By the time I returned to my room, the jade table's coolness was still faintly present at my wrist.
The footsteps in the corridor were different from usual.
Not fewer. More uniform. Normally at this hour, the Institute's registrars and researchers moved at varied paces — some reading jade scrolls as they walked, their footsteps uneven and scattered. Now every set of footsteps passing the corridor held the same measured interval. No one was speaking.
I went to the door and looked through the gap.
Two blue-grey-clad registrars were passing side by side, jade trays in their hands bearing neatly stacked jade scrolls. Eyes forward, their breathing nearly synchronized. At the bend, one of them slowed by half a step to let the other turn first, then followed.
"The Covenant Hall's First Seat, Yun Jian, is coming for a routine inspection soon."
The voice came from the other end of the corridor, pressed low — but in the deliberate quiet that had settled over the building, every word was clear.
"Shixiong Lu passed word just now. Everyone should act normally, but—" A pause. "A bit more careful than usual."
"Understood."
The footsteps continued and disappeared at the corridor's end.
I opened my door and stepped out. The laboratory doors along both sides of the corridor were closed, the light behind their paper windows steady and without a flicker. The entire Institute felt frozen, as though even the air moved more slowly.
Lin Wanzhao came around the bend in the opposite corridor. She saw me, quickened her pace, and when she reached me said nothing — just took my wrist and pulled me into a small courtyard off to one side.
The courtyard held a few clusters of bamboo, their leaves dark green shadows in the dusk. She let go of my wrist, checked both directions, then spoke under her breath.
"Did you hear?"
"I heard," I said.
"Yun Jian." She said the name very softly, as though afraid of disturbing something. "First Seat of the Covenant Hall. He detests anomalies."
She said this and looked at me.
The look was level. The specific levelness of someone confirming what they already know.
"Understood," I said.
Lin Wanzhao nodded and said nothing more. She drew something from her sleeve and pressed it into my hand — soft to the touch, with a faint green-wood scent. "Dried bamboo pith. Steep it in water tonight. It calms the spirit."
She left, her steps placed quietly.
I held the bamboo pith packet and walked deeper into the Grade E sector. At the gap under one of the stone doors, someone had pressed a dried flower — petals shriveled, most of the color gone, a trace of pale yellow remaining. I didn't know who had left it.
My quarters were a converted storage room at the far western end of the Grade E sector. The room was small: a narrow bed, a wooden table, a chair. The window faced the containment array directly — a formation array designed to block the aether-resonance radiation from higher-cultivation cultivators. During the day it was transparent, and through it I could see a sparse stretch of forest outside. At night, when the array activated, regular pulses of blue light would spread outward in layers like water rings.
The blue light came through the paper window and cut the quilt into geometric patches. Those patches moved slowly as the array ran, shifting from the bed's foot toward the head. All night without stopping.
Like a lamp that never goes out.
I set the bamboo pith on the table and sat on the edge of the bed. Outside, the sound of the patrol registrar's footsteps — regular, every half hour. When they reached the window they slowed slightly, presumably checking that the containment array was running correctly, then continued forward.
No cultivation authorization. No leaving the Grade E sector. No contact with high-grade spirit stones.
These restrictions were in the thin booklet distributed at check-in, printed in neat even type. I had read through it. Each regulation was followed by a small superscript referencing the Covenant Hall article number. These were not suggestions. They were rules.
I closed the booklet and set it at the corner of the table.
On the table beside the bamboo pith: my herb box — the one I'd brought from the mortal town, made of elm wood, divided into twelve compartments. Inside, the odds and ends from the apothecary: dried tangerine peel, hawthorn slices, licorice root, and a few common calming herb leaves. Not much, but every compartment was full.
I opened the box and ran my fingers along the compartments.
One. Two. Three.
Like working an abacus.
I leaned against the bed frame and went back through the evening.
Lin Wanzhao had come to find me just as I was returning to my room. She'd pulled me into the corner of the courtyard where the old scholar tree grew — its blossoms had already fallen, the leaves dense enough that their shadow covered two people entirely.
"The rules for your situation have been confirmed," she said. No preamble. "Three-month observation period. Covenant Hall review after. Two possible outcomes."
She looked at me.
I waited.
"If classification is impossible — meaning the Institute is never able to determine which known category your constitution belongs to — return to origin." Lin Wanzhao continued. "If the anomaly grade is assessed as high and deemed a potential risk to Immortal Sect order — memory erasure, then return to origin."
When she said *memory erasure*, her pace didn't change. But something else entered her voice — the sound of something swallowed back down.
I sat on the stone bench beneath the scholar tree without moving.
The light outside was the warm yellow of mid-afternoon, angled in, drawing long tree shadows across the flagstone. The containment array was transparent in daylight — I could see the forest through it, leaves shifting in a light wind, a bird passing through and leaving a dot that vanished almost immediately.
Three months.
I worked the compartments of the herb box again. One compartment for ten days. Twelve compartments: one hundred and twenty days. The herbs inside were still about three-quarters full.
Three months would be the beginning of autumn.
*Memory erasure.*
I stopped. My finger rested on one compartment, and my fingertip registered the faint grain of the elm wood's edge.
That would erase these three months.
The mirror showing nothing. The crossed-out line in the record book.
Then back to the apothecary. Weighing herbs again. Believing that was how life had always been.
I lifted my finger.
The elm compartment snapped back into place with a small, quiet sound.
No.
I closed the herb box and stood.
The medicine packet Master had given me was still in my sleeve pocket. I took out the calming formula, used the small copper brazier in the room to brew it. The flame was low, the bottom of the brazier glowing dull red. Steam rose — the earthy smell of poria, cool mint, a thread of bitter aged tangerine peel.
Exactly the smell of the apothecary.
When it was ready, I sat on the edge of the bed holding the bowl. Didn't drink it immediately. Just held it and breathed it in for a while. Then drank.
Hot.
The next morning I went to the laboratory to continue basic data collection. Passing through the central courtyard, I saw the bamboo-screened enclosure — the courtyard where the celestial-born First Seat cultivated, normally double-sealed with bamboo curtain and formation array, and the Grade E sector's residents were only permitted to pass at a distance.
The bamboo curtain wasn't fully closed. A gap.
Wind came from inside the courtyard — dry, faintly scorched, the smell of stone that's been in the sun a long time. The curtain shifted in the wind, the gap widening and narrowing.
As I passed, through the widening gap, I saw the figure inside.
He stood at the courtyard's center, wearing the same dark ink-grey changpao as always, his sleeves pushed up to the elbow. His head was down. He was looking at his own wrist.
A moment's pause.
He lowered his hand and resumed his cultivation, fingers moving through forms in front of him, drawing traces of aether-resonance current so faint they were barely visible.
In the instant he'd looked down, I hadn't managed to see his wrist clearly.
The curtain shifted again. The gap closed, cutting off that angle.
I only registered, in that brief window, that his aether-resonance current had stilled along with him.
I kept walking. No reason to stop.
In the laboratory, Lu Qingshuang was already there — Xie Wuwang's research assistant, who ran most of the basic data collection sessions. He stood at the examination table, record book in hand, cross-checking yesterday's data. He nodded when I came in and gestured to the stool.
"Aether-resonance tolerance threshold testing today," he said. His voice was flat, nothing extra in it.
I extended my wrist onto the jade table.
The testing ran for two hours. By the time it ended, the sky outside the window had brightened fully. Lu Qingshuang wrote the final line in the record book and closed it.
"Continue tomorrow," he said.
I stood and left the laboratory.
Back in my room that afternoon, I sat by the window and went through the day point by point.
Yun Jian of the Covenant Hall was coming. The Institute had moved to a heightened state of order.
My situation: three-month observation period, Covenant Hall review after, two outcomes — unclassifiable meant return to origin, high anomaly grade meant memory erasure then return to origin.
Lin Wanzhao had said: Yun Jian detests anomalies.
On the celestial-born First Seat's wrist: a faint area where the resonance marks had dimmed.
Three months.
One question.
I looked down at my own wrist.
Beneath the skin, pale blue veins. Thin wrist. And beyond that — nothing. No resonance marks. No fate-thread paths. No traces of cultivation or destiny.
Empty.
Outside, the containment array activated. The first ring of blue light spread outward, came through the paper window, and cut the first diamond of light into the quilt.
I raised my wrist toward that blue.
Blank.
I lowered my hand. The word left my mouth very quietly, barely loud enough for only me to hear:
"Blank."
I turned it over once in my mind and thought about what it could do. From the other side of the wall came the low, steady hum of the containment array running — deep and continuous, passing through the wall, settling into the pillow as a faint, sustained tremor.
Ninety days. I started counting.