The days in Longzhou grew heavier.
Not colder. Not hotter. Just… heavier. As if the air itself pressed against my skin like wet cloth, too thick to breathe, too thin to call suffocation. My soldiers said nothing, but I could see it in their eyes. The stillness. The way they checked their shadows twice. The way even laughter from the locals sounded rehearsed.
It was the kind of fear that didn't scream—it waited.
I turned my attention to the records.
Zhou Fen handed me three ledgers: grain intake, distribution logs, and military requisitions.
They did not match.
Rice had supposedly arrived from the central provinces. But none had been stored in the granaries, nor distributed to the hungry. Entire entries were missing, dates crossed out and rewritten in a different hand. Someone had tried to patch it, but the cracks showed through.
I flipped another page.
An official seal had been forged—not well enough to fool me. And alongside it, a name appeared more than once:
Clerk Deng Yuan.
"Zhou," I said, setting the page aside, "how long has this clerk worked here?"
"Four years," she replied. "Appointed under the last regional magistrate."
"Where is he now?"
"In the registry hall," she said, pausing. "He never goes home. Sleeps behind the altar in the old temple across the canal. Says it keeps him 'clean.'"
I said nothing.
The next report came at noon.
One of the farmers' sons found a body near the collapsed irrigation channel west of the grain route. At first, they thought it was a drowned beggar. But the boy insisted he saw rats avoiding the corpse.
I rode out alone, taking only one soldier.
The hut was barely a ruin. Mold had overtaken the rafters. The roof sagged under its own shame. Inside, sprawled on the dirt floor, was what remained of Bao Zhen, a former logistics officer dismissed weeks ago.
His mouth had been stuffed with rice—blackened, clumped, half-molded.
His eyes were gone, but not hollowed. Just… missing, as if they'd never been there at all.
His hands were blackened, curled inwards like claws. The burns didn't spread to the arms. Only the hands, as though he had grasped something unspeakable and paid the price for touching it.
On the far wall of the hut, drawn faintly in charcoal, was a spiral.
At first, I thought it a child's doodle. But the lines were too perfect. Too smooth.
Deliberate.
The soldier beside me shifted uncomfortably.
"Highness…"
"Send for the city mortician," I said. "Tell them to document everything. I want every officer who worked with Bao Zhen questioned before nightfall."
"Yes, sir."
"And find Clerk Deng Yuan."
That evening, I waited.
The sun set like a dying ember behind Longzhou's crooked skyline. The wind carried the smell of mildew, rice ash, and burnt incense—though no temple bell had rung today.
I sat alone with Bao Zhen's personal ledger, recovered from his hut.
The ink was smudged and the cover half-eaten by moisture. But the inside was intact—too intact.
Dates crossed out. Rewritten again and again. Some entries scratched over entirely, only to reappear on later pages.
And then, near the back—one entry stood alone:
"They said it was hunger. But I know now: it feeds on more than grain."
The ink shifted.
I blinked.
Where once was empty margin, a sentence now stretched across the bottom of the page in thin, delicate hand:
"You are not the first prince to open the vault."
I stared at the line.
The candlelight flickered.
My breath slowed.
I looked at my palm.
A spiral of ink had appeared there—faint, almost like a burn—but vanished as soon as I touched it.
I shut the ledger
Zhou Fen entered not long after, her face pale.
"Clerk Deng Yuan has been brought to the garrison," she said. "He was found praying behind the altar of the sunken Bodhisattva statue. Said something about the 'grain remembering.'"
"And the other officers?"
"Nervous. Watching each other. Everyone is afraid to speak."
"Good," I said.
She frowned.
"Fear separates the guilty from the afraid."
I stood by the window long after she left.
Outside, Longzhou's lanterns flickered like dying stars.
And in the distance, near the broken eastern temple, I saw a circle of peasants kneeling silently, their backs to the moon, their hands clasped not in prayer—but in some twisted imitation of it.
Not to Heaven.
Not to the Court.
But to something else.