The guild's public incident logs were accessible through the academy library.
Not the full records — those required assessor authorization or guild membership above F rank. But the summary logs, the incident classifications, the gate assessment histories going back five years — those were available to any registered student doing research. The academy had negotiated access as part of its hunter training curriculum.
He'd been using them for three weeks.
Not every evening. Not obviously. Just pulling records in the spaces between other research, building a picture from the pieces that were publicly available. The ancient circulation had changed what he could detect in gate environments — the thread, the residue, the marker in the eastern forest. But the thing moving through the lower district's gate network had been moving for longer than his perception had been developed enough to catch it.
The records knew things he didn't.
The pattern showed up on a Thursday.
He'd been cross-referencing gate assessment histories in the lower district's eastern sector — the three kilometers surrounding gates seven-six and nine-two, the two he'd flagged himself. Looking for anything that didn't match the standard baseline.
He found it six months back.
Three gates. Different locations across the eastern sector. All three had flagged elevated mana signatures within a two-week window — the kind of reading that triggered the guild's standard anomaly protocol. Assessment teams dispatched. Reports filed.
All three assessed as false alarms.
He pulled the assessor names.
Different teams. Standard practice — the guild rotated assessors to prevent familiarity bias in reporting. Three separate teams, three separate gates, three separate reports.
All three reports filed within four hours of each other.
He looked at the timestamps again.
The assessments had taken place over eleven days. Three different teams working different schedules in different parts of the sector. The gap between the first assessment and the last was eleven days. But the reports had all been filed on the same afternoon — a window of less than four hours.
He sat with that for a moment.
Assessment teams filed reports when they completed assessments. Not days later. Not to match a colleague's timeline. The gap between assessment and report filing was usually hours at most, never days. A team that assessed a gate on day one and filed the report eleven days later had held that report for eleven days.
All three had held their reports.
All three had released them on the same afternoon.
He wrote down the assessor names. Three teams, six people. He wrote down the report timestamps. He wrote down the gate locations and cross-referenced them against his own notes from gates seven-six and nine-two.
The six gates formed a rough pattern across the eastern sector — not a straight line, not a perfect shape. But a coverage area. Like something mapping a territory.
He looked at the coverage area.
The eastern forest gate where he'd found the fixed marker sat outside the city, beyond the sector's edge. He added it to the map.
Seven points. The coverage area now had a direction — from the eastern forest inward, toward the lower district's center. Following the same direction the current moved when he ran the circulation practice.
Something had been mapping this territory six months ago.
Something had been mapping it and the assessors who found the anomalies had coordinated their reports to a single afternoon — which meant someone had told them to. Or they'd known to. Or the reports had been held and released together deliberately.
He wasn't sure which yet. The three options had different implications.
He closed the records and sat in the library's quiet for a long moment.
Nythera.
I see it, she said. She'd been reading alongside him — she always was, when he worked. The coordination is deliberate. Someone wanted those reports filed simultaneously. Either to make them look routine — multiple false alarms in one afternoon is less suspicious than multiple false alarms spread across two weeks — or to make sure they were processed together and buried in the same batch.
Who has access to assessor reports before they're filed.
Regional guild administrators. Senior assessors with oversight responsibilities. In the eastern sector— A pause. Whoever manages that sector's assessment rotation would have seen all three teams' preliminary notes before the reports were formally submitted.
And could have held them.
Yes.
He thought about the attending at the eastern office. The one who had been processing his Null completions for months without asking questions. Who had flagged his anomaly notes and passed them upward. Who had mentioned standard monitoring protocol when he'd asked about them.
She wasn't the problem. She was Local tier. She processed what came to her.
The problem was wherever his notes had gone after she passed them up.
He left the library without making further notes. What he had was already in his head — the timestamps, the assessor names, the coverage area, the direction.
Someone had been here before him.
Someone had been mapping this territory six months before the thread started moving fast enough for him to feel it.
And they had made sure nobody looked too closely at what they'd found.
Board Rank thirty-four. Five weeks until the qualification window closed.
He kept moving.