No parade. No mission briefing, just ladders, shopping lists, and the smell of old wood.
Festival prep day.
Translation: fix the small leaks before they learn your name.
Mesh at sunrise. Anchors: supply depot, main hall, river gate, neighborhood sub-shrines. Kunou ran the board like she was born doing it. Sitri split crews and time blocks. Tsubaki walked clipboards into compliance. Rias did "public face" so well the elders pressed extra oranges on her. Dragon volunteered for "heavy things" and immediately found the heaviest bell.
Ren took my loop—tool pouch, volunteer sash, breath low.
"Checklist?" I asked.
"Frayed shimenawa, cracked ema pegs, bell ropes, points where the road forgets it's sacred," he recited.
"Plus one," I said. "Anything that hums and shouldn't."
He nodded. Hibird went full foreman. Roll patrolled ankles, sparking like a quiet fuse only wards could see.
First leak: the river gate. Someone had hung coin-charms on the downstream side—cute copper fishes that skimmed intentions off anyone who passed. Harmless if you like turning prayers into spreadsheet cells.
Ren touched one with knuckle and thumb, breathed through the fold, and flipped the note. The skim became static. We bagged twenty, flagged the post: city maintenance—do not rehang. A jogger's shoulders dropped and he didn't know why.
Second: ema wall at a pocket shrine. The wish boards sang too bright—ink thick with push, answer me now. Good way to burn the ear off any god listening.
Sky Crown drew the geometry in thin gold. I didn't pull. I smoothed. Ren reset the pegs, spaced the boards, wiped three with salt water and a soft "not today." The wall stopped yelling and went back to listening.
The audit thread skimmed the roofline. Present? Yes. Interference? Preventative. Hostility? Find a hobby. It moved on.
Bell ropes next. Real ones, not souvenir jingle. One had a new core: nylon braided with a wire so fine it tasted like nothing. The strike note rang clean to human ears. To wards, it rang open and record.
"Listening bell," Ren said, quiet.
"Mm," I said. "Find the ear."
He traced the wire down the beam, under a bracket cap, into a charm the size of a postage stamp tucked where dust pretends to be emptiness. The charm paired to something offsite. Not a gate—just a log.
"Vendor?" he asked.
"Contractor with a handler," I said.
We didn't cut. We caged. I let Cloud sheath the charm like lacquer—pressure without crush. Ren threaded Mist through the rope core and reversed the pairing from send to sing to yourself. The bell still rang for worshippers. The charm rang for no one. I wrote a note on the cap in tiny bureaucrat: inspected—see ward office.
Kunou arrived as if she'd heard the bell from across the district. She read the cap, made a noise that means I will make phone calls, and smiled at Ren like he'd just aced a test.
"Next," I said.
We walked the neighborhood line. A corner shop had a threshold ward written in a blog font—pretty, wrong. Tsubaki arrived with vinegar water and a proper brush. The owner apologized to the air. The ward corrected its posture.
Dragon discovered a portable shrine practice frame and offered to "spot." We spotted him not touching it. Rias thanked the grandmas who were absolutely running this block. Sitri swapped two time slots so a delivery truck wouldn't argue with a parade rehearsal. A teacher lost her voice and found it again over tea someone didn't charge for.
Midday brought the quiet trick: a stack of folded paper "festival cranes" with a fold I recognized from yesterday's arcade—pins that make crowds re-arrange themselves. Cute, if you like losing children.
Ren palmed the stack, inverted the lead fold with a breath, and swapped them at the booth for blank paper with a bow that said your niece is smart in auntie body language. The stallkeeper nodded like she'd just remembered her niece is smart. We put the bad stack in the compost box.
Two o'clock, the big temple's side hall. The bell there is a proper thing—old bronze, deep voice, dust that smells like winter. Its rope was clean. Its beam was not.
A second wire, finer than the first. This one ended in a slip of lacquered wood tucked into a carpenter's notch. When the bell rang, the slip wrote down the shape of the ring—ward signature, boundary breath, city pulse. Collect enough pulses, you get a map. Add yesterday's beacons, you get a net.
"Careful," I said.
Ren exhaled down his spine. Mist first—soften the edges. Cloud second—close the fist without squeezing. The slip sighed. We eased it free and slid a wooden plug in its place that said nothing to hear in a language only thresholds know.
I handed the slip to Kunou in an envelope labeled return to sender with commentary. She grinned like a fox with a citation pad.
Heaven's thread lingered this time. Sky Crown chimed present; bounded; not yours. The thread let go. Somewhere a scribe wrote non-hostile anomaly continues to do our job for us and went to lunch.
Evening prep bled into golden hour. Lanterns tested their throats. The streets shifted from logistics to anticipation. Kids practiced clapping on two and four and missed anyway. Ren's posture loosened by a millimeter; he'd been carrying the day like a tray and hadn't spilled.
"Did we overcorrect?" he asked.
"There's no such thing if no one notices," I said.
He thought about that like it tasted better than it sounded.
We closed our loop. Bell notes rang true. Ropes felt like rope. The river gate stopped trying to skim. The ema wall hummed low and polite. Kunou filed three complaints and six thank-yous. Sitri sent tomorrow's schedule and it didn't fight back. Tsubaki checked her list and found nothing left on it; she looked suspicious until a grandma bullied her into taking a rice ball.
Dragon almost rang the big bell "just to hear it"—and then didn't. Progress.
We walked the last hundred meters in the quiet a city gives you when you've earned it.
No headlines. No hero kids with props. No angels with clipboards needing signatures.
Just bells that told the truth and boundaries that minded themselves.
Guardian work, keep the bells honest.