The central plaza of Jianghai at the edge of evening had the kind of slow polite crowd that only existed in the first ten days of a launch — players who had not yet learned to move through public space with the elbows-out efficiency of a leveling-game's second month, who walked, instead, in the slower curving arcs of people in a real city on a real night, willing to stop in the middle of an open square to look up at a pre-rendered moon and to feel, briefly, like tourists.
I came up the south stair into the plaza at seven-twenty in-game with an Iron-Sole boot heel slightly out of step from the other because I had been on the train back from Suzhou IRL until five-thirty and had logged in at six and had eaten, in real time, half a baozi from the engineering courtyard's late stand on my walk back to the dorm, and the baozi was sitting low and warm in my IRL stomach in a way that the helmet's cradle band was reading as a small irregular heart-rate pattern that the system had noted and dismissed.
I had a quest to turn in. *A Lantern in the Hollow* — escort scribe, completed yesterday with Wanqing — paid out at the temple's lower window, but the bonus reward (eighty silver, plus a small silk-bound chapbook of holdable in-game lore) was only redeemable at a specific NPC scribe who stood at the south fountain of the Jianghai central plaza between sundown and second bell, which in launch-week dilation worked out to about an in-game hour beginning roughly now.
I came up the stair with the bond icon dim — Wanqing was logged out, doing her programming lab assignment, and would not be back in until ten — and crossed the plaza at an unhurried walk toward the fountain.
The fountain was the same stylized stone-sword fountain at the center of the plaza that I had seen on day one. The water sheeted down the blade. The stone-sword caught the launch-evening light with a faint silver sheen that the artists had clearly enjoyed. Around the fountain's circular base were arranged, this evening, perhaps forty or fifty players in idle clusters of two and three. The plaza criers were down to one. The two NPC vendors at opposite corners — an old auntie selling skewered meat and a teenage boy selling cold tea — were both running their pre-recorded barks in tinny call-and-response.
I bought a meat skewer from the auntie. Three copper.
I had not bought a meat skewer in old timeline. I had, in old timeline, been too cheap to spend three coppers on the small auntie's skewer because three coppers had been a meaningful unit of starter-week wealth. New timeline I had four silver and a faint persistent need to feel the skewer's wooden stick between my fingers because Wanqing had said the auntie's skewers were lying skewers and I wanted, briefly, to disagree with her.
The skewer was savory. It was also restorative — three HP regen on a single bite, the small system-tick scrolling along my UI at the moment I bit. The auntie had not, in fact, been lying. The auntie had been delivering exactly the skewer the system had promised. I was going to mock Wanqing about this.
I started to circle the fountain, looking for the scribe.
I found her, instead, on the third arc of my circle — not the scribe.
She was standing alone on the western lip of the fountain basin with her back partly to me, in an ankle-length pale white robe with a faint cold-blue trim along the hem and the cuffs, and her hair was unbraided down her back, white-pale in the launch-evening light. She was leaning very slightly forward with one hand on the rim of the basin. She was watching the water sheet down the sword.
I had seen her on day two, at this same fountain, at distance, in a launch-evening crowd, and had walked past without stopping. Tonight the plaza was quieter. Tonight she was alone at the fountain. Tonight she was, again, three weeks earlier than my old timeline memory of her, and the second sighting in three days was the unmistakable system-message that the new timeline was accelerating Bai Yueran's appearance into the launch zone for reasons that I could speculate about but that I would not, for the moment, allow myself to fully think through.
I did not approach.
I stood at the eastern arc of the fountain basin, behind a small cluster of three Lv 5 swordsmen who were arguing in low voices about a guild invite, and I ate my meat skewer slowly. I watched her in the way I had spent five years watching things I could not afford to watch directly — at the very edge of the eye, with the full body of the avatar turned a precise eighteen degrees off her bearing, with the head angled down toward the cobblestones and the gaze lifted just enough to catch her shape in the upper-left of the visual frame.
She had the avatar's hair down. She had not had the avatar's hair down on day two; on day two she had worn it in a small high ponytail. The down-hair was, I knew from old timeline, the cosmetic option she would settle into permanently in roughly a month and a half. She was three weeks ahead of her cosmetic schedule too.
She was not doing anything. She was looking at the water.
The pre-rendered moon over Jianghai had risen above the eastern rooftops. The launch-week artists had given Jianghai's moon a particular pale silver-gold sheen with a faint suggestion of cloud across the lower limb, and the moon's light caught the line of her throat where the white robe's collar opened a finger's width, and the launch-evening lanterns along the plaza's edge added a warmer counter-light along the same line, and the whole effect was — was, I let myself note as a fact, with the small detached registration of a man who had once paid for a very expensive in-game art-book that had included a feature on the launch-week atmosphere render — extremely deliberate.
She was, even more than three weeks earlier than expected, exactly the version of herself that the game would later catalogue as *Server Goddess.*
I kept eating the meat skewer.
The cluster of three Lv 5 swordsmen in front of me dispersed; the argument about the guild invite had resolved unfavorably for two of them, and they walked off in opposite directions, leaving me with a clean line of sight across the basin to her.
She did not see me.
She would not see me. She was looking at the water. She had no reason to look across the basin at the eastern arc; the eastern arc held no NPC of interest to her, and any player she might have wanted to message she could have messaged from her UI without looking up. She was alone at the fountain because she had come alone, and she was looking at the water because the artists' fountain was beautiful at this hour, and she was a freshman finance major from Suzhou with a brand-new helmet who had logged in alone on a Saturday evening to look at a fountain.
A second figure entered her arc.
The figure was a player, male, mid-twenties, in a pale grey tunic with a small black-and-red guild crest at the right shoulder. The crest was the Tianxia outer-recruit mark with the third stroke — outer-circle, low-tier, but verified. The figure was Lv 14 by the small numeric tag floating above his head. He had the small confident lean of a man who knew, at this distance from the basin's western lip, that the woman in the white robe at the fountain's edge would not see him until he had closed the last six meters between them.
He approached her at a casual angle.
Bai Yueran straightened a fraction. She turned her head. The launch-evening lanterns caught the line of the throat differently as it moved.
I kept eating the meat skewer. I held my eyes at a precise eighteen-degree off-bearing. The cradle band against my IRL ribcage logged the small sustained climb in my heart rate that the system had no context for and was not equipped to investigate.
The Tianxia man stopped a meter from her. His mouth moved. The pass-through at this distance carried his voice as a faint insufficient buzz; I could not hear the words. I did not need to hear the words. The body language was textbook outer-circle proposition: a small respectful tilt of the chin that nevertheless settled the hips at a fractionally aggressive angle, a hand half-lifted in greeting that did not, quite, retract.
Bai Yueran's reply was very brief. She did not turn her body. She did not move her hand from the basin rim. She said two or three syllables and shook her head a precise half-inch.
The Tianxia man took a step forward. His hand finished its small lift. He set it, lightly, on her arm.
He set it on her arm.
I had been watching at a precise eighteen-degree off-bearing. The off-bearing collapsed.
I turned my body a precise twelve degrees toward her without intending to. The longsword's pommel, which I had been resting my left hand on while eating the skewer with my right, took a small unconscious pressure under my left palm. The cradle band against my ribcage took a second sustained climb that the system, this time, flagged with a small soft warning chime in my UI advising me to take a thirty-second breath cycle.
Bai Yueran did not, however, need me. She stepped back. She stepped back precisely one foot, with the small unhurried economy of a woman who had been raised to manage a hand on her arm without losing composure, and the Tianxia man's hand fell off her arm because the arm was no longer where the hand had been. The whole exchange took perhaps three-quarters of a second. The Tianxia man's face did not change. His head did not tilt. The fingers of his lifted hand curled, fractionally, in the half-second after they lost contact with her sleeve.
Then he lowered the hand.
He spoke again. Three or four syllables. He gave her a small mocking half-bow. He turned and walked, not hurriedly, away from the basin's western lip across the plaza toward the south stair.
He passed within twenty meters of the eastern arc where I was standing.
I read his name as he passed.
*Hu Liansheng — Tianxia Coalition (Outer Verified).*
I logged the name, in my head, in the precise small handwriting that the To Bury notebook used. Hu Liansheng. Outer Verified. Lv 14. The face was unfamiliar. The face was not a face from old timeline. He was a third- or fourth-string figure in the Tianxia organization who, in old timeline, had been entirely beneath my notice. He was, tonight, the man who had put a hand on Bai Yueran's arm.
He cleared the south stair and was gone.
I did not move from the eastern arc.
Bai Yueran stood at the western lip for perhaps another twenty seconds. She did not turn around. She did not look across the basin. She did not, anywhere in her body language, acknowledge that anyone in the plaza had seen the small exchange. She finished looking at the water. She straightened. She brushed nothing off her sleeve. She turned, very gracefully, and walked toward the north stair with the white robe lifting a finger's width with the motion.
She passed within fifteen meters of the eastern arc.
She did not see me.
She would not have seen me even if she had looked at me. I was Lv 11. I was, in her present perception, the kind of Lv 11 swordsman in a beggar's tunic who was eating a meat skewer at the fountain in the launch-evening crowd, and there was no element of my visible profile that would have meant anything to her. She had no friend named Bladeless. She had a friend, in old timeline, named Bladeless in the third year of the game; she had had a friend, in this timeline, who had sent her a brief private message at sunrise three days ago that she had not received a reply to.
She walked up the north stair and was gone.
I finished the meat skewer.
The auntie at the meat-skewer stand, twelve meters away, called her tinny pre-recorded bark again into the launch-evening crowd: *savory and restorative.*
I dropped the wooden stick into the small in-game bin beside the auntie's stand. I bowed half an inch to her, which earned the small +1 reputation tick I had been meaning to harvest. I crossed the plaza along the eastern arc and went to the temple's lower window and turned in the *Lantern in the Hollow* bonus to the scribe NPC — a stooped young man in a dark robe — and received eighty silver and the small silk-bound chapbook.
I did not open the chapbook.
I closed the inventory. I crossed back across the plaza to the south stair and started down it. The launch-evening lanterns flickered as the artists' atmospheric program shifted toward its full-night palette.
At the bottom of the stair I stopped. I stood there for one full breath with the longsword's pommel still under my left hand and the small warm wooden ghost of the meat skewer in my right hand and the chat scroll on my UI quiet and the bond icon dim and the cradle band against my ribcage logging the slow descent of my heart rate back toward resting.
I opened the To Bury notebook. The notebook was inside my jacket inside the dorm in Hangzhou; it did not exist in the in-game world; I opened it in my head, because the discipline of writing the name down in my head was the discipline of writing the name down.
*Hu Liansheng — Outer Verified — Lv 14 — fountain, hand on arm. Tianlong Server.*
Below it I added a small caveat.
*Don't kill yet. He is not the trail; he is the fingerprint of the trail. Watch where his money comes from. Watch who he reports to. The hand on the arm was scripted by someone above him who wanted to see how she would react. He was a probe. The probe is the new information. The probe is the thing.*
I closed the notebook in my head.
I crossed the lower plaza and turned east toward the gate that would take me to the night-grind grasslands where I had two more hours of Crescent Moon mastery clean-up before bed.
Behind me, in the far distance somewhere along the north stair, an NPC bell sounded the second-bell hour. The launch-evening was officially night.
I did not look back at the fountain. I had not, on day two, looked back. I had not, on day three from the temple steps, replied to her DM. I would not, tonight, look back.
But I would, at some point in the next three weeks, find Hu Liansheng on a quiet stretch of road and I would have a small private conversation with him about which of his fingers he could afford to lose first.
I tightened my grip, very lightly, on the meat skewer's wooden stick that I had not yet thrown away after all, and I walked toward the gate.
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