The third bell faded into the wood. The market square remembered how to be a market again. People pretended to look at stalls that did not sell anything. Watchers set their brushes down and picked them up again without writing.
Mu Qing did not look back at the clean lintel door. Neither did Ye Tian. Bai Shen let out a breath he had not been using. Wen Yao listened to the air as if it were a friend who might choose to speak at any time.
[Mark status, present at low level] [Direction of pull, away from you] [Signature prefers fixed rooms and written rules] [Recommendation: teach it to follow a person or lose the lesson]
They took the side lane where the wall leaned as if tired. Laundry hung above them and made a second sky. Someone had chalked two circles on a step and given them a line to speak to each other.
Bai Shen touched the line with one finger. The chalk came away on his skin. "A watcher taught a child this," he said.
"Or a child taught a watcher," Mu Qing said. "They learn faster."
Ye Tian let the new route sense taste the corners.
[Minor Tracking, light] [Recent passage, heavy teams avoided the long wall] [Two quiet men stepped over a broken tile and hid the sound] [Flag pull, faint ahead and left]
They moved that way without looking as if they were moving that way.
The lane opened into a small court with a tree that had been trimmed into good manners. A low post waited in the center, a socket at the top, no powder ring, no balcony, no door with a name that asked to be read.
Wen Yao tilted his head. "This one is honest," he said.
"Honest enough to be a lie," Mu Qing said. "It is too plain."
At the edge of the court, a door stood half open. No lintel cleaned. No basin. Only a small string of knots hanging inside the frame.
Ye Tian stepped to the post and did not set anything. He touched the socket with two fingers as if testing a cup that might crack.
The Origin stirred.
[Utility nearby] [Type, Minor Marking] [Function, assigns weak routes and attention anchors] [Integrity, 51 percent] [Seizure chance, rises during placement act] [Note, signature not the clean lintel keeper, a junior hand]
A shadow moved at the open door. A boy stood there with chalk on his palms and careful eyes. He did not run. He did not speak. He looked at the socket as if it were a mouth that might say his name.
Ye Tian met his gaze. He lifted the roll of red cloth they had taken from the bell house and showed it to the boy. He did not move to place it.
The boy blinked. His eyes went to the knots on the string, then to Ye Tian's hands, then to the ground.
Mu Qing's voice did not carry. "He is trained to write on feet, not faces," she said. "If you step, he will mark you. If you step back, he will mark you. If you wait, he will do what he has been taught to do when someone waits."
Ye Tian waited.
The boy breathed. Then he did what he had been taught.
He came out of the doorway with small steps and a palm turned so the chalk could kiss a sleeve in passing. His other hand reached without looking to straighten the string of knots.
Ye Tian moved the sleeve an inch. Not away. Across.
[Contact made] [Minor Marking activation peak] [Seizure window open]
He let the contact settle like the weight of a cup on a table.
There was no light to see. The chalk did not flare. The thread that ran between them was small and tidy.
[Seizure complete] [Acquired, Minor Marking] [Integration available, light] [Effect, lay simple attention lines, amplify or mute a path, resist weak marks]
The boy looked at his hand as if the chalk had forgotten him. He turned in a small circle, searching for the pull his training had promised him.
He found nothing.
Then he did a brave thing for a boy. He looked Ye Tian in the face and asked for help with his eyes.
"Do not let them tie your wrist to a post," Ye Tian said quietly. "Use chalk on the floor where no one will think to wash."
The boy blinked again. Then a smile tried to be born and did not quite make it. He stepped back into his door and closed it with care.
Mu Qing stared at Ye Tian without moving her mouth. "You are going to cause the archive trouble," she said.
"It will forgive me," he said.
[Integration, light] [Minor Marking merged] [Side feature, weak delay on hostile tags]
Bai Shen set his feet in the center of the court and looked at the sky between the leaves. "Now we place," he said.
"No," Mu Qing said. "Now we catch a story."
"How," Bai Shen asked.
"With a cup," she said.
Wen Yao smiled. "Bring your own."
They did not place the token. They placed the red cloth on the post and left the socket empty and obvious.
They walked away as if it had bored them.
At the far edge of the lane, Ye Tian paused where two walls made a corner that felt like a patient ear. He set his palm to the stone.
[Minor Marking, place] [Line, pulls attention from court to well] [Duration, brief]
The line ran under his hand and settled. It did not shine. It made a small sentence in the town.
"Now we count," Mu Qing said.
They did not go far. They let the corner keep them. They watched with ears more than eyes.
A team passed the court and did not see the red cloth at first. The pull drew their glance to a well two houses away. They slowed. They turned. They missed what they had come to seek. They learned nothing and blamed the ground.
The second team saw the cloth and moved for it. A watcher cleared his throat above them, then did not speak. The man at the head of that team hesitated at the empty socket. He did not know whether to fetch a token first or to wait for another to bring one. He argued with himself and lost time.
Sun Ruo walked past and smiled once at the empty cup. He did not try to fill it. He looked up where a balcony did not stand and kept moving.
"Enough," Mu Qing said. "The story will run without us now. We will write a different one."
They took the path that did not smell of sesame cake and arrived at a narrow place where a roof had fallen and been set back on with more hope than nails. A thin rope crossed a gap and asked to be held to pass. A small sign beside it said this is safe if you are light.
Bai Shen looked at his shoulders and then at the sign. "I am not," he said.
"Then we make another shape," Ye Tian said.
He set his palm on the rope, not to test, to listen.
[Rope anchored on one side only] [Hidden slack, made to spill one man in three] [Attention lines, mild] [Recommendation, reroute weight, do not cut]
He placed a weak mark on the boards beyond the rope. It called to nothing but the eye that wanted to know where a foot should go.
"Wen Yao," he said.
Wen Yao nodded. His breath stayed even. He stepped where the mark had suggested. The rope held. He crossed and made more space. Bai Shen followed with the care of a man who knows he is heavy and does not plan to break what does not belong to him.
Mu Qing crossed last without touching the rope at all. The floor liked her. Floors often do.
On the far side, a lane slanted into a larger square. The center held a low frame with three sockets in a row. A boy in a plain robe watched from the eaves and tried to look like a tile.
"Three," Bai Shen said.
"One," Mu Qing said. "The middle one is a question with a wrong answer in it."
Ye Tian tasted the routes.
[Minor Tracking] [Most teams set on left then learn it slides] [Middle holds a spring that steals balance] [Right is farther and safer and therefore unnoticed]
"Right," he said.
They went to the right frame and did not hurry. He lifted his sleeve and felt for any pull that was not his. There was none.
The token turned in the slot and agreed to live there.
The bell that answered did not come from above. It came from a low place, as if the town itself had chosen to nod.
[Devotion +5] [Visibility rising] [Center attention, annoyed]
On the far side of the square, a figure stood with his back to a pillar and watched with interest that was not kind and not cruel.
Zhou Ren.
He did not clap. He did not speak. He let his smile sit on his face and be the thing that moved.
"Have we fed him enough for the morning," Bai Shen asked.
"He feeds himself," Mu Qing said. "We feed the board."
Wen Yao glanced toward a narrow tool shed by the edge of the square. A door there had been open and was now closed. A small strip of light bled under it.
"Someone else writes," he said.
"Then let us teach the next flag to argue," Ye Tian said.
They slipped into a row of crooked houses where doors opened onto walls and windows looked into other windows. A faint chalk line on a step said walk here only if you already know why.
Mu Qing counted with her eyes. "One house where the floor was replaced yesterday. One where a paint smell waits. One where the broom does not belong. The flag will sit where those lines do not meet and will pretend to be a brush."
They found a low room with a basin on a stool and a rag beside it that had not been used. The socket waited two fingers below eye height. A small scroll sat beside it, tied with a white strip.
Ye Tian did not touch the basin. He did not read the scroll.
A woman in plain cloth stood in the back doorway and looked at them with a face that had learned how not to make expressions.
"The bell will not ring here unless you drink," she said.
Wen Yao's pulse did not change.
Mu Qing's mouth tilted. "That is a rule even the board did not write," she said.
The woman shrugged. She did not care if anyone said yes.
Ye Tian set his palm near the socket and let the new small utility place a line that did not exist a moment ago.
[Minor Marking placed] [Attention line now points to the rag, not the basin] [Duration, short]
He picked up the rag and wiped the rim of the socket as if cleaning it.
A faint smear of dark lifted onto the cloth. It smelled of nothing. It had a shape like water that had learned to imitate ink.
"Waste," Mu Qing said softly. "Someone tried to teach the socket to drink for them."
He turned the token and decided not to wait for the bell.
It rang anyway. A watcher standing at the end of the alley wrote a quick line and looked troubled as if the pen had asked him to lie and he had agreed.
[Devotion +4] [Observation, center will try a heavier hand by afternoon] [Advisory, avoid open circles where rules are strong]
They left the door as they had found it yet not the same. The woman watched them go and did not nod.
By the time they reached the long wall again, the square had filled with a different kind of quiet. People who had gone to write had returned to read. Names had moved. Small red marks had appeared. Beside Ye Tian's name, the small sign that had been a note was now a line that said discussed.
"Discussed by whom," Bai Shen asked.
"By whoever believes pens are more honest than stones," Mu Qing said.
Zhou Ren stood near the board without standing near the board. He did not look at Ye Tian. He looked at the younger disciples who were learning where to put their eyes.
"Will you teach them this afternoon," he asked the air.
"If the board is brave," Ye Tian said. "If it is not, we will teach it not to pretend."
A small clatter sounded from a street to the left. A cart lost a wheel and leaned into a wall without complaint. A child laughed and stopped when he saw three elders together.
The neat handed elder crossed the arcade with the gentle frown elder and a third who had never looked at Ye Tian directly and did not now. Their robes held clean lines. Their steps did not make the floor speak.
"Put him where the rules change from one stone to the next," the neat handed elder said to the others as if discussing weather.
"If the floor breaks," the gentle frown elder said, "we will call it a lesson and not a fault."
They did not lower their voices. They did not have to.
The Origin moved like a quiet river again.
[Next placement opportunity, high Devotion if performed where rules argue] [Danger, moderate] [Utilities prepared, Minor Qi Shield light, Body Reinforcement steady, Pain Dampener steady, Concealment light, Marking light, Tracking light] [Recommendation, hold one more flag before noon, then vanish for one hour]
"One more," Ye Tian said.
"One that will make a watcher put down his brush," Mu Qing said.
They cut across a lane that smelled of a hearth that should not be lit. A goat that did not belong to anyone watched them eat the space between two steps. The town had decided to see if it could be a different town in this corner.
A narrow bridge ran above a ditch where no water had ever lived. A pole at the far end wore a socket that had been sanded too smooth.
Wen Yao looked down. "Letters," he said. "Small, inside the wood."
Mu Qing leaned in. "A rule written inside a limb," she said. "Clever. Wrong."
Ye Tian set two fingers on the smooth place and let the small line in him speak.
[Minor Marking, invert] [Attention line says the rule inside belongs to another pole] [Duration, one breath only]
"Now," he said.
Bai Shen raised the token and set it before the mark could remember what it had been told to be.
The bell that answered came from three places at once. One above. One inside the wood. One in the floor under their feet that should not have had a bell in it at all.
All three agreed.
[Devotion +7] [Public attention high] [Center attention grudging]
Footsteps approached like rain that had decided to be polite. Sun Ruo appeared at the end of the bridge and stopped where the ditch had taught him to stop.
He did not bow. He did not smile. He held the stillness of someone who had been told to watch and had chosen to learn while doing it.
"The man at the door with the clean lintel will ask to see you again," he said.
"When the bell is hungry," Ye Tian said.
"It is always hungry," Sun Ruo said.
"Then it can wait," Mu Qing said.
Sun Ruo's mouth almost remembered how to smile and then did not. He stepped aside and let a woman with a basket pass. She did not see him. He did not need her to.
They left the bridge and its three bells and took a street where the boards had been laid by a different hand. The smell of cedar learned to mix with the smell of pine for one block and then forgot.
The Origin rested.
[Team status, steady] [Your breath, even] [Recommendation, vanish for one hour]
"Now we become another line," Mu Qing said. "Let the board argue with itself without us."
"Where," Bai Shen asked.
"Where rules do not reach," she said. "The store room with the broken ladder. The shade behind the shrine where no incense burns. The corner with two jars that do not match. The town forgets its own corners when it is excited."
They found the corner with the two jars that did not match and sat where the shade had decided to live even when no one asked it to.
The square did not need them for a while.
They let the bells be bells without needing to count them.
And the chapter ended with three lines on a board that had not been there at dawn and a town that might remember this morning for longer than its builders had intended.