The smell of blood has layers.
Iron reaches the nose first, followed by something sweet that borders on rot, and then a third scent with no name.
It reminds a person that the body is only a vessel, and that the vessel has holes.
Yuan sat on the overturned table in the middle of his ruined hut, clutching his wounded arm with his other hand to slow the bleeding.
Three men lay on the floor before him.
Two groaned so quietly that their voices were barely audible.
The third, the man with the trimmed beard, breathed slowly with his eyes half-open.
The candle had gone out during the fight, and Yuan had not lit another.
The only light came through a crack in the wall, cold and gray.
Kill them, the Soldier said from the depths of his consciousness, his voice weary.
Three bodies disappear in a single night, and no one asks questions.
You know where things are buried.
“I know.”
Then why are you waiting?
Because corpses did not talk, Yuan thought.
Three bodies found in the hut of a man their employers described as “a simple adviser” would be far worse than three living prisoners presented as evidence.
The living were evidence.
The dead were problems.
But that was only one side of the calculation.
The other was no less serious.
These men had seen what he could do.
They had seen his speed and watched him read their intentions before their hands even moved.
If they fell into Lin Shui’s hands and she questioned them with her usual patience, they might reveal details that could not be allowed to leave their mouths.
Two of them saw nothing but direct strikes, the Hunter said in his new voice, unlike any of the others.
The third saw everything.
The decision settled into place.
The two would go to Lin Shui, with enough evidence to be useful.
The third would belong to him.
Yuan rose heavily and secured the wound with a strip of cloth torn from his damaged shirt.
He closed the two inner doors he had opened during the fight without even realizing it, then summoned the Soldier one final time, keeping his focus narrow and controlled rather than allowing it to surge.
One precise strike to the back of the bearded man’s neck.
The man lost consciousness completely.
He did not die.
By dawn, the hut had regained its outward calm.
It no longer looked like a place that had been broken into, but like the home of a man who had simply fallen asleep in his clothes.
Yuan sent the servant girl to his contact in the market with a message of three words.
Before sunrise, a coal cart was moving slowly toward the middle walls, pulled by an old ox and driven by the blacksmith’s boy.
The two wounded men were hidden beneath sacks of coal and covered by loose pieces of wood.
The cart passed the soup stall.
The old man glanced at it from the corner of his eye and saw the blacksmith’s boy driving it at an hour when no one carried coal through the district.
He returned to his pot and stirred the soup without a word.
A cart like that attracted no attention.
At that hour, every cart carried coal, vegetables, or things no one wanted to know about beneath its cover.
As for the third man, Yuan carried him himself over his shoulder, passing through alleys he knew by the soles of his feet rather than by sight, until he reached the old grain warehouse.
The same place that had once been He Long’s first stage.
He lowered the man into the small cellar beneath the floor, where damaged sacks of wheat lay forgotten.
He bound him, closed the wooden door above him, and left.
It was the longest journey Yuan had ever made while his arm was still bleeding.
By noon, after properly bandaging the wound and changing into clean clothes, Yuan met Lin Shui.
“You were the target of an assassination attempt last night.”
He said it without preamble after they had seated themselves alone in the same small house.
The bare tree outside the window was still trembling in the wind.
“Three professional attackers.
One of them said, before losing consciousness, that they were from the Shen Family.”
Lin Shui’s eyes widened.
Yuan saw something in them that he had never seen before.
Genuine shock, without a mask.
“Shen?” she repeated, tasting the name.
“This quickly?
It’s only been a few days since we discovered their network.”
“That’s what concerns me.”
“Because that means…”
“They have an eye inside your family.
One fast enough to learn that I’m the source, then move within days.”
She fell silent.
Yuan watched her expression shift from shock into something heavier and more precise: the unease of someone skilled in the art of suspicion.
If the Shen Family had an eye inside the intelligence branch, then some portion of the work she had spent years building might already be exposed.
“I have the two wounded men in a safe place,” Yuan said.
“I’ll hand them over to you in a way that makes it look like a routine arrest carried out by your network, not the discovery of an attack against me.”
Lin Shui looked at him with newfound appreciation.
Even in a crisis that threatened his own life, his mind had not stopped calculating how the story should be told.
Days later, the internal investigation began.
Lin Shui told no one where the information had come from.
“Routine security suspicions,” she told everyone before closing the door.
At the same time, for the first time without hesitation, she asked Yuan to use his network in the outer district to search for any other trace of the Shen Family: local intermediaries, watchers, anything.
Yuan accepted without showing that what she had just asked him to do was exactly what he had already wanted to do.
There was something satisfying about being officially assigned to do what he would have done in secret anyway.
The following week, he found the thread.
A small merchant in the outer district sold copper tools and purchased very little himself.
Once every two weeks, he received an odd-looking stranger who did not appear to belong to the district or to any great family.
The stranger paid him unusually well for small, seemingly worthless pieces of information.
Who had entered the market.
What someone had bought.
Which caravan had been delayed.
Things that meant nothing individually.
But when placed together, they formed a precise picture of the Ming Family’s commercial movements.
Yuan sent the servant girl and three of his intermediaries, not to confront the man, but simply to watch.
One glance from here.
Another from there.
Until the picture came together.
The stranger was staying at a small inn on the edge of the district, disguised as an ordinary traveling merchant.
But one night, the servant girl returned and said in a low voice,
“He doesn’t drink tea like a merchant.
He turns the cup in his hand before lifting it, so he can see what’s behind him in the reflection.”
A professional, then.
Yuan considered breaking into the inn or capturing the man himself.
Then he rejected the idea.
He did not know the man’s level, nor what traps he might be carrying.
Any confrontation of this kind needed more resources and protection than Yuan possessed.
And the greatest resource he had was Lin Shui.
He decided to pass the information to her the following day.
But the man was gone the next day.
The servant girl returned at dawn, her face pale.
“The inn is empty.
He left everything behind?
No.
He took everything that belonged to him.
He didn’t leave a trace.
Not a cup, not a scrap of cloth, not even half a piece of bread.”
As though he had never been there.
That afternoon, Yuan sat in his hut and turned the matter over in his mind for as long as he could.
Either he was cautious by nature and changed locations regularly, Yuan thought.
That was what professionals did.
Or someone had warned him that he was being watched.
And if that was the case, the leak had not ended.
It was deeper than he had thought.
An enemy who runs with that much precision isn’t prey, Yuan.
It was the Hunter who spoke this time.
His tone was completely different from every other voice.
No Merchant’s mockery.
No Soldier’s anger.
No Craftsman’s obsession.
Just a short sentence, dry as a blade.
He’s another hunter.
He’s watching you just as closely as you’re watching him.
Perhaps more closely.
Yuan did not answer.
For the first time since arriving in this city, he felt that he might be facing someone who was more intelligent than he was, not merely stronger.
He raised his eyes toward the mud wall, where he had drawn a red question mark above the three names.
Then, a familiar appetite returned to his thoughts.
Then I’ll raise my game.