It took Zhu Li all morning to find a suitable medicine mortar in Chang'an.
The task proved more complicated than he'd expected. There was no shortage of shops selling mortars in the city, but the one he'd crushed had been carved from stone — fine-grained, the grinding channel worn to a smooth curve by years of use. Every new mortar he found was freshly chiseled, all sharp edges, the kind that would shed stone dust into whatever was being ground.
He spent an hour crouched in a stoneworker's shop, running his fingers over mortar after mortar. In the end he chose one of blue-grey stone — the closest match in grain. The channel was new, but the stone itself was fine enough that two months of use would wear it smooth.
The shopkeeper watched him deliberate with such care and asked, "A gift for someone?"
"Replacing one I broke."
"Pardon?"
"I stepped on theirs."
The shopkeeper looked him up and down. His expression, hovering between speech and silence, might as well have spelled out *how are you this honest?*
---
Standing before the door of the Hall of Returning Flowers with the mortar wrapped in cloth, he suddenly felt a bit foolish.
The door was half-open, same as before. Those clusters of red flowers still pushed up through the cracks in the stone steps, blooming even more fiercely than last time — an almost violent red. The three characters of the hall's name gleamed in an old-gold sheen under the daylight.
That floral scent drifted out to him — sweet, faintly bitter. He realized he could identify it now. As though his tongue had learned a new word, and from now on the smell would never again be "some kind of flower" but specifically "the scent of the Hall of Returning Flowers."
He took a deep breath and pushed the door open.
She was there.
Situ Xuan sat behind the counter, an age-yellowed book spread open before her. She was writing annotations in the margins with an impossibly fine brush. At the sound of footsteps, she raised one eyelid — only one — confirmed it was him, and went back to writing.
"The mortar." Zhu Li set the cloth bundle on the counter.
She didn't reach for it. Her brush didn't stop.
"Blue-grey stone. The grain might not be exactly like the old one, but the quality is close. A couple of months and it'll —"
"You didn't come just to return a mortar," she said.
The brush stopped. She set it down and looked up at him. Her gaze was as calm as a lake without wind — you could see everything on the surface, but nothing of what lay beneath.
Zhu Li was silent for two seconds.
"You're right," he admitted. "I have questions."
"Ask."
"Yesterday, those gu-worm fragments — when you killed them with your pollen, you said something. 'Black Blossom Gu: feeds on memory and emotion.'"
"Mm."
"Where do the eaten memories go?"
She finally lifted her head all the way from behind the book. The lake surface of her gaze rippled, ever so slightly — not because the question surprised her, but because the person asking it did.
"You're not stupid," she said. This was, presumably, some degree of compliment.
"Thank you." He wasn't sure *thank you* was the right response, but said it anyway.
Situ Xuan stood and took a porcelain jar from the medicine shelf behind the counter, unscrewing the lid. Inside lay several clumps of black, fibrous matter, giving off a smell of rotting sweetness — the remains of gu-worms.
"These are gu-worm corpses I extracted from other victims earlier. Look closely —" She lifted one clump with a silver needle, holding it up to the light. "The abdomen."
Zhu Li leaned in.
In the sunlight, the creature's abdomen revealed something faintly visible: threads. Impossibly fine, translucent threads wound tight within the abdominal cavity, packed together like spun silk.
"That's —"
"Memory," she said. "When a gu-worm consumes a memory, it doesn't digest it. It spins the memory into thread."
Zhu Li's brows knotted together.
"You're saying someone is breeding gu-worms, and not just to harm people —"
"The harm is only the means." She placed the remains back in the jar. "The purpose is to harvest the memory-thread. Nine victims, every one of them with these threads in the gu-worm's abdomen. And not in small quantities — this isn't casual experimentation. It's mass production."
"What can memory-thread be used for?"
"I don't know." This was the first time he had ever heard her admit to not knowing something. "But whoever needs this sort of material — their ambitions are not small."
Silence settled between them for several seconds. The shop was very quiet. Only the distant clamor of the West Market drifted in through the window, like background noise from another world entirely.
"Why are you telling me all this?" he asked.
She looked at him, her gaze entirely unguarded. "Because yesterday, when you realized you'd attacked the wrong person, your first response was to apologize. Your second was to ask questions. You didn't make excuses. You didn't fly into a rage to save face."
"... Isn't that normal?"
"No," she said. "Most people make excuses."
She sealed the porcelain jar and closed the old book — and only then did Zhu Li notice the title on its cover: *Remnant Volume of the Hundred Gu Canon*. It looked extraordinarily old.
"I'm still tracking the memory-thread." She unwrapped the cloth from the mortar and glanced at it, running a finger along the grinding channel as though testing the stone. "If you find new victims, tell me. My pollen can extract gu-worms. Your Bureau's methods cannot."
Was this some kind of invitation to cooperate? Zhu Li wasn't sure. But he nodded.
"One more thing," she said as he reached the door. "Next time you enter my shop — knock."
"Last time the door was open."
"Last time I was in the back courtyard extracting gu-worms. I didn't have time to close it."
"What if next time the door is open again?"
She considered this. "Then call out before you come in. If I happen to be in the middle of something and you throw another talisman at me — I can't promise I'll dodge in time."
"You dodged fast enough."
"You throw too slow."
Zhu Li opened his mouth, weighed his options between *retorting* and *preserving his dignity*, and chose the latter.
He left. Behind him came a sound, very faint — it might have been a laugh, or it might have been nothing more than a breath through her nose. He didn't turn around to find out.
---
That night.
Zhu Li's second shift on night watch.
Just past midnight, he began patrolling the corridor near the old storeroom with deliberate attention. Experience from last time had taught him — if the painted court ladies were going to emerge, this was the hour.
In the small hours of the morning, they came.
Not one. Three.
Three translucent court ladies drifted out from the direction of the storeroom, their sleeves billowing without wind, their jade ornaments swaying without sound. Their faces were still indistinct — like looking at someone through a curtain of rain, their features dissolved into soft pools of light.
But their forms were clearer than before. The colors of their robes were more defined now, their movements more *alive* — no longer the flat, drifting quality of paper cutouts, but weighted, rhythmic, possessing a grace that was nearly real.
They were growing stronger.
Or rather — they were becoming more *real*.
The three ladies drifted in different directions.
The first went to the kitchen. She floated to the edge of the stove and her hands moved through the air in searching motions — opening a drawer that wasn't there, pulling at a cabinet door that didn't exist. What was she looking for? Zhu Li leaned against the kitchen doorframe and watched. Her searching followed a distinct pattern: always beginning from the lower left, working low to high, near to far.
The ingrained habit of forty years.
The Caretaker probably cleaned the kitchen in exactly that order.
The second went to the main hall. She stood in the corner, both hands raised, miming the posture of someone holding a lute — but there was no lute in her hands. Her fingers plucked at empty air, playing a song only she could hear.
The third headed deeper into the corridors.
Zhu Li followed.
She moved faster than the other two, her skirts trailing just above the floor, gliding through one passageway after another. She never looked back — didn't even seem to know she was being followed. All of her attention was fixed ahead.
She stopped before the iron door.
Same as last time.
But this time, she did not pass through.
She stood before the iron door, her translucent hand pressed flat against its surface, perfectly still. As though waiting for something. Or listening.
Zhu Li held his breath.
Then he heard it.
From beyond the iron door — impossibly faint — came a sound.
Not a knock. Not any identifiable noise. It was a *hum*. As though something were vibrating. As though, very far away, something was breathing at an impossibly slow frequency.
The sigils on the iron door were glowing. Brighter than last time. And the crack had widened — no longer a couple of inches, but nearly the span of a hand.
The court lady reached inside.
This time it wasn't a matter of passing through — the crack was too narrow for her entire body. She simply slipped one hand in, her arm disappearing up to the elbow, as though groping through a doorway into another room.
Her face — that blurred, rain-washed face — showed expression for the first time.
Confusion.
She had touched something on the other side of the door. But it wasn't what she was looking for.
She withdrew her hand. Lowered her head. Turned and drifted away.
As she passed Zhu Li, she paused for an instant — those indistinct eyes regarding him.
Then she continued on, back toward the storeroom.
Zhu Li stood alone before the iron door. His heart was hammering.
The hum from behind the door had faded, but he could have sworn the vibration still lingered in the air — or perhaps it lingered in his chest, tangled with his own heartbeat, until he couldn't tell whether the resonance came from beyond the door or from somewhere deep inside himself.
He looked at the crack in the iron door — wide enough now to fit his whole hand through.
He didn't reach in.
But he was more certain than yesterday: there was something behind that door. Not merely the restricted zone Pei Du had warned him away from — but something active, alive, something that *breathed*.
He turned back toward the storeroom.
All three court ladies had returned. The corridors were quiet again.
He walked to the folding screen and raised his torch.
In the wavering firelight, the painted scene on the screen came into sharp relief —
He counted.
One, two, three... nine.
Only nine court ladies remained on the six-paneled screen.
The three empty spaces showed faint silhouettes, as though someone had been gently peeled away from the silk, leaving behind only a faded shadow.
The twelfth court lady was still there. She stood on the rightmost panel, hands at her sides, facing forward.
But in the torchlight, Zhu Li noticed a new detail.
Her lips were slightly parted.
As though she were speaking.
He leaned in close, nearly pressing his face against the silk. The torchlight fell across her features — that face rendered with an almost living subtlety by the painter's brush —
There was a word on her lips.
Not painted. It was a faint ridge in the silk itself — visible only from very close, only at the right angle of light.
A single word.
*Wait.*
Zhu Li's hand froze in midair.
He didn't touch the word.
He simply stood there, torch raised, looking at a court lady who had been painted who knows how many years ago, looking at the quiet, stubborn word on her lips.
She was waiting for someone who would never come again.
And that person, in the last moments of life, had been thinking of her.
The torch crackled once. Zhu Li stepped back half a pace, the light shifted, and the ridged word on her lips sank back into the painting, invisible once more.
He turned and walked out of the storeroom.
---
Back in his room, he lay on his bed and placed the Illusion-Breaking Bell on his chest. The copper wall of the bell rested against his clothes, rising and falling with each breath.
Two things had happened today.
First: he now knew that behind the Nightmare Gu, someone was collecting memory-thread — organized, deliberate, purpose unknown.
Second: the court ladies on the screen were emerging one by one, more and more of them, growing more and more *real*. They were searching for someone. And whatever lay behind the iron door was gradually... loosening, because of their crossings.
Were these two things connected?
He didn't know.
But he had a dim sense that this Bureau, hidden beneath a paper effigy shop, held far more secrets than he could imagine.
And now he was caught up in both — the case unfolding outside, and the mystery lurking within.
He closed his eyes.
Two images surfaced in his mind as he drifted off.
One was the word *Wait* on the painted lady's lips.
The other was Situ Xuan in the Hall of Returning Flowers, saying *You're not stupid*, with that faintest glimmer of light in her eyes — so faint it might not have existed at all.
He wasn't sure whether it had been approval or a test.
But he was sure of one thing: he'd be going back to the Hall of Returning Flowers tomorrow.
He already had his excuse ready.
She still hadn't told him what was written in the *Remnant Volume of the Hundred Gu Canon*.