In the old workshop, the master craftsman placed the broken arrow beneath the window, first examining its iron head, then parting the loose binding at its tail.
Shi Yuan was about to point out the dark mark when the old man pushed his hand aside.
"Let me look for myself."
Chen Xiuyuan spread the small map of Broken Stream beside it and explained the arrow's retrieval from beginning to end. It had pierced an empty basket, its exposed shaft had been snapped short, and the head and remaining half of the shaft had only been removed together afterward. It had neither been test-fired nor reworked in the meantime.
After listening, the old man turned the shaft over and felt a cut near the iron head.
"I made this batch of shafts."
Shi Yuan immediately asked, "Who did you sell them to?"
"Plenty of people."
He took an arrow without fletching from the rack and showed them the same cut. These short shafts were made to fit several common bows in the area, and regular customers often bought them by the bundle. The iron heads could also be replaced. Once an arrow had changed hands a few times, the workshop had no control over it.
Chen Xiuyuan picked up the new arrow and compared it in the light. The workmanship was indeed similar.
"Can you recognize who took this particular one away in person?"
The old man shook his head. "If I could, I'd have said so yesterday."
Shi Yuan frowned, his earlier eagerness fading. But Chen Xiuyuan did not put the arrow away. He continued asking where these shafts had been sold recently, which sales the old man had handled himself, and which he had only heard about from his assistant.
This time, the old man offered something more useful.
Some time earlier, a cart transporting medicinal herbs had come and taken a bundle of these arrow shafts. The people with the cart had said they were picking up goods for somewhere else along their route. Arrows were not all they had bought; they had also traded for food at the meat shed. As for what the cart's escorts looked like, the old man only remembered one unfamiliar man in brown clothes. No one had called him by name.
"What day was it?" Shi Yuan asked.
"A few days before I went away. I can't remember exactly which."
Shi Yuan thought for a moment, then asked the old man to describe the cart and whether it had unloaded anything inside the gates. Only when he heard that a paler piece of wood had been used to repair its shaft did he select one of the meat exchange tokens he had brought.
"It might have been this time."
The mark on the wooden token belonged to an exchange involving goods from outside, dated before the herb-gathering team had been attacked. Shi Yuan had kept it because a porter's share for handling that shipment remained unclaimed. It could not be put away as a settled token.
Chen Xiuyuan did not cross out "might." He had Shi Yuan write on the back of the map why he remembered this cart, then asked the old man to confirm only what he had seen himself.
The old man said the cart shaft had indeed been repaired. As for whether the wooden token belonged to that occasion, he had never seen the meat shed's records and could not speak for Shi Yuan.
"All right. We'll leave it there," Chen Xiuyuan said.
Shi Yuan looked at him. "Aren't we asking more about the man in brown?"
"We are. But selling arrows and who fired them at Broken Stream are two different things. Finding out where the cart went first is better than searching the mountains for someone in brown clothes."
The master craftsman wrapped the broken arrow in its original cloth and handed it to Chen Xiuyuan, his expression more relaxed than before.
"With questions like yours, I dare answer. But if you want me to look at an arrow and swear who shot it, I can't do that."
Leaving the workshop, the two did not head straight for the patrol post. They went to the herb shed first.
Auntie Sang was waiting for them, an opened packet of medicinal herbs before her. As soon as Chen Xiuyuan approached, he caught a sour, rank smell mingled with the bitterness, much fainter than the one at the bridgehead.
"Where did this packet come from?"
"It was obtained in trade for an injured man at the western end. His family thought it smelled wrong and didn't dare put it in the pot. They brought it here last night."
Auntie Sang pushed the scattered medicinal roots aside and pointed to a stained corner at the bottom of the wrapping.
"The roots inside do look like the right ones. But I smelled this other scent beside the bridge."
Shi Yuan immediately reached for the arrow bundle in Chen Xiuyuan's hand, wanting to put the two together. Chen Xiuyuan moved the arrow to his other side.
"Don't mix them. The arrow didn't have this smell to begin with."
Auntie Sang nodded and took some medicinal roots that had not touched the wrapping cloth from another dried leaf, letting him smell them separately. Chen Xiuyuan could only distinguish the difference, not determine by scent what had been added, so he asked Auntie Sang to clarify what she could confirm.
"It smells like the residue left by contact with beast-luring medicine. Perhaps the wrapping held something else before, or perhaps it brushed against something while the goods were being moved. I can't say for certain from this corner alone."
"We didn't bring back the packet at the bridgehead," Chen Xiuyuan said.
"Right. It was trapped beneath a rock. It rained afterward, so even if we went back, we couldn't treat it as being in its original condition."
She remembered clearly and did not add a single word on their behalf just to connect the two incidents.
Chen Xiuyuan set the returned packet aside on its own and asked how the shipment had arrived. Auntie Sang had found the person who distributed the herbs at the time and checked with them. That batch had happened to come in on a cart that had visited the meat shed, close to the time mentioned by the workshop, but they still needed confirmation from someone who had actually moved it.
Shi Yuan looked at the unsettled meat exchange token in his hand, a troubled expression appearing on his face.
"That porter came today. Just now, he saw the gate guards and turned around to leave."
"Did you stop him?"
"I only said he still had a share to collect and asked him to wait a while."
Chen Xiuyuan closed the herb identification booklet.
"Let's give him what he's owed first."
The porter sat beside a low wall outside the meat shed, a flattened cloth sack by his feet and half a wooden token clenched in his hand. Seeing Shi Yuan approach with someone, he immediately stood and said he still had a journey to make.
"Collect it and go." Shi Yuan held out his hand for the token.
But the man did not hand it over. His gaze fell on the cloth holding Chen Xiuyuan's broken arrow.
"I only moved the goods. Whichever gate the cart entered, wherever they told me to put things, that was where I put them."
"We're not asking about that yet," Chen Xiuyuan said. "Shi Yuan knows what work you did here. Let's settle that account."
Shi Yuan fitted the two tokens together. Their notches matched. After checking the marks on the wooden board as well, he turned to fetch the meat owed.
The porter remained standing, seemingly unable to believe he could collect it just like that. After he had unloaded that cart of medicinal herbs for the tribe, the people accompanying it had hurried him so insistently that he had left before his pay was settled. Later, he had heard something had happened at Broken Stream and that Blood Stone was investigating the people transporting herbs. Several times he had come nearby without daring to enter the gates.
"I thought it had been withheld," he said.
Shi Yuan handed him the wrapped food. "Work recorded here won't be erased just because someone hasn't come. If you don't collect it, I don't know where to find you."
Only after opening it and looking inside did the porter's hands slowly relax. He opened his empty cloth sack, put the meat inside, and slung it over his shoulder, but did not leave immediately.
"What exactly do you want to ask?"
Chen Xiuyuan asked him to sit first, then placed the broken arrow a little farther away without unwrapping it.
"Where did you pick up that cartload of herbs, and how many places did you unload at? Only tell us what you did and saw yourself."
"I don't know who owned the goods."
"Then you don't need to tell us about the owner."
The porter glanced at Shi Yuan, then toward the patrol guards at the entrance, and lowered his voice. "The people with the cart know me. If you question me today and tell them tomorrow that I said it, will I ever be able to travel this road again?"
Chen Xiuyuan did not immediately promise that no one would find him. He himself had only opened one Heavenly Meridian and had not even seen those archers' faces clearly. An empty promise of protection would only lure the man into a trap.
He turned to Shi Yuan and asked whether there was somewhere behind the shed where the man could rest temporarily, then asked him to fetch someone familiar with patrol arrangements. Only after receiving confirmation that the porter could stay inside the gates tonight and leave with people already planning to travel the same road did he explain these provisions to him one by one.
"This is what we can do. If there's something you don't want to say, leave it for now. We won't make you go out alone to confront them today, either."
The porter stared at him for a while.
"Are you the one who came back from Broken Stream?"
Chen Xiuyuan nodded and lifted the repaired bottom frame of his small basket to show him. The vines on either side of the arrow hole were still split, and the replacement bamboo strips were paler than the old ones.
"The arrow struck here. I want to find whoever did it, but I can't decide for you whether you saw anything."
The porter's gaze lingered on the hole for a moment. At last, he set his cloth sack back beside his feet.
He first described where he had picked up the goods: a cart stop outside the small market. At first, everything loaded had been tied packets of medicinal herbs. Later, someone had brought several long tubes and told him to tuck them beneath the cart, screened by empty baskets. He had not opened the tubes, but while lifting one, he had seen tightly bundled slender rods slide out of one end.
"Did they have iron heads?" Chen Xiuyuan asked.
"I didn't see any. What showed was the rounded wooden end."
Chen Xiuyuan noted it down without recording them as arrows.
The porter spoke more and more slowly, pausing whenever he reached something uncertain. He remembered the cart visiting a workshop, but not which doorway it had entered. He also remembered the newly fitted wood on the cart shaft snagging his clothes; its edges had not been shaved smooth.
Shi Yuan pointed to the date recorded on the wooden token, about to ask whether it had been that day, but Chen Xiuyuan gently pressed his hand down.
"Let him tell us what he remembers first."
The porter could not remember the date. He remembered that the convoy had entered the gates that afternoon and finished unloading before the meat shed closed. After receiving his token, he had been hurried away. On the road, he had even been scolded over two missing empty baskets.
Only then did Shi Yuan spread out his records.
The unloading time, the unclaimed wages, and the extra empty baskets left behind all matched. The porter lowered his head and recognized the carved mark on his own half, then suddenly said, "It was this trip."
Chen Xiuyuan added the confirmation separately beside it, then asked where else those packets of medicinal herbs had gone besides Blood Stone.
The porter named an herb stall. Auntie Sang happened to arrive with the person who had returned the herbs. Hearing the place, she paused, but did not interrupt. Chen Xiuyuan first let the porter finish describing the rest of the route, then checked the two accounts separately.
The returned packet had been obtained in trade from that very place.
For the first time, the workshop's arrow shafts, the cart at the meat shed, and the herb stall's goods could be linked through the experiences of the same porter. Chen Xiuyuan still left two uncertain points blank: whether the long tubes had contained arrows, and where the strange smell on the wrapping cloth had come from. No one had yet witnessed either.
Auntie Sang took the herb packet aside rather than thrusting it beneath the porter's nose to teach him to identify the smell. She only asked whether anything else had fallen out while he was moving the things beneath the cart.
The porter thought, then said a tightly wrapped little leaf packet had rolled beside the axle. Someone had picked it up himself and told him not to touch it.
"What kind of leaf?"
"Yellow. A dried leaf. Thin vines wound around the outside."
Auntie Sang looked at Chen Xiuyuan. The packet beneath the bridge piling had been wrapped the same way.
Chen Xiuyuan stopped her before she could speak, wrote down the porter's exact words first, then closed the herb identification booklet. The growing similarities were worth pursuing, but he remembered those two arrows at the bridgehead and did not want to end up catching only someone who moved goods for others.
"We'll leave it here today," he said. "If you're willing, stay inside the gates tonight. Tomorrow, when we trace the route, we'll ask you to help point the way."
The porter nodded and picked up his cloth sack again, but stopped after two steps.
"There's one more thing."
Chen Xiuyuan looked up.
"After the people with that cart settled the goods, they burned some wooden tags. I picked up a corner. I thought if they denied the hauling work, I'd at least have a little proof. Later, I was afraid someone would see it, so I never brought it out."
He turned back the mouth of his cloth sack and drew a small, charred piece of wood from its lining.
The fragment was only two fingers wide. One edge had burned brittle; the other still had a flat surface shaved by a knife. Half the carved marks on it were gone. As Chen Xiuyuan leaned closer, he caught a very faint burnt smell.
The porter pressed it onto the table.
"That cart you're looking for had this hanging from it."