The Record Room

There were no footprints in the narrow passage to the north.

The floor was paved with solid flagstones, which held no traces except drag marks. As Helian Yuan followed the iron nail markers inside, he held his torch low, letting it illuminate the ground ahead rather than the distance.

If someone was inside, they would see his torchlight before he saw them.

After fifty paces, a wooden door appeared at the end of the passage. It opened inward and bore four characters: "Records. Do not touch."

The characters were neatly written, but the space for a signature was blank.

Helian Yuan had seen the same tone on the pages he had brought out earlier. There were only orders, with no indication of who had given them or what would happen if they were violated. The rules seemed strict, but when it came time to assign responsibility, no one could be found.

The door lock had rusted shut.

He did not smash it. First, he threaded an old iron chain through the door handle and wedged an iron nail against the latch. Then he used his short spear as a lever, prying bit by bit. The chain bore the tension, while his right arm only controlled the direction. Even so, when the latch broke, the sound carried a long way down the narrow passage.

Helian Yuan immediately extinguished the torch.

No footsteps approached in the darkness.

Only after waiting a while did he relight it and enter.

The room was drier than the passage outside. Three rows of wooden shelves stood against the walls. Most of the documents had been removed, leaving only damaged volumes that had been soaked through or had their crucial pages torn out. A dried-up set of ink implements sat on the desk, beside half a thick volume held down by a weight.

Helian Yuan checked the corners and the exit first, then opened the volume.

The pages had not been bound in chronological order. Several had matching small holes along their edges and had clearly been taken from other volumes and stitched together again. The record keeper had assembled fragments from different hunting grounds and different years into a master ledger, keeping only the information they needed to cross-check at the time.

Without reading the words, Helian Yuan first sorted the pages into three layers by age. The oldest were yellow and brittle, and recorded the first three hunting grounds in Blackwater Ravine; the middle layer bore heavier water stains and mentioned "transfer" repeatedly; the newest pages were still pliable and repeatedly used only "retrieval" and "verification."

The focus of this system had shifted from raising demonic beasts to tracking down certain targets that had been transferred elsewhere.

Number Seven appeared in all three layers, but a part was missing each time: the old pages lacked its species, the middle pages lacked its destination, and the new pages contained only its status. It did not look like accidental damage on a single occasion. Rather, someone had kept deleting the information that could have identified it clearly at different stages.

Helian Yuan compared the edge of a record sheet with the iron tag he had brought. The gray impression along the tag's edge fit precisely into the recessed outline drawn on a page of the master ledger; however, the strokes of the character for "seven" were not quite the same. That meant the iron tags could be reproduced, and the number alone could not prove it was the same demonic beast. What could truly link its identity might be the hunting ground, the batch, and the transfer route.

On the map of Sunken Bone Slope, he found a spring symbol drawn differently from those commonly used on the map outside. A thin semicircle had been drawn beside the spring, looking like either a fence or a territorial boundary. The Fourth Hunting Ground was not merely a place name, but an area marked out according to some rule.

The first page did not name a demonic beast, but read "Third Batch." Below it were columns for the hunting grounds: the first, second, and third grounds in Blackwater Ravine, as well as a circled "Fourth Hunting Ground." Three, Seven, and Thirteen appeared in the transfer-in columns on different dates.

The numbers did not correspond to species.

When the same demonic beast was transferred between hunting grounds, its number remained unchanged; only after its death, escape, or "retrieval" would the number become available again. A level-three Red-Maned Wolf and a level-three Ironmane Bear had used certain facilities at different times, but neither was necessarily the "Number Seven" the gray-robed man was looking for.

Helian Yuan turned to the entry for Number Seven.

The first half had been torn away, leaving only the last sentence: "Transferred to the Fourth Hunting Ground, pending further action."

There was no route within Blackwater Ravine beside the entry for the Fourth Hunting Ground. Instead, a map of the outside had been tucked into the volume. It showed a mountain ridge, a spring, and a bone-white slope. "Sunken Bone Slope" was written in the corner.

This was a new location hidden behind the Blackwater Ravine records.

If Helian Yuan had merely explored every tunnel, all he would have found was an old site that had already been emptied. The area still in use had long since been moved to another hunting ground on the surface.

He removed the map page and found a thin gray thread caught in its corner.

It was not a paper fiber.

It was a small piece of fabric, the same color as the hem of the gray-robed man's robe. The thread was free of dust, as if it had been caught in the cover when someone recently leafed through the volume.

The gray-robed man had been here.

Possibly only a few days before him.

There were no old pry marks around the wooden box, but the inside of its keyhole was clean. Someone had continued to use the key. Helian Yuan pressed his ear to the lid and shook it gently. Inside, paper rustled against small metal objects. It might have contained intact numbered tags, or merely a guard's seal.

The more something looked like an answer, the easier it was to forget the way back. Helian Yuan used a charcoal stick to leave a notched mark on a desk leg that only he could understand, making sure he could find it when he returned, but he did not force the box open now.

As he turned to the later pages, he also found several instances of "pending further action" that had been repeatedly traced over in dark ink. The same phrase appeared over a span of years, in different inks, yet the outcome remained blank throughout. It was not that the record keepers did not know where Number Seven had gone; they were waiting for a decision they had no authority to write down.

There was also a locked wooden box beneath the desk. Helian Yuan tried using an iron nail, but the keyhole was too deep to pry it open. The lid, however, bore a key-shaped indentation, suggesting the key might still be elsewhere in the cave.

He did not spend all his time on a single box.

Helian Yuan took only the map of Sunken Bone Slope, the two pages concerning Number Seven from the half-volume, and the gray thread. He returned the other records as they had been, and even secured the latch temporarily with iron wire so that, from the outside, the door still looked unopened.

Before leaving, he examined the four characters: "Records. Do not touch."

The final stroke of the character for "touch" had been covered with fresh ink, darker than the other characters. Someone had touched it up recently, trying to make an abandoned order continue to look like a rule still in force.

Before leaving the record room, he turned the master ledger back to the page where he had found it, but deliberately left half a corner of an unrelated blank sheet sticking out. If the next person immediately noticed the records had been disturbed, they would most likely go after Sunken Bone Slope first; if they merely pushed the blank sheet back in, it would show they cared more about maintaining the scene than checking every page.

He might never have a chance to see the result of this test, but it meant his intrusion would do more than leave traces of his own.

A muffled thud suddenly came from outside the narrow passage.

It was not footsteps, but the sound of something breaking deep inside the mountain.

Helian Yuan put away the torch and followed the markers back. When he reached the connecting chamber, a piece of rubble fell in the passage to his left, followed by a second and a third. Dust fell from the cave ceiling like rain.

He quickened his pace without running. There were too many traps and forks here. One wrong step, and even if the cave-in did not bury him, an old iron trap would clamp onto his leg.

As he passed the first trap, the ground suddenly sank beneath him.

Helian Yuan grabbed the hemp rope to steady himself and saw that the first iron nail marking the direction of the exit was slowly coming loose. The crevice in the wall had been shaken open, and the rope would soon lose its anchor.

He pulled out the nail and drove it into a deeper crevice. Just as he finished tying the rope, he heard an entire stone wall sliding behind him.

He did not feel that finding Sunken Bone Slope had already made the trip worthwhile. The route was still collapsing beneath his feet, and any answers he could not carry out of the cave would only be buried with his corpse. Helian Yuan tightened his pack straps and put the blank space in the master ledger out of his mind for now.

His escape route was closing.

Helian Yuan felt the map of Sunken Bone Slope inside his robe.

He had found the Fourth Hunting Ground, and at the same time had set off the last passable route through the old site.