The plaza listened.
Jade eaves caught every voice and sent it back thinner, and the hundred bells along the inner wall turned those thin echoes into a whispering tide. Qin Mo let it wash over him without looking away from the crowd. The Bellkeeper stood at his shoulder as if she had grown there. Yi and Ren flanked their backs, Lian two paces off, bow unstrung but ready to grow teeth.
[Ledger note: hostile intent clusters — three, at second ring arc. Tools: concealed blades, damped chimes. Surveillance: high.]
A city runner in green livery wove through onlookers and bowed low. "By order of Magistrate Yao, neutral parley is granted in the Hall of Reed Lamps. Weapons sheathed. Bells silent. Wards record all."
"Record away," the Bellkeeper said.
They didn't let themselves be herded. Qin Mo set their course one step to the side of the route the runner wanted, cutting along the plaza's edge between a brazier and a vendor's stall. The boy with the brazier tensed and then remembered he was a boy with a brazier and dropped his eyes. The smell of resin and boiled tea rode the cold.
The Hall of Reed Lamps turned out to be a long room paneled in pale wood, its ceiling hung with thin cylinders of jade that glowed like trapped dawn. Reed-mat aisles broke the space into lanes. At the far end, a fountain whispered over a sheet of stone, making a sound not unlike a bell that had decided to become water.
Two Azure Flame envoys were already there.
They wore the sect's cut with small, deliberate deviations—stitch-work brackets at the collar, burnished plates at the ribs. Their hair was bound in the clean fold that said discipline first. Between them stood a low table with two cups set and a pot steaming faintly. No third cup. The slight said as much as any weapon.
"Dev—" the taller began.
The shorter man lifted a hand. "Qin Mo." His voice wasn't loud, but it knew how to be heard. He wasn't old. He wore age like a tool he had learned to use when his real ones broke. "Envoy Shen."
He didn't offer courtesy titles like "disciple" or "traitor." That was either mercy or contempt.
Qin Mo glanced at the pot. The steam cut clean. No oil. No bitter. Safe enough to insult. He didn't sit. "Your bells announced you. Why the hall?"
Shen's mouth moved as if he might smile later. "The plaza is a stage. The hall is a contract. Men mean what they say in rooms like this, or the rooms eat them."
The Bellkeeper undid the cloth over her wrist and let it hang. The envoys' eyes followed the line of silver and then fixed on her face with the small tightness men wear when a problem acquires a name. Envoy Shen nodded to her as to an equal and then pretended she wasn't there.
"You were charged with theft," he said to Qin Mo. "You were cast out. You lived. All true."
"And the part where you set a pen in the Beast Mountains and tied a man to an altar?"
"That wasn't Azure Flame," Shen said. "That was men inside it."
"Men who used your stamp," the Bellkeeper said.
Shen's eyes flicked to her and back. "Stamps move with coin. So do hands. You know this." He poured tea into one cup and left the other dry. "We didn't come to indict the dead. We came to ask a living question."
He set the full cup on the edge of the table nearest Qin Mo and touched a small bead beside it. The bead was dull bone, threaded with iron. It made no sound. Qin Mo felt it anyway—a low pressure behind the sternum, a tug like the first instant of falling.
[Advisory: bell-script probe. Vector: identity. Counter: Siphon Sever or mute field.]
Siphon Sever bit without being asked. The tug skidded. The bead's dull surface grew duller.
Envoy Shen watched his face and raised his eyebrows a hair. "You carry an answer inside you."
"You came to read me," Qin Mo said. "Read the man who walked back out of the pass the mountains eat."
"We came to offer you a door."
Shen set a square stamp on the table between the cups. Not Azure Flame script. Older, the same geometry that had lived on the cylinders they'd torn from handlers and judges. The jade lamp glow found its lines and made them look wet.
"A door into what?" the Bellkeeper asked. Her tone made the words weigh more than they should have.
"Out of the Beast Mountains," Shen said. "Out of this city. Out of being hunted by coins and men who think bells alone are language. We don't need you to bend the knee. We need you to bring something you already carry to a place it belongs."
"The wolf king's core," Qin Mo said.
Shen's not-smile deepened. "You've held it this long without burning. That suggests either discipline or a system I don't see. Either way, it suggests you can survive what we're about to light."
"And if I won't carry your fire?"
"Then you'll keep running until the chain around your neck has a name that isn't yours. Tell me I'm wrong."
Qin Mo let his lungs fill and empty once. Envoy Shen had a good hand with words. He adjusted them like weights. He waited for the floor to tilt the way he wanted.
"Why me," Qin Mo said. "You have disciples enough."
"Disciples obey," Shen said. "I need a man who refuses and lives." He flicked the dry cup with a nail; it sang like a very small bell. "There's a gate above this city that opens when heat and frost stop fighting and start talking. You've already made them sit at a table."
The Bellkeeper's hand flexed on her staff. "What do you put through a gate like that, Shen?"
"Not what," he said softly. "Who."
The reed lamps hissed. Or maybe they didn't. The silence in the hall was so even it made small sounds where there were none.
At the far end of the room the fountain's sheet of water lifted as if a breath had passed under it. Qin Mo's skin tightened. The ledger marked movement he couldn't see.
[Infiltrator presence reclassed: internal. Source: behind lattice. Tools: mute-bell lantern.]
He didn't turn. He let his eyes settle on Envoy Shen's hands. The envoy's fingers did not twitch toward the bead. They were too still.
The lantern blossomed.
It didn't bloom light; it drank it. The jade glow dulled. The bell-ward under the floor managed one startled chime and choked. The hair on Qin Mo's arms lifted with the sudden absence of weight.
Three men moved with the dark, faces masked, blades wrapped to swallow ring. The first went for the Bellkeeper. The second for Envoy Shen. The third for Qin Mo's ribs, angled to slide between bone and heart.
Qin Mo's sword cleared leather in a breath. The blade met cloth and cut cloth and meat. The man didn't cry out—good training or a good mute—but his knees said what his tongue would not. Qin Mo stepped aside and let him fall. A second shape took the place the first had occupied. The room smelled of cold and oil. The lantern painted nothing.
Envoy Shen didn't move like a man surprised. He moved like a man who had decided earlier which way he would turn when someone tried to cut his throat. He parried without steel, catching the masked man's wrist with three fingers and turning, using the weight to break it and throw the body into the reed lamps. Jade chimed softly and went on glowing as if it disapproved of drama.
The Bellkeeper didn't strike a note. She struck wood—a flat rap on her staff that made the mute lantern's belly wobble. Qin Mo felt weight return in a ripple. The ward under the floor took a breath.
[Mute field destabilized: 63% → 28%.]
"Down," the Bellkeeper said, and the word was a bell. Qin Mo dropped. The staff passed over his head and took the second intruder across the temple. Bone thudded. The man folded.
The third slid knife-first from Shen's blind angle. Qin Mo lunged without rising, driving a cut that bit hamstring and turned into a hook behind the knee, bringing the body down at the Bellkeeper's feet. She didn't need the help. She rolled her wrist. The staff's butt kissed the intruder's jaw. Teeth clicked. Silence returned in a wider circle.
Envoy Shen lifted the mute lantern by its iron handle and snuffed it with a practiced twist. The jade glow swelled as if it had been holding its breath in a pool men had tried to freeze. Footsteps thudded in the outer corridor. City guards. The room adjusted its posture to something that could be put into words on a report.
Magistrate Yao entered with two halberds behind her. She took in the reed lamps, the fallen men, the lantern's closed throat, the blood. She looked at Shen's hand on the handle and at Qin Mo's blade, still wet, and at the Bellkeeper's bells, which had not rung.
"Parley," she said, each syllable a flat stone across water.
"No one in this hall broke it," the Bellkeeper said.
"Men who break parley don't bring their own mute lantern," Envoy Shen added mildly. "City stamp." He tilted the snuffed device so the guard could see the mark pressed into the iron throat—a square the color of old bruises. Not Azure Flame. The older stamp. The teacher who had taught teachers to cut.
Yao's eyes cooled a fraction. She gestured. The halberds moved the bodies as if they were unremarkable furniture that had been set in the wrong place. "The ward will hold an hour," she said. "You have nineteen minutes of it left." She turned to leave and then paused. "Qin Mo," she said without looking back, "the envoy's petition stands."
He didn't answer. She didn't seem to need one.
When the guards were gone, Envoy Shen set the mute lantern on the table beside the square stamp and pushed them together so their edges touched. "Consider them the two halves of your hunt," he said. "The hand that rings, and the hand that cuts the ring out of air. You break either and the other learns faster. You break both and you might survive this city."
"You didn't bring me a door," Qin Mo said. "You brought me a leash."
Shen's not-smile finally reached his eyes. "I brought you a choice."
"And what do you ask in return?"
"To be standing near the gate when you open it," Shen said. "And to keep your wolf heart from going to the man who stamped that lantern."
The Bellkeeper's fingers tightened on her staff. "Names," she said.
"If I say it," Shen replied, "you'll try to kill him before you can count the cost. You're better when you count first."
"You think I need your counsel on numbers?" Her tone would have iced steel.
"I think you'll take it when it's offered because you want the man alive long enough to tell you what he sold." Shen lifted the square stamp with two fingers, flipped it, and set it on its back. Inside the stamp's throat, a hairline groove glinted.
A chain link.
Not metaphor. A small ring of iron, stamped thin, inset where only someone who had learned to break seals would look for it. It was the twin of the one Qin Mo had pried from the altar box. The ledger pricked in recognition.
[Quest item identified: Chain Segment (Bell-forged). Ledger correlation: 2/9.]
"Where did you get that," he asked.
Shen looked at the underside of the stamp as if he'd never noticed it before. He had. "It came with the authority this room thinks I borrowed," he said. "If you prefer poetry: we inherit chains when we inherit words."
He set the stamp back upright, covering the link again. "Dusk," he said. "Outer teahouse under the east wall. Bring the wolf core. Or don't. Either way, the bell will ring."
He left without bowing.
Silence folded the room in its clean hands. Qin Mo stared a breath longer at the place where the stamp had covered the iron ring and then looked at the Bellkeeper. She had taken the mute lantern apart with quick, contemptuous motions; its pieces lay like a mouth pried into truth.
"Two hands," she said. "Ringing and cutting. He's right about that."
"He's trying to stand between them and call it balance," Qin Mo said.
"Balance keeps heads on necks."
"It also keeps knives from finding the right ribs." He wiped the blade clean on a reed mat that would be replaced by sundown and probably paid for by a line in someone's budget marked incidents inevitable. "We go?"
"We don't follow him to dusk," she said. "We get there first."
They left by a service door the runner hadn't pointed them to. The hall's side corridor breathed them into a narrow lane where vendors leaned backs to steam jars and bit into sesame cakes with the guilty quickness of men who had errands and no time for meals. The city sounded ordinary from the waist down. From the rooflines up, bells told a different story.
Yi fell into step. Ren's eyes watched the corners without moving, the way you do when you've been pinned once and don't mean to be again. Lian walked light, counting roofs.
"Two hands," Ren said, as if tasting the words. "Which one do we break first?"
"The one we can reach," Qin Mo said.
The east wall rolled into view between houses—the jade line softened by frost, its base crowded with stalls. The teahouse Shen had named hung a lacquer board over its door carved with drifting leaves. A woman with a braid the thickness of a wrist poured from a kettle and didn't look up.
They didn't go in.
The Bellkeeper took them past, into a seam between wall and warehouse where snow packed and mothers told children not to play. The seam kinked once and ended in a slit of a courtyard with a cracked altar and a frozen ivy lattice clinging to stone like a memory of green.
Pattern Sense breathed.
For three seconds the city unbraided. The courtyard wasn't an accident; it was a hinge. Beneath the paving stones ran a thin relay that fed the ward at the teahouse door. A weak join glowed faint where frost had eaten at the binding.
Qin Mo knelt and slid Frost Thread into the join, gentle as a doctor's probe. Heat followed, not to burn but to make the cold move clean. The relay sighed and turned its face away.
[Local ward eased — teahouse threshold blind spot created. Duration: ~18 minutes.]
Lian's mouth quirked. "We're very early."
"Good." Qin Mo's voice came out calmer than it felt. "It'll give us time to hear the room before it hears us."
They took positions not like assassins but like men who intended to live past the next hour. Yi at the blind spot, Ren above the warehouse eave where a loose tile made a listening hole. The Bellkeeper stood within the crowd's eye-line and kept her bells visible and still. Qin Mo leaned a shoulder into the alley wall and closed his eyes without sleeping, letting the city's sound settle into layers until one rose: the thin scrape of a chair on wood, a cup set down too gently to be natural, the hiss of water angry to be poured cold.
Envoy Shen arrived at dusk without needing to be announced. Footsteps that didn't hurry. Breath that didn't fog as much as it should. His shadow cut the threshold and didn't ring the ward. He noticed the silence in the door the way men notice the drop between steps and adjusted without changing stride.
He wasn't alone. Two figures followed—a woman in plain cloth with the bearing of someone used to deciding which part of a sentence to believe, and a boy carrying a lacquer tray that didn't rattle. Qin Mo didn't like the boy's face because the boy wasn't watching the cups. He was watching the windows.
The Bellkeeper didn't move.
Shen sat with his back to the wall and set the square stamp on the table again, this time upright from the start. The woman in plain cloth set a small bronze chime beside it, its surface scored and patched, an instrument that had earned its right to live.
"Second hand," the Bellkeeper murmured, almost to herself. "The one that rings truth."
Qin Mo felt the wolf core warm at his ribs, a reminder and a question he wasn't going to answer yet. The chime's presence made the chain under the stamp twitch, just once, as if it had remembered it was also an instrument.
The first bell of evening climbed the inner wall. It rang like cold glass struck with a nail. The city turned its face toward the sound. Conversations paused for a heartbeat, the way men bless bread and don't think about blessing it.
Envoy Shen tilted his head to listen and then said a thing that made the air in the seam go thin.
"Elder Liang will be at the Bell Feast," he said. "He will bring a judge's stamp to the high table. If you want your chain, Qin Mo, you will take it out of his hand in front of the city."
Lian's breath rasped once and cut off. Yi's shoulders lifted and settled. The Bellkeeper's knuckles went white and then remembered themselves.
Qin Mo opened his eyes. He saw the judge's thin face across a table that wasn't this one. He saw Ren An's ruined mouth saying his name. He saw the wolf king's blood steam in cold air and turn to frost on the stones.
"Good," he said.
Envoy Shen's lips made that not-smile again. "Then we're done pretending to be friends."
He touched the bronze chime with a fingernail. It made no sound. The chain link under the stamp quivered anyway.
[Quest updated — Break the Hand that Feeds: Stage II.]
[Objective: Acquire judge's stamp at Bell Feast. Risk: extreme. Reward: chain segment confirmed.]
[Advisory: Public arena. Ward interference guaranteed. Countermeasures required.]
Far off, the second bell of evening fell through the city like snow. The teahouse's lamp-skin glowed warmer. Outside, a child laughed and was hushed and laughed again.
Qin Mo's fingers closed once around nothing and then eased. He felt the balance inside him settle a hair wider, like a stance before a cut.
"We take it," he said. "And we make the city watch."