The sergeant's tent smelled of dust and boiled millet, a thin smoke curling from a battered brazier in the corner. Paper—fragile bamboo slips tied with hemp—lay stacked in impatient piles. The sergeant moved with the easy gait of someone accustomed to issuing orders rather than receiving them. He held power like a man holding a weapon: blunt, practical, and with no pretence of mercy.
He bowed as he entered, keeping his eyes low and his shoulders humble. The sergeant's gaze appraised him like a farmer checking a new ox. Then the man nodded, more to himself than to him, and tossed a thick bundle of slips onto the work table.
"You'll catalogue these," the sergeant said. "Names. Stores. Movement. If you make a mistake, you'll carry an extra slab tomorrow."
He set to work. The writing was crude and cramped—official shorthand, inventory marks, dates with strange calendrical notations. The slips told the camp's secret life: deliveries that came and went, rations tallied and accounted for, lists of newly arrived men. To an ordinary slave, these scratches were meaningless; to a man who had read ledgers and charts, they were a map.
He read until the ink blurred. Each line rearranged the landscape in his mind: where grain piled, when patrols rotated, which guards took extra rations, who reported direct to the overseer. He cross-referenced small clues—a mark denoting a chest held near the western post, a shorthand symbol for "iron" beside a delivery note. The sergeant watched him, lips pressed in a thin line, pleased at the quiet competence.
When the sergeant left, he lingered at the tent's flap, lowering his voice. "If you find anything odd, you tell me. Don't hide it. We take pride in order here."
He bowed again, and when the sergeant turned away he nearly laughed, but the sound would have been a knife in the wrong throat. Instead, he carried the bamboo slips to the outcrop in the deepening evening like a thief carrying a map to a buried prize.
The outcrop was cramped and smelled of stale sweat, but his small group pressed around the slips in the half-dark with the reverence of conspirators. Zhang Yong ran a finger over a mark and frowned. "There—iron chest near the western post, time-stamped two days ago. Says 'for tools,' but there's also a note 'possible weapons.'"
Hu's eyes hardened. "If true, that chest could arm two dozen men."
Chen spat softly. "If true. It may be bait. Guards love bait."
He folded the slips carefully. The system pulsed in his head like a calm heart.
[Quest Status: Infiltrate Supply Records — Progress 10%]
[Hint: Cross-reference delivery timestamps with patrol cycles.]
He cross-checked the slip timestamps against the patrol rota and the food deliveries. The pattern was a thin thread: the western post was inspected less often on the third day after deliveries, when the sergeant was distracted by the overseer's reports. That window—narrow and brittle—was a chance.
They moved at dusk. The camp's shadows were long and brittle; torches boomed like distant stars. He and Zhang slipped through the latrine's shadow while Hu and Chen kept watch near the ramp. Ming and the boy helped with small tasks: scattering a bit of straw to mask their footprints, nudging a sleeping guard's dog to the opposite side of the yard. Every action was minute and rehearsed.
The western post's chest sat beneath a crude lean-to, half-hidden behind sacks of grain. Two guards lounged nearby, one snoring, the other smoking and flicking ash. He swallowed and knelt, testing the chest's lock. The metal was coarse but not sturdy; the iron had been farmed from a distant supplier and then roughly hammered into a clasp. He breathed quietly and slipped a small tool he'd fashioned from bent metal into the mechanism. The lock gave with a whisper.
They moved like ghosts. Chen pried the lid; the smell of old oil and iron rose. Within, wrapped in hemp cloth, were short bronze blades—short swords used for close work—and a smattering of crude arrowheads. Not enough to arm an army, but enough to give a small cell teeth.
He felt the system's presence like a steady hand on his shoulder.
[Supply Cache Identified — Recommend Redistribution Strategy]
They filled two small sacks and replaced the rest with empty straw to hide their theft. For the moment, restraint was as important as daring; they would not take everything. If the chest were noticed missing entirely, it would be evidence of a raid, and the camp would tighten like a fist.
Back at the outcrop, the weapons were a revelation. The bronze glinted like a promise beneath the dim light. The boy's fingers trembled as he touched a short sword. Zhang checked the edges with the practical eye of a soldier and nodded approval.
"Enough to rig training," Zhang said. "Enough to teach the boy when he's old enough. Enough to give us an edge."
He tasted the possibility of power—small, concentrated, and dangerous. Each metal edge made them more than victims.
They spent the following days integrating tiny advantages into daily life. Hu, posted to the ramp tasks, would occasionally "find" a broken tool and quietly hand it to the boy to mend. Chen, assigned to granary checks, would quietly note slack screws in a crate and redirect guards' attention. Zhang began to lead whispered drills right after the sergeant left their section—shifting weight, closing ranks, moving as one.
As the training sharpened, the system gifted him a new ability—a small, private menu he could call Logistics Manager. Through it, he could track minor deliveries, assign men to discreet tasks, and flag suspicious items. It was not power in the imperial sense, but it was power over small things: movement, timing, and resource flow. And those small things accumulated.
The sergeant continued to use him, proud of the neat ledgers and improved efficiency. He praised him to the overseers with a rare glint of softness: "Li Wei knows numbers. He keeps us from wasting time." That praise was a blade disguised as kindness, but it also threw a thin shield around his cell; the sergeant's favor slowed the pace of suspicion.
Word spread in small, dangerous increments. Whispers of a "notable worker" and a "man the sergeant trusts" moved through the camp like rumors of rain. Men in corners looked at them differently—less like prey, more like a possibility. Some kept their distance; others edged nearer, drawn by the gleam of bronze and the murmur of coordination.
At night, when the camp settled into the thin quiet before the next day's grind, they trained as a unit. Formations that had once been words on a panel became muscle memory: raise, shift, pivot, hold. They practiced silent signals, the tilt of a chin, a foot shifted to indicate advance. They spoke of futures in corners in hushed, dangerous voices—landing spots on maps only they could read.
Everything still hinged on secrecy. One mistake—one careless boast, one misread rotation—could shred them. But the ledger slips had given them the first true advantage: knowledge. Knowledge became the seed from which strength would grow.
Under the indifferent bulk of the Great Wall, fingers closed around bronze and a plan took shape.
Teaser: He found weapons in the record's shadow—and with them, the first true advantage against a world that would bury them.