eventually notice the foreign will inside the vessel and correct it.
Remove the irregularity.
Remove him.
Li Xiao Bai did not sign.
The masked figures did not move.
The quill remained extended.
But the corridor changed anyway.
Not visibly.
The air tightened.
The torchlight steadied into a sharper, whiter burn.
The pale pane returned, its archaic characters darker, more deliberate, the strokes of an old language used to pronounce death without raising its voice.
[ IRREGULARITY: AFFIRMED ]
[ REMOVAL: ENGAGED ]
[ GRACE: ONE ENTRY ]
[ FAILURE: ERASURE ]
Gray's forearm burned.
Not pain exactly.
Deletion beginning at the edges of the mark, as if the system had decided where he ended and reality was obligated to obey.
Gray's body trembled. Fatigue and instinct. The vessel protesting.
Li Xiao Bai steadied it anyway, not by soothing it, but by imposing control the way one imposes a lid on boiling water.
A system that demanded a signature could be bent.
Not with violence.
With definition.
With the oldest weapon Fang Yuan had ever trusted.
He looked at the ledger again.
A blank line.
A single word.
SIGN.
The city wanted a name in a book.
Not because ink was magic.
Because recorded things could be owned, tracked, corrected, erased.
If it wanted a signature, he would give one.
But he would decide what that signature meant.
He reached out and took the quill.
The moment his fingers closed around it, he felt the system lean closer, not in emotion, but in focus. Like an eye narrowing at the instant prey stopped running and started thinking.
The masked figures did not breathe differently. They did not shift. Their stillness was practiced.
The only movement was the quill tip, hovering above the line.
Li Xiao Bai lowered it to the waiting space.
Ink touched paper.
And he began to write.