Countermarking

The stake replacement team changed its route every day.

On the first day, they headed north from the eastern slope. On the second, they went west from the spring. On the third, they did not continue in the direction they had taken on either of the previous two days. Instead, two groups set out at the same time from the gray-robed man's temporary camp. One carried new stakes; the other carried only small leather bags. Helian Yuan watched from a distance, then withdrew.

The people with the leather bags collected the old markers, while those carrying stakes put in replacements.

If the two groups traveled together, a new line would be put in wherever an old marker was pulled up. Now that they had split up, it meant the gray-robed man already suspected someone was using the order of stake replacement to work backward and determine where the search was taking place.

He began deliberately creating false time gaps.

Helian Yuan did not follow the nearest team. He circled around to the southern side of Sunken Bone Slope and found a steep gully worn by wild goats. Fresh wood shavings lay at the bottom, but the rain had not wet them, which meant the stake replacement team had come through last night. There were no new stakes in sight, only a tree root shaved flat.

Two grayish-white specks remained on the edge of the root.

Helian Yuan scraped them lightly with the back of his hunting knife, exposing a thin lead-colored trace beneath the white powder. They had not merely scattered powder along the line. They had first used a kind of soft lead to press an impression between the stake and the nail. If a nail was pulled out or turned, it would leave scratches on the lead surface.

That was why they collected every old nail.

The nails themselves were also records.

Helian Yuan did not touch the root. He went up the steep gully and found a fallen rock halfway up the slope. A dead mountain rat lay pinned beneath it. There was no wound on its belly, but white foam stained its nose and mouth. It had probably licked the powder on a stake.

The mineral powder contained a trace of bitter medicine that could briefly disorient small animals. That way, whenever a small animal was found running wildly, crashing into rocks, or dead around a new stake, the search team knew the powder had not been washed away by rain.

One rule watched not only for people, but also used animals to check the lines for them.

Helian Yuan waited beside the mountain rat until the afternoon. When the sun slanted westward, two guards carrying leather bags did indeed enter the gully. They looked at the dead rat first, then checked the shaved root. One of them took a thin piece of wood from his bag and pressed it against the lead mark on the root to make an impression.

"It hasn't been touched," he said.

The other looked uphill. "South gully should have been sealed off yesterday."

"Three false sevens turned up in the north. The order was changed."

"All the same person?"

"If it was one person, he knows the place better than the map."

After that, the two did not continue uphill. They put the dead rat in another bag, turned, and headed east.

Helian Yuan waited a long time before crawling out of a crevice where they could not see him.

Three false sevens.

He had only planted one.

The other two had come either from the hunter with the crossbow on his back or from other hunters who had not yet left. The gray-robed man treated "seven" as the highest-priority signal. Someone else had understood that and started using the same thing to disrupt the search.

That should have been good news, but it also meant the false markers would soon lose their value. The more people used them, the more likely the other side was to abandon the rule of collecting sevens first, or even turn the false sevens against the hunters and use them to draw them together.

Helian Yuan needed to obtain an intact nail collected from an old marker and figure out how the white powder and lead marks were arranged.

That night, he dug a very shallow pit at the lower mouth of the south gully. He put no animal trap in it, only a layer of pine needles, then connected it with hemp rope to a thin stone some distance away. If someone stepped on it, the stone would flip over, exposing the blood-scented grass juice hidden underneath.

The scent would attract mountain foxes without leaving an obvious human scent.

Before dawn, a stake replacement guard entered the south gully. He carried three short stakes on his back and a hammer at his waist. When he reached the pit, he saw fresh mountain fox prints. They stretched from outside the gully all the way to the root, passing right over the shallow pit Helian Yuan had dug.

The guard did not suspect an ambush. He crouched to examine the overturned stone, then reached out to feel the lead mark on the root first.

Helian Yuan dropped from above.

He used neither Tiger Shadow nor a swing of his spear. He looped the hemp rope around the guard's hammer hand and used the force of his fall to drag him into the rock wall. The guard had just opened his mouth when Helian Yuan's knee drove into his chest and a hunting knife came to rest beneath his Adam's apple.

"Where are the collected nails?"

The guard clenched his teeth and said nothing.

Helian Yuan did not ask again. He found a small leather tube on the man's right hip. Inside were two old nails, a lead strip, and a packet of white powder. After taking them out, he immediately released the rope and stepped back.

The guard clearly had not expected him to spare his life. He pushed himself up and went to draw his saber. Helian Yuan kicked the hammer away, then followed through by jabbing his short spear into the back of the guard's hand as he gripped the saber.

A bone cracked dully.

The saber fell.

"Go back and tell the gray-robed man," Helian Yuan said, "the hunting grounds weren't made by his stakes."

There was a price for saying those words. The other side had heard his voice for the first time, and the guard would also remember his build, the way he used a spear, and the slight hesitation when he exerted force with his right arm.

But if he only took the items and left no reason, the gray-robed man would treat the attack as an ordinary robbery. He needed the other side to know that someone was targeting the stake replacement itself.

Clutching his hand, the guard retreated to the mouth of the gully without giving chase. He stared at Helian Yuan in the darkness for several breaths, then suddenly said, "You think pulling out one nail is enough to understand how we close off the mountain?"

"I don't need to understand all of it."

Helian Yuan bent down, picked up the hammer, and smashed the nearest short stake.

"As long as you have to take one extra step every day, that's enough."

The guard turned and left.

Helian Yuan did not stay where he was. He divided the white powder into three portions, putting one back in the leather tube, rubbing one onto a rock by the stream, and wrapping the last in oilcloth. The lead strip was very soft, with four horizontal grooves cut into its face. Each time an old marker was collected, a dot was pressed into a groove. There were now six indentations in the second groove, while the third was empty.

These were not dates.

They looked more like counts for different areas.

The edge of the first groove had already been pressed flat, indicating it had been repeatedly filled and erased in the past. All six indentations in the second groove were fresh, while the third seemed reserved for an area deeper in the mountains where work had yet to begin. The gray-robed man's search was no spur-of-the-moment plan. Even the number of old markers to be collected in each area had been allotted a separate groove in advance.

Of the two old nails, one was ordinary. The other had an extremely fine circular mark on its tail, close in size to the inner circumference of the old iron ring. It might once have held a restraint strap, or it might have secured a seal on a cage door.

Helian Yuan put that nail away separately.

After daybreak, whistles soon rang out in the south gully. The stake replacement team did not rush over immediately. First, a group sealed off the exit from the east, while others searched the heights for loose rocks and ambush points. As expected, the gray-robed man had changed the rules and no longer let the stake replacers operate alone.

But once they made that change, the people collecting nails and the guards were tied together, slowing them down by at least half.

Helian Yuan stood on the back of a more distant slope, listening to the wooden mallets stop and start.

What he had seized was not a packet of powder.

It was the cost of making the other side assign one more person to guard every stake.

That afternoon, the mountain wind carried the scent of the white powder on the streamside rock to the eastern slope. A group of mountain foxes that had accidentally licked the bitter powder darted wildly among the new stakes, snapping two gray lines in succession. The search team had to send people to check every boundary that had been touched.

Amid the confusion, Helian Yuan approached the gray-robed man's temporary camp for the first time.

Three carts stood behind the camp.

Helian Yuan did not forget his escape route simply because he had come close. First, he placed three pieces of bark beneath a fallen pine, pointing them toward the south gully, the stream bank, and the bare rock respectively. When retreating, he could tell which side someone had passed by seeing which piece had been lifted by the wind. After seizing the collected nails, he needed to be more careful, not treat the next attempt as the same situation just because the first had succeeded.

The innermost cart held neither the master ledger nor provisions.

A thick cloth covered the cart bed, and a bent iron bar protruded from beneath it.