Zhang did not throw Du Yan's report into the brazier.
He thought about it.
The scroll sat on the Ash Hall's table, held open by two inkstones. Its characters were crisp: Order enforced, tablets seized, no resistance requiring blood. Local hall cowed. Town quiet.
Zhang read the line about no blood three times, eyes narrowing.
"Merciful," he said at last.
Wang Yu, kneeling to one side, kept his gaze on the floor. "Captain Du interpreted Your Excellency's order with… prudence," he offered.
"Prudence," Zhang repeated. "Another word for caution. Another word for future trouble, if you let it grow."
He tapped the margin where Du had added, in smaller script, that the Road-men had dismantled their own tablets rather than fight, and that no open defiance had occurred.
"'Road cut its own teeth,'" Zhang read aloud. "Poetic, for a captain."
"He has spent time near scribes," Wang Yu said carefully. "And near… Yong'an's allies."
Zhang's gaze flicked to him. "Near whom, clerk?"
Wang Yu bowed deeper. "Counsellor Ji, Excellency. General Ren. Men who overthink."
Zhang's mouth curved. "And do you overthink, Wang Yu?"
"Only on paper, Excellency," Wang Yu said. "Ink is cheap."
Zhang let the smile settle.
"Du obeyed the face of my order," he said. "He seized tablets. He left the hall standing. Yong'an will call that a victory. Xia will call it hesitation. Men like Ren will call it interesting."
He rolled the scroll shut with two fingers.
"Send Du another order," he said. "Praise his restraint. Remind him of his oaths. And then give him work that keeps him too busy to visit law-houses."
Wang Yu bowed. "What work, Excellency?"
"Bridges," Zhang said. "There are always bridges to inspect. And wolves to chase. Far from Haojin."
He waved a hand. Wang Yu accepted the dismissal, rising carefully.
"And clerk," Zhang added as he reached the threshold.
Wang Yu stopped.
"Next time," Zhang said softly, "when you copy a captain's report, do not let your hand soften the edges. I can smell hesitation even through your neat strokes."
Wang Yu bowed until his forehead nearly touched the lacquered ash. "Yes, Excellency."
"Good," Zhang murmured. "We must all learn to write more sharply."
After Wang Yu left, Zhang unrolled Du's report again and set it beside the map.
Haojin's little mark sat between Yong'an and the river, a dot in the crease of two realms. He touched it with his nail.
"Bend," he whispered. "You think bending saves you. But everything that bends has a breaking point."
He drew a small circle around the dot, ink blooming like a bruise.
"Let's see," he told the empty hall, "how wide your Road thinks it can grow before Heaven notices."
The ash under his feet, remembering other halls and other men who had thought themselves clever, did not answer. It shifted very slightly, as if impatient.
On the Xia side of the river, in a village called Reed Mouth, Heaven did something it had not bothered with in a long time.
It listened.
Reed Mouth was smaller than Haojin, poorer than Yong'an, and more stubborn than both. Its houses leaned under the wind like old men under too many obligations. Its people knew three things: how to plant millet in stingy soil, how to patch boats, and how to endure when soldiers came.
They were good at the first two.
The third had been harder since the last tax season, when a new sub-collector arrived with a bright sash and a knack for counting other people's coins.
"He takes more than the ledger says," old Aunt Cao muttered, pounding dough. "Calls it 'delay fee.' Delay of what? Our patience?"
Her grandson shrugged. "He has soldiers," he said. "We have millet."
Then, one market day, something new appeared on the tavern's wall.
It was not a banner. No dragon, no wolf. Just a square of wood, palm-wide, with crooked characters carved into it and a little sparrow scratched at the corner as if someone's hand had remembered a bird between words.
NO BEATING WITHOUT WITNESS.
The tavern-keeper had found it wedged into his doorframe at dawn, slick with river mist.
"Who put this here?" he demanded, waving it at his regulars.
They shrugged. "Looks like someone's child practicing carving," one said. "Or a bored god."
He almost tossed it into the hearth. Then, because firewood was dearer than wood with writing, he nailed it to the beam instead.
Two days later, when the sub-collector's guard struck a fisherman in a quarrel over weights, three men shouted at once, "Under the sparrow!"
The guard blinked. "What?"
"Witness," Aunt Cao barked, waylaying him with unleavened dough. "You beat him here, under the bird, we all see. Next time your captain comes asking why you broke his tax-payer's arm, we tell it with all our mouths. Or are you afraid of words?"
The guard's stick slowed. Pride warred with a more practical fear: Captain Du's temper when his accounts walked into camp on crutches.
He hesitated. He did not strike again.
Grumbling, he settled for shouting and stormed out, flinging threats that blew away on the river wind.
The next market day, there were two new tiles.
NO SEIZING WITHOUT RECORD, said one over the grain dealer's stall.
LIES PAY DOUBLE, said the other above the dice corner, to general derision.
"Who keeps carving those?" Aunt Cao demanded, squinting up suspiciously.
Shuye, pretending to be merely a jar-merchant passing through, smiled into his sleeve and didn't answer.
Ren Kanyu's scouts saw them before he did. They brought him the story with mud on their boots and amusement in their eyes.
"The villagers claim the sparrow does not belong to Xia or Qi," one reported. "They say it belongs to anyone who can argue with a stick."
Ren took the scratched tile the scout held out. The wood was cheap. The cut was deep enough to remember.
He weighed it in his palm, feeling the Emperor's question echo: If their law gives my people bread where mine has given them hunger…
"Did the collector's take change?" he asked.
The scout shrugged. "Slightly," he said. "He 'forgot' his delay fee twice. The grain-weights at the tavern have matched the ledger three days in a row. There have been fewer noses broken. More words, though."
"Words cost less to mend," Ren said.
That evening, under a lamplight that hissed, he wrote to Bai'an.
To His Majesty: The sparrow-marked law has appeared in Reed Mouth and three neighboring villages. Minor changes: fewer beatings in public, fewer seizures without at least one other witness, more complaints lodged in front of that mark. No banners raised, no taxes withheld. Grain reaching our stores has increased slightly. Our people grumble more, bleed less.
He hesitated, then added, echoing Ziyan more than he liked:
If law from below is a disease, this strain seems to prevent fevers instead of cause them. Recommend continued observation. Crushing such tiles will not remove the questions they have already taught our peasants to ask.
He sealed it with the Imperial sigil, not a sparrow, and sent it by the fastest rider he had.
The road to Bai'an, for once, did not feel like it was trying to kill him. It only watched.