The Blank Name

The gray-robed man did not enter the hunting grounds.

Standing outside the eastern rock wall, he sent his guards to walk every game trail first, then had them inspect the gray cloth and iron traps trampled and broken the night before. He even nudged the fake arrowhead on the ground aside with the tip of his boot, unwilling to bend down and touch it.

Helian Yuan lay hidden on the northern slope, watching all morning.

The man was more cautious than the retrieval team and understood the danger of the level-four Blue Rock Panther better. A fake iron tag alone would have been hard-pressed to lure him deep into its territory.

So Helian Yuan did not leave the fake tag by itself.

He had cut a corner from an old record sheet brought out of the underground transfer room. The scraps of the characters "seven" and "fourth" happened to remain on it. He set the fake iron tag on top of the paper and placed both beside an old Blue Rock Panther claw mark. The spot was inconspicuous, but lay directly along the route marked on the gray-robed man's new map.

The record paper was real.

The iron tag was fake.

The clues to the rules were real too.

Only the conclusion was false.

That afternoon, a guard discovered the corner of paper and reported it at once. The gray-robed man did not approach immediately. He first sent two men around from the left and right to confirm there were no ropes or freshly turned soil nearby. Only then did he walk to within ten paces of it.

He did not touch the iron tag. He smelled the paper first.

The damp, rusty smell of old paper from Blackwater Ravine passed the first inspection.

The gray-robed man crouched and lifted the corner of paper with a pair of tongs. The fake iron tag flipped over on the stone, revealing the "seven" Helian Yuan had deliberately weathered.

"Bring me the master ledger's duplicate pages," the gray-robed man said.

A guard turned and headed for the carriage.

Those words proved there was an official record in the carriage that could be checked against the iron tag.

Helian Yuan did not wait for the Blue Rock Panther to appear on its own. From the northern slope, he pulled a long rope buried in the grass. Its far end ran over a tree root to the east, dislodging a bag of beast blood hanging high above the ground.

The blood bag smashed against the stone behind the gray-robed man.

The level-four Blue Rock Panther's low growl sounded almost at the same time.

The retrieval team had enraged it the night before. When it smelled fresh, thick blood and strangers in its territory again, it sprang straight out from behind the rock wall. Two guards drew their sabers to meet it, while the gray-robed man quickly tucked the fake tag and paper corner into his sleeve and retreated toward the carriage.

He did not panic or even look back. He simply shouted an order: "Leave the duplicate pages in the carriage! Fall back outside the perimeter first!"

At that moment, the hunter with the crossbow on his back fired the fletchingless arrow from the western slope. It was not aimed at anyone. It struck an old boundary stake in the distance, making a sound that suggested someone was moving there as well. The youngest of the guards turned his head as expected, but the gray-robed man shouted him down. "Guard the carriage. Don't chase the sound."

Hearing the order, Helian Yuan knew the man had adjusted after the previous night's failure. He stopped trying to lure everyone away and used that brief distraction to approach the rear of the carriage. After making his own judgment, the crossbow hunter withdrew. He did not wait for Helian Yuan to succeed or leave a rendezvous route.

That was exactly the boundary the two had agreed on: he would help keep the hunting grounds from being completely sealed off, but he was not responsible for helping Helian Yuan steal the ledger.

Helian Yuan descended the slope from the other side.

The driver was huddled behind the carriage shafts, his attention fixed entirely on the Blue Rock Panther. The leather bag containing the master ledger's duplicate pages hung inside the carriage, tied with a gray cord. Helian Yuan cut the cord and took the bag, but did not take the whole thing with him. He pulled out only the top two pages, then stuffed the remaining papers back as they had been.

When the driver turned his head, he saw only a dark figure dart past the rear of the carriage.

"Someone on the northern slope!"

One of the guards broke away in pursuit.

Helian Yuan ran along a narrow path he had cleared beforehand. The ditches, fallen trees and low pines ahead allowed only one person through at a time. The saber-bearing guard wore heavy boots and lost a step at every obstacle. Helian Yuan did not summon Tiger Shadow, saving its six breaths for when he was truly trapped.

At the second ditch, the pursuing guard suddenly stopped.

An iron nail engraved with a seven had been driven into the edge of the ditch, with gray thread pinned beneath it. It was another layer of false markings Helian Yuan had planted before escaping the old grounds. The guard could not decide whether to keep pursuing him or retrieve the internal marker first.

In that moment of hesitation, Helian Yuan slipped into a crevice in the northern slope.

He kept circling until nightfall. Only after confirming that no one had followed him did he open the two duplicate pages.

The first page listed numbers, hunting grounds, status and "name." The rows above and below all had entries: number six's name field said wolf, number eight's said leopard, and number thirteen's said Lightning-Patterned Leopard.

Number seven's hunting grounds were Sunken Bone Slope, and its status was pending retrieval.

But its name field was blank.

There was no beast species, no code name, not a single word to say what it was.

This was not an incomplete record. The table's borders and every other entry were intact. Only that one field had been deliberately left blank.

Helian Yuan placed the master transfer list beside it for comparison. The master list said number seven had "already been transferred out," yet the duplicate page did not give its name. The organization had been trying to retrieve a target whose identity had been removed from the records.

The second page contained only a few lines of supply figures and no direct answer.

Helian Yuan turned the paper over.

Several parallel vertical indentations had been pressed into the rough surface, evenly spaced, with horizontal lines along the edges. The page had probably spent a long time beneath some kind of diagram or record, the pressure of a pen transferring the shape of iron bars onto its back.

When he saw the vertical lines, a fragment left by Old Mo's remnant soul suddenly surfaced.

Metal cages.

Many tiger-type demonic beasts confined separately.

A black tiger in the deepest part, its forepaws resting on iron bars.

The memory broke off at the edges. There was no location, no face of the person who made the record, and no final identity for number seven.

But this time, for the first time, the paper in reality and the remnant soul's fragment shared the same outline.

Tiger Shadow stirred restlessly at his feet for an instant, as though the impressions of the bars had touched something deeper. Helian Yuan pressed the sheath of his hunting knife against his right arm until the shadow lay flat again. What he needed now were traces on the paper that could be checked, not an incomplete memory to fill the blank name with a premature answer.

Helian Yuan did not let himself sink any further into the memory. He closed the duplicate pages, listened for movement around him, then put the papers in an oilcloth bundle.

Three short whistles suddenly sounded beyond the northern slope, spaced at the same intervals as the old camp inspector's signal. One group of guards searched the outer perimeter for the papers, while another began pulling out the iron nails and boundary stakes the hunters had left, one by one. The gray-robed man no longer tried to capture the panther immediately. Instead, he first deprived everyone of the ability to use the hunting-ground markers.

The spring route the crossbow hunter often used would be cleared too. Helian Yuan found a broken arrow in the crevice. There was no call for help on its shaft, only a notch pointing west. The hunter had already abandoned his old stone hollow of his own accord, choosing to preserve his crossbow and route rather than hold the spring he had kept for three months.

That retreat was also a consequence of the gray-robed man's expanded search. Helian Yuan had stolen the duplicate pages, but the cost did not fall on him alone; all the hunters unwilling to have their names entered in the ledger had to choose where to stand again.

He took the broken arrow, intending to return it someday, but did not go looking for the crossbow hunter now. The routes people took to meet one another were the easiest thing for an expanded search to exploit. If the two of them broke contact, they would be harder to catch together.

Firelight was still moving to the east. The gray-robed man had not withdrawn. Instead, he had sent men to widen the search around Sunken Bone Slope. The fake iron tag would soon be exposed, and the missing duplicate pages could not be concealed for long either.

For the first time, Helian Yuan had more information than the other side expected.

The cost was that he, too, had become someone to be retrieved across the entire hunting grounds for the first time.

He spread out his map and drew a line each at the northern slope, the spring and outside the eastern rock wall. His next step was no longer merely to evade the search of the mountain. Before the gray-robed man tightened his grip on the hunting grounds, he had to find out exactly what kind of erased identity number seven's blank name pointed to.

The wind blew from the east.

In the distance, someone drove new boundary stakes into the earth, one strike after another.

Helian Yuan pressed his hand against the blank-name page through the oilcloth.

The impressions of the iron bars on the back of the paper pressed against his palm.