The Assembly Hall was a cavern of cold benches and ink. Lantern soot smudged the ribs of the ceiling. Every breath tasted faintly of stamp wax. Layered bell peals rolled the length of the chamber, each strike flattening talk into a low hush, then letting it rise again like surf.
Officials took their places in measured sequence: scribe, rules-officer, hearing judge, sector clerks. Proctors wheeled a steel cart down the center aisle. The cart's wheels ticked over seams in the flagstones, a clinical sound. Inside the sealed evidence tray lay the second die, the dispatch slip, the micro-shim—three objects under clear glass, three cords tied to the same hand.
The Assembly Call hung on the side board in clean, heavy strokes. The ink was still black-wet. A clerk dusted it with sand, lifted the sheet, and pinned it above the dais. The grains crackled under his fingernails. A faint tang of metal from the cart laced the room.
Qin Ye walked in beneath the twin banners. The room's noise pressed toward him, then compresssed, as if the air itself had learned to hold its breath.
He paused at the entrance plaque. Bronze, cold, its roster letters worn smooth where generations had traced them.
[Daily Sign-In available.]
[Location: Bronze Roster Plaque.]
[Sign-In? Yes / No]
Yes.
[Ding! Sign-In successful!]
[Reward: Assembly Thread (Lv.1, 25 breaths — compress signal/voice cues in crowds; boost clause-citation timing) + Nameplate Mark (1 use — register a provisional designation for an item/mark during session).]
The hall's roar cinched tight, strands of talk spooling into low cords he could step between. The clerk's quill scratch. The proctor's shoe heel. The small, fatal cough of a man three benches up. All of it separated cleanly. His breath slid into place: four, four, two.
A senior clerk rang a table bell. The board on the west wall flipped on brass hinges. Letters marched into view.
Final Integration Trial — Squad Assignment Posting Imminent.
Format: Squads of three.
Field: Master Floor & Service Corridors.
Note: Procedural Scores weighted in Inner Gate exam consideration.
A murmur broke like wind through winter reeds. Qin Ye felt it skim past his jaw. Scores mattered today. Everything he had done with stamps and clauses and cold edges would count here, not in the quiet of a back room but in the grade that decided the door ahead.
A He-line representative rose. The man's robes were precise, the white of his collar a blade. "The matter of the unknown symbol," he said, voice pitched to carry, "is technical. I move it be referred to a closed technical board for classification."
The words struck the room and spread. Closed. Technical. The kind of motion meant to fold trouble inside cloth where hands could do what eyes could not.
Qin Ye turned his face half a notch. The Assembly Thread tightened. The noise thinned to a channel he could speak through.
"Clause 3.8," he said. No preface. No softening. "Any mark affecting trial apparatus is subject to public disclosure in open session."
His breath counted itself. Four, four.
"Clause 4.2," he added, each number carried by the bell's aftertone. "Public index parity prohibits sequestering newly registered symbols."
The rules-officer's eyes dropped to the compendium. His finger ran the page. The scribe's seal hovered.
Stamp.
The head official nodded once. "Motion denied. The symbol remains in open session."
Wax thudded onto paper. A corner of the hall exhaled relief; another sharpened to anger. The cart wheels hummed again. The glass lid fogged for a heartbeat where a proctor's breath touched it, then cleared over the second die's face.
A clerk rose with a ledger open at the index page. "Registry item requires designation," he said, looking not at the panel but square at the crowd. "How shall the unknown symbol be listed?"
Qin Ye stepped forward one pace. The Nameplate Mark warmed against his palm.
"Provisional designation," he said. "Null Crest. Status: under audit."
A designation slip bit out of a side printer with a quick, hot rasp. Sand sprinkled. The clerk's stamp fell heavy. Above the dais, the public index mirror board flickered. Where there had been a blank dash, a word wrote itself in law-black: Null Crest.
The murmur changed color. Naming made it real. Real demanded rules. Rules demanded logs.
"The prior registration," the rules-officer offered, too mild, "was likely a system backfill. A glitch."
"Request Device Witness and ledger echo at time of registration," Qin Ye said, the Assembly Thread drawing his words into a straight line.
A proctor touched a switch. The hall's central screen woke. Grainy, then clean. A login pane, user field masked by a perfect bar of em dash: — . A cursor blinked. It ticked once. Twice. The registry window wrote a single line. The bell above the dais pealed mid-stroke and the recording froze on the precise frame where the index changed.
He didn't look away. "Play once more," he said.
It ran again, and every mechanical cough of the system aligned with every mechanical bell in the hall, a machine folding into a machine. Then he closed his hand on the only tool that mattered next.
He opened the procedural cache the hearing had given him. Two choices rose like stamps held above a ledger: Live Ledger Bind. Cross-Pane Registry Echo.
He chose the first.
A clamp icon snapped shut over the Null Crest entry. The edit glyph greyed out. On the mirror board, a dark border drew itself around the index line and held. Any finger that tried to move it would meet metal.
[Ding! Micro-Goal: "Fix the Crest in Record."]
[Reward: +250,000 Spirit Stones; Proctors: Reputation +1 (situational).]
The scribe's head moved half an inch in approval. A proctor coughed into his sleeve and didn't bother to hide the smile in his eyes.
The He-line representative tried again, smaller. "Ink-dry delay," he said. "Designation should not promulgate until—"
"Immediate promulgation under Public Signal," Qin Ye said, not louder, just cleaner. "Clause 2.3."
Stamp.
The null crest sat in the index with its new name, and the hall felt the difference like air after rain.
The board to the west flipped a second time. Names slotted into the grid.
Squad 7 — Qin Ye / Lin Xiu / Yue Hong.
Route nodes: Master Floor Audit Room → Service Corridor 3 → Supply Rooms 2F-East / Annex → Final Gate.
Sound shifted. Surprise here, satisfaction there. A low, dry laugh from someone who loved disasters. Qin Ye's jaw didn't move.
At the back rail, He Rulong stepped sideways into sight. He did not look down at the board, only out over the room, still as an unstruck bell. "Watch the angles," he said, and the words fell like chalk into a map.
Yue Hong was already moving. "Squad leader," he told the nearest marshal, tone clean as a cut, "warrants priority path selection. It preserves flow."
"Route parity requires simultaneous node access for all squad members," Qin Ye said. "Clause 5.4."
The marshal didn't look up. The stamp fell. "Parity confirmed."
Yue Hong's mouth held half a smile, no heat in it. He filed the moment in some inner ledger. Qin Ye shifted a boot's width. Lin Xiu answered the adjustment without looking, a twin heel set at the same angle, a breath caught and released on two. For three steps they were a metronome behind two bodies, Shadow Duet Step done as quietly as the turning of a page.
The scribe called for the evidence tray. The glass top lifted under two seals and three witnesses. The second die's metal face caught a rag of light, throwing it back as a dull, even wash. The dispatch slip lay with its corner bent, a small detail the first clerk had missed; the micro-shim nestled like a seed beside it. The room was a garden where seeds grew into orders.
"Registry confirms"—the rules-officer read, quill tip wet—"Null Crest provisionally designated; index entry bound for session duration; apparatus under audit."
A junior clerk sidled two steps toward the cart. His hand began a tidy gesture toward the tray's rim—straighten the glass, square the corners, harmless motion. The Lot Beacon wasn't here; the hall didn't care about lots. But the Device Witness over the dais did.
"Hands off the apparatus," the head proctor said, not unkindly. "We are done touching things we think are tidy."
A ripple of brittle laughter, quickly swallowed.
The west board snapped again. "Final Integration Trial — Squad Assembly in sixty minutes," the header read. Under it: Master Floor route icons pulsed to amber; corridor lines traced. Where the route UI printed the session header, the symbol label now traveled with it—Null Crest—black as a brand.
A He-line aide raised his hand, not at Qin Ye but at the panel. "Silent registration is explained," he said. "System backfill. The mask means nothing."
"Live Ledger Bind removes the mask's shelter," the rules-officer answered, voice thin but official now that the lock sat. "Session holds."
The scribe stamped, each blow a small, square certainty.
A clerk came running with a stack of fresh docket sheets. The paper edges were warm from the roller. He set them in a neat column on the proctors' table, then peeled the top one off and fed it into the header press. The press hissed. The iron smelled like bloodless heat.
Before the docket slid forward, Qin Ye allowed himself one clean inhale. The Assembly Thread eased its grip; the hall's moan swelled back, bigger now that the parts had places to go.
On the dais, the scribe lifted a hand. "One more matter," he said. "Public index parity requires the crest's designation appear on today's field dockets."
It did. The header inked the name with a clarity that claimed the paper the way a foot claims a stone. Null Crest. The crest without crest. The sign for what the room had finally admitted to seeing.
Yue Hong stepped in closer than he needed to. His voice did not rise. "You like laws," he said, and it might have been praise. "Let us see how they run."
Lin Xiu's fingers flexed once against her wrap. Her gaze stayed on the route nodes, pupils the size of cut pepper seeds. Qin Ye said nothing. The warnings were gone; the work remained.
In the third row, someone tried a last procedural itch. "Delay the route posting until the ink dries," he suggested to no one that mattered.
"The ink dries while you move," the head official said, stamping the docket. "That is the point of a day like this."
Proctors lifted the evidence tray for return to custody. The glass fogged and cleared over the second die. The micro-shim did not roll. The dispatch slip's bent corner stayed bent, exactly as a bent corner should when three men and two seals have agreed to what it means.
At the hall's edge, a bell rope twitched. The amber lamps shivered and settled deeper into color. The doors on the east gallery were thrown wide and the corridor beyond inhaled the Assembly's smell of paper and law.
The docket spat from the press and slid along its track to the take-up shelf. The header wore the crest's new name like a declared edge.
[Ding! Side Quest updated: Trace the Hand (Silent registrar bound; route includes suspect nodes).]
[Ding! Main Quest updated — Final Integration Trial: begins in one hour.]
The clerk lifted the docket. A line of ink in the header bled thin and dark through the words Null Crest, as if the name itself had cut the page.