By breakfast, the board had become the most argued-over object in Hejingshui.
It leaned against the shrine wall beneath a surviving strip of roof. Forty-one names filled the charcoal-dark surface. Most had nothing beside them. Three carried small marks copied from the frost that had formed on the bell. Beside LIN XUE, Xiulan had drawn four short vertical strokes. She had refused every suggestion for what the strokes meant. Four survivors, someone had said. Four copies, said someone else. Four ghosts. Four mistakes.
Xiulan had put down the charcoal before she used it on a person.
Lin Xue's husband stood in front of the board with the wooden hairpin cupped in both hands. He had been there long enough for the morning mist to dampen his shoulders.
"They cannot all be her."
Nobody answered immediately.
Tianhui sat on the shrine steps while Luo Pei checked the inside of his wrist. His first living channel pulsed under her fingers, faint and irregular. He had been awake since before dawn. Fu Lan had called that foolish. Lan Jue had called it medically unhelpful. Qiao Rui had asked whether ancient cultivators were allowed to sleep or whether they had simply made exhaustion prestigious. Tianhui had not found a good answer to any of them.
Tianhui studied the four marks.
"They may not all be the same person," he said.
Lin Xue's husband turned on him. "Which one is my wife?"
Tianhui could have listed the models already forming in his mind. Split continuities. Reconstructed echoes. Four separate people sharing one origin. One person reached through four incompatible relations. None of them would help the man holding the hairpin.
"I do not know."
The man's grip tightened around the hairpin.
Good, Feng Zhen's voice said inside his memory. You are learning the uses of disappointment. Tianhui ignored him.
Xiulan came down from the shrine with three sheets of salvaged paper. "We know what they said. We know where we heard them. We do not know what they are. So we start with what can be checked." Lan Jue took one sheet. "Separately." Xiulan nodded. "Agreed."
"No leading questions. No asking which one is real."
Xiulan's mouth tightened. "I had understood that part." Lan Jue studied her for a moment and let the matter go.
They moved into the shrine because the courtyard was already filling with families who wanted to know when their own missing would be searched for. Qiao Ming tried to organize turns. Grief ignored his system with great efficiency. Inside, Xiulan wrote five headings.
MEMORY.
BODY.
PLACE.
TIME.
WANT.
Tianhui watched the last word appear. Lin Xue's husband sat opposite her. "You should have written that one first." Xiulan nodded once. "Yes." They began with facts simple enough to be insulting. What did Lin Xue eat the morning before the rupture? Which roof had leaked last winter? Where had she hidden money from her husband? At that, the man objected.
"There was no hidden money."
Fu Lan, passing the doorway with a basket of broken tiles, stopped long enough to say, "Then you have learned something useful already." He stared after her.
One of the four Lin Xues remembered millet porridge and salted radish. Another remembered no breakfast because she had argued with her mother. A third remembered eating at Fu Lan's house. The fourth answered too faintly for them to be sure. The roof question was worse. Before they continued, Xiulan insisted on asking the fifth heading. WANT. The answers arrived separately. One Lin Xue wanted to see her husband. One wanted everyone to stop asking whether she remembered the correct village.
One wanted to know whether the road could be opened from her side. The faint fourth voice said only, "Find the others first."
Lin Xue's husband bent over the table. "Which one said she wanted to see me?"
Xiulan kept the page between them. "I know which voice said it. I am not naming her until all four have been heard."
"And you're not telling me."
"I am not letting familiarity decide before the women do."
He demanded to know why.
"Because you are already listening for one voice more than the others."
He stood so quickly the bench scraped stone. "She is my wife."
Xiulan forced herself not to soften it. "Maybe. That is exactly what we are trying to learn."
The uncertainty hurt him, and Xiulan refused to disguise it. She had spent years being told that certainty was kinder than doubt. It was not. Certainty merely chose who had to carry the doubt alone. Tianhui watched the man's hands close around the hairpin.
"You would tell me," he said to Tianhui.
"I would tell you what I knew," Tianhui said. "I would leave the rest unclaimed."
The man stared.
"I would tell you what I knew," Tianhui continued. "I do not know which answer would help you, and I do not trust myself to choose for that reason."
The anger remained, but the man no longer knew where to put it. Lin Xue's husband sat again. Xiulan wrote all four wants exactly as spoken. Only then did they continue. Two remembered the north roof being repaired in spring. One insisted it had never been damaged. One remembered a fire that nobody in real Hejingshui had seen. Tianhui asked when the fire happened. The answer came through the grain bowl in a whisper broken by static.
"Eight years ago."
Xiulan stopped writing. Even the noise from the courtyard seemed farther away. Eight years. The rupture had happened six days ago.
Lin Xue's husband made a sound through his nose as though refusing to breathe would make the number smaller. Tianhui reached for Branch-Sight by instinct. He stopped before opening it.
The urge remained. He had learned that refusing it once did not make refusal easier the second time. The mind remembered every door it had been denied. Lan Jue noticed his hand tightening on his knee. She said nothing. Xiulan turned the page.
"What happened during the fire?" she asked.
The Lin Xue who remembered it answered first.
"My father died."
In real Hejingshui, Lin Xue's father was alive and standing outside the shrine. Nobody moved for several breaths. Then someone in the courtyard began shouting. Qiao Ming opened the door.
A woman pushed past him carrying a child whose nose was bleeding. Frost had formed along the child's hairline, thin white circles that faded as they watched.
"The bell rang," the woman said. "Again."
The board had gained no new answer. But on the lower edge of the shrine bell, three circles of frost were forming around a broken line. Another signal. Another family.
Tianhui looked from the frost to the room where four versions of Lin Xue disagreed about eight years of history. The village had forty-one missing people.
One morning had turned a single missing woman into four incompatible histories. Outside, forty other names still had families waiting beneath the shrine roof. Tianhui already knew the question that would reach them next: why had Lin Xue been given so much time?