The Wei Compound gate swallowed them without ceremony.
Servants materialized from the courtyard, taking reins and leading horses toward the stables with the practiced efficiency of people who'd done this a hundred times and expected to do it a hundred more. No crowd gathered, no elder waited on the steps. A bandit suppression in the western hills ranked somewhere below merchant disputes and above roof repairs on the clan's hierarchy of concerns. The party dismounted into the same courtyard they'd left from, and the courtyard treated their return like an exhale.
A steward in pressed gray robes intercepted An Quan before his boots had fully touched flagstone. He held a sealed scroll at chest height, the way a courier holds something that belongs to someone more important than himself.
"Commander An. The Patriarch requests your attendance. Immediately."
An Quan took the scroll, broke the seal, read. His face gave away nothing. He handed his horse's lead to the nearest servant, adjusted his collar, and followed the steward toward the inner compound without a backward glance. The scroll disappeared into his robe beside the supply token he'd been carrying since the mountains.
Xuanji watched him go.
"The Patriarch's standing order." Jin Mo's voice came from his left, flatter than usual. "Accounting office. You're expected."
Xuanji nodded. No argument, no sigh, no negotiation. He'd been a pickpocket long enough to understand that when the system assigns you a task, compliance buys you more room than resistance ever does.
Jin Mo studied him for a beat, as though expecting the protest that didn't come. His jaw shifted. Something in his posture loosened by a fraction.
"You heard the order, cousin." Jianyu's voice carried from three horses down, where he was handing off his reins with theatrical precision. "Back to the abacus where you belong. I hear the ink is less dangerous than bandits."
Xuanji looked at him. Through him, really, the way you look through a window when you're focused on something past the glass. Then he turned and walked toward the east wing.
Behind him, Jianyu's prepared follow-up died in his throat. The silence where a reaction should have been left him standing with his mouth half-open, his audience of two looking elsewhere.
=====
The accounting office smelled the way Xuanji imagined legal documents smelled: old ink, dry wood, and the stale air of a room whose windows hadn't been opened in months. Scroll racks covered three walls from floor to ceiling. A high table dominated the center, scarred from years of abacus work, its surface stained in repeating half-circles where tea cups had been set and forgotten. Two junior clerks occupied stations near the far wall. They glanced up when Xuanji entered, registered who he was, and returned to their columns without greeting.
He was assigned grain reconciliation. Incoming shipment tallies against departure logs, a task designed to occupy hands and produce nothing of value. The ledgers were bound in pale cloth, each one covering a quarter-year cycle, each entry written in the same cramped clerical script that made every number look like a minor act of spite.
Xuanji opened the first ledger and began matching figures. Within five minutes, something shifted behind his eyes.
He didn't know accounting. He didn't need to. Three years at Fisherman's Wharf had taught him to read the architecture of dishonesty. Counterfeit twenties had a tell: the paper was right, the ink was right, the portrait was right, but the overall pattern was a fraction too regular, too clean, as if the person printing them had been so focused on perfection that they'd accidentally eliminated the messiness that made real bills real. The ledgers had the same quality. Line by line, nothing jumped. But when he let his focus soften, the way he used to soften it while scanning a crowd for the pocket that sat wrong, a shape emerged.
"Donation, Mountain Shrine, Eastern Ridgeview." The entry appeared in every monthly cycle. The amounts varied between fifteen and twenty taels, the kind of natural-looking fluctuation that suggested real transactions. Always signed by the same sub-clerk: a name Xuanji memorized on the first pass. Always routed through the same treasury sub-account. The pattern repeated across eight consecutive months of ledger data, reliable as a heartbeat.
Xuanji tilted his head toward the territorial map pinned to the wall behind the high table. His eyes found the eastern ridge. Followed the contour lines. Located Ridgeview. There was a mining claim. A watchtower ruin. A seasonal herding camp.
No shrine.
The nearest one sat forty li south, on a completely different sub-account's jurisdiction. Someone had invented a destination, given it a plausible name, and used it to move between one hundred twenty and one hundred sixty taels per year out of the main treasury. The amounts were modest enough to vanish in a budget this size. Accumulated over years, they'd fund a second household.
Xuanji turned the page. His expression didn't change. His hands didn't pause. He continued matching grain tallies with the same methodical tedium as before, the sub-clerk's name locked in the same part of his brain where he used to store license plates, apartment numbers, and the work schedules of beat cops.
Information was currency. Currency was never spent the moment you earned it.
The office door opened an hour before the evening gong. Jin Mo leaned into the frame, one shoulder against the wood, arms folded. His posture was different from the morning's rigid escort stance. Looser. The weight distributed more evenly, the way a person stands when they've decided they're staying for a moment rather than passing through.
"Clerks been giving you trouble?"
Xuanji looked up from the ledger. "They haven't said a word to me all afternoon. It's the most productive relationship I've ever had."
Something moved in Jin Mo's face and settled before Xuanji could confirm what it was.
"Has the grain route always come through the eastern pass?" Xuanji said it the same way he might have asked about dinner, letting the question sit at the surface with its roots hidden. "I've been reconciling the same entries for hours. Seems like a long way around."
Jin Mo's arms unfolded. The shift was small, a readjustment of weight, but Xuanji recognized it. He'd watched enough marks register the moment a question stopped being casual.
"The grain route is the grain route." Jin Mo's voice carried a new edge, sharp but controlled, like a blade drawn halfway. "It goes where the elders say it goes. You're here to count, Xuanji. Count."
The words landed clean. No anger behind them, but no ambiguity either. Xuanji dipped his head and returned to the ledger. "Counting."
Jin Mo stayed in the doorway for another three seconds, his eyes on Xuanji's hands, on the ledger, on the map behind him. Then he straightened.
"Kitchen closes after second gong. Servants' hall, east corridor. Don't be late."
He left. The door stayed open, letting the evening air push against the staleness of the room.
Xuanji listened to the armored footsteps fade. In his old life, a mark who caught you reaching and didn't call the police was a mark with his own reasons for avoiding attention. Jin Mo wasn't a mark. The comparison broke down at the edges. But the shape was familiar: someone who chose silence over reporting, and in doing so, drew a quiet line between duty and something else.
The clerks packed their stations at the second gong without acknowledging Xuanji's presence. He closed the ledger, replaced it on the rack, and left the office with nothing visible taken.
=====
The sanctuary hadn't changed.
Xuanji squeezed through the gap in the eastern storage wall, the same gap Mei Ran had led him through weeks ago. The crumbling courtyard lay under cold moonlight, moss silver on the stones, the dead fountain basin collecting shadows. He stripped his robe to the waist and sat cross-legged beside the fountain's edge.
Systematic. That was the word. On the street, he'd always been systematic about money. How much in the jar, how long it lasted, which corners could be cut and which corners were load-bearing. The same logic applied here.
He started with one finger. Index finger, right hand, pressed flat against a stone tile. He pushed Iron Skin through it, felt the skin thicken, the tissue beneath compress. Held it. Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty. The qi drain was negligible. He released and flexed the finger. No meridian ache. The equivalent of spending pocket change.
Full hand. He pressed all five fingers down. The hardening spread across his palm, knuckles tightening until the stone felt like pressing against wood. He counted. Fifteen seconds. His Heart Meridian sent the first warning, a dull clench behind his sternum. Twenty seconds. The clench sharpened. He released at twenty-two and patched with Qiao's technique, the familiar two-finger press to his wrist.
Full forearm. Ten seconds before the ache became a throb. He disengaged and patched. Breathed through the dizziness.
Full-body activation. He closed his eyes, pushed the technique outward from his center, and felt it race along every surface. His entire skin tightened. Three seconds. His vision swam. His meridian didn't just leak; it ruptured. He cut the technique and emergency-patched, and still spent the next thirty seconds hunched over his knees with his pulse hammering in his ears.
He sat back. Ran the numbers.
Rice and beans, twelve dollars a week. That had been the equation in San Francisco. Everything mapped to it: rent was one hundred and eighty rice-and-beans-weeks. A new pair of shoes was three. A bad day on the Wharf, when the crowds thinned and the marks got cautious, meant pushing the margin thinner, borrowing calories from tomorrow to pay for today.
Qi was the same currency in a different denomination. Qiao's diagnostic touch was rice and beans: sustainable, baseline, always available. Iron Skin was rent: expensive, necessary in bursts, ruinous if overextended. Running both was the monthly arithmetic of a person living on exact zeros, where every dollar had a name and there was no line item for surprise.
His income was crippled. The Heart Meridian leaked qi the way a cracked pipe leaked water, steady and structural, and no amount of careful spending could outpace a drainage problem. He could steal every technique in the compound and still hit the same ceiling. The engine wasn't the bottleneck. The fuel line was.
He pulled his robe back on. Crossed the courtyard. At the gap in the wall, he paused to brace his hand against the stone, and his left hand did it again. The fingers curled of their own accord: thumb to the base of the ring finger, index and middle extended, pinky tucked beneath the palm. The same formation as the ridge. The muscles held the position with a certainty that had nothing to do with Tobi Miller and nothing to do with Iron Skin.
He stared at his hand in the moonlight.
Three times now. He released the formation, shook his fingers loose, and filed it in the growing folder of things that didn't fit inside any explanation he had. The folder was getting heavy.
He squeezed through the gap and walked back toward the servants' hall. Somewhere in the compound, An Quan was reporting to the Patriarch. Somewhere, a sub-clerk's name sat in a ledger beside a shrine that didn't exist. Somewhere in the mountains behind him, a man with a hollow arm was walking toward someone who wanted answers.
The compound was quiet. The moon was high. Xuanji's fingers, at his sides, stayed still.