Story Background
The Burned Page
Three days ago, the mountain-defense array fluctuated at the western training grounds, scorching a page of the ledger being checked there. The junior sister newly assigned to Zhao Heng's patrol group was on duty. She picked up the half-burned sheet beside a practice post and recognized her own name; the words ‘next activation’ and ‘one year’ were still legible beside it.
She placed the sheet on Zhao Heng's desk and pointed to the line. ‘Why me?’
Zhao Heng was responsible for patrolling the array and checking its ledger after each activation. Every ordinary activation or fluctuation took one future year from one registered disciple. She was next, though no year had yet been taken from her. During several emergencies, he had used his chief-disciple authority to move deductions onto himself—twenty-three years in all. That authority let him bear another person's deduction in an emergency; it did not let him erase a registered name.
Zhao Heng showed her the transfers he had made. She looked through them, one hand still resting on the scorched sheet. ‘You did change this ledger. Did you put my name here too?’
The Array Must Hold
The junior sister would not rely solely on the ledger keeper's explanation. At dawn the next day, she asked Zhao Heng to take her back to the western training grounds: she wanted to see why an array that consumed lives could not be stopped. He needed to inspect the recent fluctuation, so he went with her.
In the snow, he checked the runes on an array pillar. The mountain-defense array still held the yaochao, the demon tide, beyond the sect walls; destroy it, and the sect would lose its shield. If a major assault forced repeated activations, the ledger would record a separate deduction each time.
Zhao Heng had searched for seven years and had only one promising replacement design, still unproven. He had also found signs that the elders might already know the array's cost. He dared not stop the old array without a working replacement. But now the person at risk was a junior sister from his own patrol group, and he could not promise she would be safe at the next activation.
Zhao Heng did not ask her to give up the burned page. ‘You have reason to doubt me,’ he said. ‘I changed the ledger. The entries are still there. If you want to find out why your name is next, start with the transfers I made.’
