Wu Jin wrote ten edicts and signed none. He tore three in half. He burned one. He left five under a weight and stared at the ash-tray as if it might argue.
The Zhou envoy had come and gone with smiles the color of polished bone. Aid would begin entering by the northern road tomorrow, with counting-priests to "soothe" the earth and engineers to teach mountains to agree.
In the antechamber, ministers rehearsed gratitude. Outside, petitioners practiced kneeling without insisting upon answers. Inside the wall, the air kept time with his breath as if waiting for instruction.
Wu Shuang entered without ceremony, which meant the guards had stepped aside because she had not asked them to move.
"You met with Zhou again," she said. "You smiled."
"I enjoy politics," he said, and then surprised himself by sounding bored.
"Their priests will change the city," she said. "Make it like a patient that mutters numbers to keep courage."
"Better numbers than blood."
"Blood you will spill regardless," she said, not unkindly.
He turned then, unwilling to be described accurately. "Sister," he said, "what do you want? If I hang no one, the city learns to sing itself into fire. If I hang a few, it calls me tyrant and breathes another day. If I cut Zhou, Zhou marches faster. If I welcome them, they write their names under mine on the door. If I strike south, the river swallows my horse. If I do nothing, I am a king of patience. If I do everything, I am my father."
She did not flinch when he said it. She only stepped closer until she could hear how hard he held himself still. "One day soon," she said softly, "someone will ask you whether the throne is yours or a chair left at the end of a long table. When that day comes, answer as if you mean to keep eating."
"You think I am being fed to someone else," he said.
"I think," she said, "you have never asked who placed the chair."
He did not ask either.
By the second watch, the first of Zhou's columns reached the broken road. They brought poles and strings and small singing plates; they brought tablets of ink that did not write unless spoken to; they brought kindness that felt like counting.
Their lead priest drew a square on the ground and sat within it, humming a note too low to carry. The square breathed. The soil firmed. Wheels stopped sinking. Men cheered at competence the way exhausted men cheer for bread.
A boy from the work gang laughed and said Heaven favored them, then looked up and stopped laughing because the sky above the pass looked like dry silk waiting for a knife. He spat, because he had seen tailors work, and carried a bucket as if it were a shield.
At twilight, a foreman found a joke carved under a beam three spans up:
BRIDGE GOES BOTH WAYS.
He did not smile. He rubbed his thumb over the letters until the skin grew hot and the wood kept its insult.
The Lord Protector received a courier whose boots had learned to make no sound.
"What news?" the old man asked.
"Zhou engineers. Counting-priests. They tame the pass."
"Good," he said. "When men believe a mountain can be taught, they feel brave enough to be foolish again."
"And in Ling An… the rebel. Your son. He cuts your other son's rope while pretending to weave his own."
"Names?" the old man asked.
The courier did not give any. He gave a folded paper instead. The old man read it. Four lines, left by careful hands on three doors and one table.
不变
桥在下
钟未鸣
吃与被吃
Unchanging.
Bridge is beneath.
The bell has not rung.
Eat, or be eaten.
The old man did not smile. He did not wince. He fed the paper to the brazier and watched it curl. "He is learning to speak," he said. "He has not yet learned to choose which silences to keep."
The courier waited because men understood when the old man had not finished thinking.
"Send a letter," he said at last.
"To whom?"
"To my daughter," he said, as if admitting something the river had known already.
Wu Shuang knelt before a bowl of water that refused to reflect. The lacquered seals of the Hall were stacked to her left like a collection of small, patient animals waiting for command.
She exhaled slowly, as one does to make tea taste sweeter. The water did not sweeten.
"Father," she said quietly, not as a summons but the way you remind a house of its own name before you sleep.
The surface did not show his face. It showed a tower plan sketched in thin, precise strokes—no stairs. Walls thickened to bear more than wind. A doorway that did not open to any room. At the base, a line of four characters that had appeared in half the city by morning.
不. 变.
"You set the stones," she said. "And the men. And the crowns."
The water did not argue. It shifted to a map of the Hei, then to the pass where white banners pretended not to matter, then to the Lotus Hall where her brother stood alone working the shape of his hands into the arm of the throne until the wood learned his grip.
"Tell me what you want me to do," she whispered, and hated that she was asking.
The water showed her a bell-rope. It was not in Ling An.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the bowl was only a bowl. She was only a woman with ash on her sleeves and too many doors remembering her footsteps.
She sealed a letter addressed to no one and sent it with a runner who knew when to forget he had a face.