Chapter 665: The Mark Beneath the Cut

Chapter 665: The Mark Beneath the Cut

They met in a private chamber under Ji’s own peak rather than any hall with a door onto a corridor, and Leon understood the significance of that before anyone spoke.

Ji Liansu. Elder Ruan, back from the basin with ink on four fingers now instead of three. Han Suwen with a case of records. Nobody else.

"Sit," said Ji. "Elder Ruan, show him."

Ruan put a viewing plate on the table and brought up an image magnified past anything Leon’s eyes could have managed.

"That’s the interior of the second spike," she said. "I took it apart in eleven layers. This is between the sixth and the seventh, underneath the third carved character."

There was a mark in the metal. It was tiny — smaller than a grain of rice at true scale — and it was not a signature. It was four strokes and a number.

"A craftsman proud of his work signs the outside," Ruan said. "This is placed where the character above it burns through on first use. Ordinary employment destroys it. The only way to find it is to do what I did, which is to disassemble a functioning implement layer by layer, which nobody does to a tool that works." She sat back. "It’s a batch identifier. Internal. It exists so a workshop can track its own output without telling the customer, or anyone who finds the customer, who made it."

"And the alloy?" Leon asked.

"Better." Ruan brought up a second plate. "There’s a stabilising additive in it — about one part in four hundred. It stops the cutting edge losing shape under formation backlash, which is exactly what you want in a tool meant to sever an active channel. It is also expensive, it comes out of three mines that I know of, and it moves through perhaps six regional markets on the whole eastern seaboard." She tapped the plate. "Mark, alloy, cutting angle, and the order the characters are laid down. Four independent things. Together they point at one workshop, and that workshop sells through Moonfall’s hidden formation trade."

Han Suwen produced the last piece from her case: a rubbing, and beside it a Palace record with the Shen family’s seal on it.

"The ward-breaker from the estate attack," she said. "The Shens still hold the original. This is a full technical record taken at the time, including an interior cross-section that somebody had the sense to order."

Ruan put it beside her own image.

Same four strokes. Different number.

"Same workshop," she said. "Different batch. That is as certain as anything in my discipline gets."

Leon looked at the two marks side by side for a while.

"It’s a maker," he said. "Not a buyer."

"Correct," said Ji. "And you will keep saying so, because a workshop that sells to one clan sells to four."

"You’ll lead it," Ji went on. "I want to explain why, so that you don’t mistake it for a favour.

"If I send Elder Ruan to Moonfall, every person in that trade knows within a day that Jade Moon Palace is dismantling formation-breaking tools. The workshop closes, the ledgers burn, and whoever commissioned those spikes learns that we found something inside them." She folded her hands. "If I send a squad of enforcement disciples, the same thing happens more loudly.

"If I send my direct disciple to buy cultivation resources for his household, nothing happens at all, because that is exactly what a man in your position does, and everybody in that city already knows your face and your business relationships."

"The Shen family," Leon said.

"You have a genuine relationship with the house that was attacked. You have a legitimate reason to return. Your household covers combat, medicine, administration, detection, and formation analysis between four people, and you personally have seen what these tools did in both incidents, which nobody else alive has." Ji’s voice sharpened slightly. "Now hear the limits.

"You are authorised to find the workshop, preserve evidence, question people involved in its trade, and defend your household. You are not authorised to name a clan, accuse a clan, or provoke one. I do not have proof, and neither do you, and a direct disciple of mine starting a quarrel with a regional power on the strength of a metallurgical match would be a disaster I would have to clean up personally."

"Understood."

"Say it back."

"Find the workshop. Preserve what’s there. Don’t start a war on suspicion."

"Good."

The cover was the part Leon liked, because it was not a cover.

"I need resources," he said. "Genuinely. I established the Early Qi Refinement layer two days ago, and it consumed considerably more than I expected. Nine affinities in balance means nine supplies, and materials carrying another cultivator’s imprint force the Scripture to waste most of its effort stripping them clean."

Ji considered that. "How much did the first stage cost?"

"Enough that I’d rather not say it out loud in this room."

"Mm." She did not press. "You may use the Palace’s trusted purchasing channels, and you may draw an advance of one part against the share your household is owed from the future expedition. Not more. I am not opening the vault to you — the reward is a future entitlement and I will not have it spent before the realm exists."

"That’s fair."

"It’s also all you’re getting."

Qingyue was summoned afterward, alone, and Ji told Leon in advance exactly what he could say.

He said it in her presence, plainly.

"The tools recovered during the Ashen Rain mission were formation-breakers. Elder Ruan has matched their maker’s mark and alloy to the ward-breaker used against the Shen estate. Same workshop. The trail runs back to Moonfall’s hidden formation trade, and the Palace can’t investigate it openly without warning everyone connected to it."

Qingyue’s eyes did not leave his face.

"What were formation-breakers doing in Ashen Rain Basin?"

"That part is sealed," said Ji. "By me. Not by him."

Qingyue looked at her master’s master for a moment and then, sensibly, let it go.

"Then I’m coming," she said. "Not as a favour to the Palace. Those people attacked a house under my guarantee — I brought Leon through that gate, and the Shens gave him papers, and four Void Immortals walked into their garden because somebody sold the tools that got them past the wall." Her jaw set. "I know who trades in Moonfall and who only appears to. I know which repair shops take commissions they don’t write down. You’d spend a month finding what I can find in four days."

"Good," said Ji. "Then it’s settled. Qingyue, understand that this is not your Palace assignment and I am not putting it in your record."

"I understand."

They planned it that night in the inner residence.

Vyra built two lists, one public and one not. "Purchases in the open. Questions in private, and none of them phrased as a question if I can help it — I’d rather trace an alloy through a shipping ledger than ask a merchant who bought it."

Seraphine had the mark image and was studying it with an expression Leon recognised. "Any workshop precise enough to cut this has equipment worth more than the building. There aren’t many. That narrows where we look before we ask anybody anything."

Ira, who had been listening with visibly diminishing patience, said, "So the plan is shopping."

"The plan is shopping," Leon agreed.

"For how long?"

"As long as it takes."

"I could find the workshop in an evening."

"You could find a workshop in an evening," said Loriel, without looking up from her seed cases. "And then everyone in the trade would know somebody is looking, and the people who actually know things would stop being findable." She fastened a case. "Frightened people tell you less than comfortable people do. Dead ones tell you nothing at all."

Ira opened her mouth, considered it, and closed it again.

They left the following morning on an ordinary travel authorisation, six of them, with a purchasing list and no escort.

To anyone watching from the terraces, the Palace Mistress’s famous disciple was going to Moonfall to buy resources for four unusually talented attendants.

Three people on the mountain knew he was following a mark hidden inside a weapon.

[If you have bought privilege, thank you so much; if you haven’t, please do; that would help me a lot]