Registrar Bao stayed in Pinebrook longer than anyone expected, working through stacks of old tax rolls and settlement counts at a table Gu Chen had set up for him inside the meeting hall. Xu Yuan kept coming back to watch, more than once, pulled by curiosity and by the growing, uncomfortable feeling that Bao's paperwork and his own buried disc were two threads of the same rope.
"You keep coming by," Bao observed one afternoon, not looking up from a ledger old enough that its pages had gone brittle at the edges. "Most young men your age would rather be anywhere else than watching an old man squint at numbers."
"I'm interested in the gap. The missing century."
"So am I. That makes two of us in this entire province, as far as I can tell." Bao finally looked up, rubbing his eyes. "Would you like to know something strange? I've cross-referenced eleven different regional archives now, going back as far as records exist. The gap is consistent everywhere I look. Same missing century, give or take a decade for how far each region's records actually reach back that far."
"That's not a local event, then."
"No. Whatever caused it happened across the entire province, possibly further. Uniformly. Which is the part that troubles me most." Bao set down his brush. "A famine spreads unevenly. Some villages weather it better than others, depending on stores, on rainfall, on luck. A war leaves scattered evidence — burned granaries here, empty garrisons there. This is neither. It's too clean. Too complete."
"Erased," Xu Yuan said, echoing the word the unnamed officer had used weeks ago.
Bao didn't flinch from it the way Gu Chen had. "That's the word I keep circling back to as well, though I've been reluctant to write it in my official report. A word like that invites questions I don't yet have answers for, and questions without answers make careers difficult in the Capital."
"But you think it's true."
"I think," Bao said, "that something removed an entire century's worth of settlements from both the world and its records, thoroughly enough that four hundred years later, most people have no idea it ever happened. And I think whatever did that is either gone now, in which case we're simply archaeologists picking through old wreckage—" He paused, and for a moment his usual composure slipped. "Or it isn't gone. In which case Eastern Watch Fortress and everything since has been the same thing happening again, and this time we're standing close enough to watch it happen instead of finding the aftermath four centuries later."
The cold that had been sitting low in Xu Yuan's stomach since Bao's first mention of the gap sank a little further.
"Which do you think it is?"
Bao was quiet for a long moment, looking at the ledger in front of him without really seeing it. "I've spent thirty years reading records for the Capital. I've learned that history rarely repeats by coincidence. When the same pattern shows up twice, four hundred years apart, it usually means the same cause is still out there, in no rush at all between meals."
The word landed harder than Xu Yuan expected. He thought of the corrupted clearing, of the animals lying undisturbed and undecayed, of the single vast eye that had opened once in the depths of the mountains and looked at him the way something enormous looks at an ant it hasn't decided is worth the effort of noticing properly yet.
"Have you told Gu Chen this?"
"I've told him the numbers. He can draw his own conclusions from them, same as you're drawing yours." Bao picked his brush back up. "My job is the ledgers, not the theories. Theories get people killed when they're wrong and get archivists dismissed when they're right and inconvenient. I'll leave the conclusions to men with swords."
Xu Yuan didn't have anything to say to that. He sat with the registrar a while longer, watching him work through pages that held, in dry columns of numbers, the same story Xu Yuan had been piecing together with a shovel and a notebook.
He told Mei Lin everything that evening, sitting by the river where they'd fallen into the habit of ending most days now. She listened without interrupting, the way she always did when something mattered enough to earn her full attention.
"The same thing happening again," she said finally. "Four hundred years apart."
"That's what Bao thinks."
"Do you believe him?"
Xu Yuan thought about the disc still wrapped in cloth at the bottom of his pack, about Old Han's five generations of half-understood signs, about the ancient eye that had watched him without malice and without any hurry at all.
"Yes," he said. "I do."
Mei Lin was quiet for a while, watching the water. "Then we're not just uncovering history. We're standing in the middle of it happening again."
"I think we might be."
"That's not a comfortable thought."
"No." He picked up a flat stone and turned it over without throwing it, the same habit he'd fallen into whenever his hands needed something to do while his mind worked. "But I'd rather know it and be afraid than not know it and be caught the way Eastern Watch Fortress was caught. Nobody there saw it coming either. That's half of why it worked."
Mei Lin reached over and took the stone from his hand, gently, and threw it herself — a clean, low skip that carried three bounces across the darkening water before it sank.
"Then we keep finding things," she said. "One shovel-full at a time, if that's what it takes."
Xu Yuan looked at her and felt some part of the dread from the last hour let go. "We."
"You didn't think I was just going to card wool forever, did you?" She almost smiled. "I've got nothing left to protect where I came from. I might as well help protect what's still standing here."