Morning fog coiled low around the ledgers-room, where red-stamped books slept in cedar shelves, smelling faintly of ink and dust and old decisions . Ling Hu arrived with two elders and an accusation packaged as concern. "Irregularities in capital flows," he said, letting the words do the wounding .
They opened Tian's accounts—numbers neat, notes spare—and then produced the poisoned evidence: duplicate ledgers spotless in their falsity . "Cross-checked with merchant seals," Hu said, eyes bright as wet stones . Tian read the forgery twice, not because he doubted, but to ensure he would remember the shape of it, the elegant lie people would prefer .
"This is not mine," he said quietly. "The ink is fresh. The hand mimics but does not breathe where I breathe" . But logic rarely arrests a fall once it has begun; momentum solves doubt by crushing it under the wheel .
By midday, rumor outran truth by a province; by sundown, truth had no shoes left to run with .