The gong sounded, once, from somewhere below the training yards.
Zhenan's Qi snapped tight in his core.
Then again, closer, the note rolling through stone like a knock from inside the walls.
He was on his feet before the second strike finished echoing. His body moved first; thought followed only to keep up.
He didn't ask what happened. He didn't need to. In Black Lotus, alarms meant only a few things, and none of them waited.
A River Blue runner met him at the stair mouth, eyes wide, breath torn. His thin, frantic Qi jolted against Zhenan's steadier flow.
"Senior Ascendant Su…"
"Where?" Zhenan asked.
"In the underground southern corridors. The lock. Someone…"
Zhenan was already moving past him.
The stairwell dropped like a throat, stone growing colder with every level.
Black Lotus did not sit above Yunzhong like a watchtower the way Jade Wind did; it sank into the city's stone. The smell changed too, less incense, more wet rope and old ink, as if the docks and the paperwork that ruled them had seeped into the stone.
Above, guild charters and Ministry seals pretended to keep order. Below, the Hall did. When the Ministry of War invoked a Writ of Enforcement, Black Lotus "borrowed" whatever the city couldn't refuse. Keys, gates, men. On paper it was temporary. In practice, it lasted as long as fear did.
Men poured down the steps ahead of him. Black sashes, heavy boots, the kind Yunzhong learnt to fear by sound alone. There were some women among the runners and clerks, trained and sharp, but the bodies sent to catch, bind, and drag were almost always male. The city liked force to look like a man. Black Lotus didn't correct that mistake. It fed on it.
The runner stumbled after him, trying to keep up. "He hit the latch guard and slipped the chain. He's fast. He got hold of a knife."
"Who is he?" Zhenan asked.
"I don't know him," the runner said. "He came in on a late intake. They said he was dockside. He wasn't on our roster."
Not on our roster, Zhenan repeated in his head, feeling his Qi prickle under his ribs. There were many kinds of "not on our roster" in Black Lotus, and most of them ended behind doors nobody named.
They reached the southern corridor. Torchlight flared. Every footstep bounced back at them, doubled and sharpened.
Ahead, running feet. A chain clink. Someone cursed.
The corridor turned. A man came into view at the far end of the passage. His hair was loose and his wrists still marked by rope burn.
A prisoner. Definitely not one of Zhenan's.
That was the problem. He should have felt relieved. He didn't.
Zhenan didn't draw his duan dao yet. In tight places, distance mattered more than steel. The river quarter where he'd grown up had taught him distance before any master taught him forms.
The prisoner's eyes flicked once and then he lunged sideways. A River Blue disciple was half a step too slow. The prisoner seized him by the collar and dragged him back, a stolen blade flashing up near the boy's throat.
"Back," the prisoner rasped, spitting the word as if it burned. "Back or I cut him, I cut him and you will have to explain it."
The man's Qi pulsed like a cornered animal, spiked and trembling, every surge a plea and a threat tangled together.
A guard tossed a hook without thinking. Another man grabbed a stone.
Idiots, Zhenan thought. In a corridor this narrow, you only needed one bad throw to kill your own.
"Lower that," he said, his voice calm enough that it sounded bored.
He slowed, let his breath settle. If he ran in straight, the boy died. If he came in wrong, he would be forced to cut fast and bloody. And that would be its own kind of failure.
The hostage's eyes were wide above the prisoner's forearm, and they were fixed on Zhenan with the ugly relief of a junior who believed rank was the same thing as safety.
"Don't come closer," the prisoner rasped. His voice was raw from hours without water. "I don't want to kill him. I just want out."
Out, Zhenan thought, and the word tasted like a story that never ended well. He felt, briefly and against his will, the urge to want that word to mean something different. His Qi tugged but he kept his face blank because pity was a scent men could follow.
The prisoner jerked his head toward the darker end of the corridor.
"Open it," he demanded, and when no one moved for him, his fear sharpened into desperation. "Open it now. You want blood on your stones?"
"If you cut him, you still do not get past me," Zhenan said. "If you let him go, you might live long enough to regret running."
The prisoner barked a laugh that cracked halfway through, and Zhenan heard the thinness under it, the way a man laughed when he was trying to convince himself he was not already lost.
For a moment, the corridor held still.
Then the prisoner's eyes flicked to the nearest torch, and Zhenan saw the choice forming.
He moved before it finished.
His duan dao came free in a short, clean draw. His Qi channelled down his arm in one clean line, guiding the blade. It did not swing for flesh. Instead, it angled in under the prisoner's wrist, caught the tendon line with controlled pressure, and turned the man's grip into pain without turning it into death.
The prisoner shouted, his arm loosening on instinct, and Zhenan stepped into the space that opened, shouldering the hostage away with a firm, practiced shove that sent the boy stumbling back into the hands of the guards. Alive.
The prisoner tried to bolt the moment the hostage was gone, and Zhenan's chain snapped out in a low, controlled arc that skimmed the stone and caught the man's ankle. He went down hard, and Zhenan was already there. He sat astride the man's back in a low, balanced crouch; one hand trapped the man's arm behind him, the other pressed him flat until the fight drained out of him in ragged, panicked breaths.
What if one day it's a familiar face. He felt the thought form and strangled it before it could turn into anything softer.
Around them, the corridor filled with running feet. Lower disciples poured in, trying to look like the kind of men Black Lotus rewarded. They rushed the prisoner with rope and cuffs, voices too loud.
Zhenan kept his grip steady until the man was bound. Then he stood and stepped back, letting the others take over.
The prisoner spat blood and shook his head like an animal refusing a halter. His eyes flicked up and down the corridor as if looking for a door that would open for him.
None did.
A new set of footsteps approached, and the crowd parted on instinct.
Mo Cang, another Senior Ascendant, stepped into the torchlight like a blade being unsheathed. His Qi brushed the corridor like a blade hidden in silk. His Crimson Red sash, same as Zhenan's, was perfectly tied, his hair was perfectly bound, and his eyes held that controlled brightness that came from sleeping too little and believing too much in it.
He took in the scene fast: the dropped knife, the River Blue boy still shaking, the prisoner bound on the floor and the nine-section chain still tied to his ankle and Zhenan standing clean in the middle of it.
For an instant the warmth in his expression was almost convincing, until Zhenan felt the pressure behind it, the old resentment that never fully cooled. Senior Ascendant Mo Cang had trained him, broken him into discipline, and now he had to live with the fact that Zhenan had outgrown the hand that shaped him.
"You could have let the boy bleed a little," Mo Cang said, still quiet. "Fear teaches faster than kindness."
Zhenan's reply came evenly. "Dead juniors don't learn." He kept his Qi deliberately flat, the way he'd learned to do around men who wanted to read turbulence in him.
Mo Cang's mouth tightened.
"A junior who freezes when steel touches him is a liability," he said. "A lesson costs less than a funeral."
The words were doctrine. Mo Cang had always needed the Hall to be right. He had always needed the rules to justify what he wanted. But lately, he seemed to want something more.
Zhenan's eyes stayed on the prisoner. "Fear is already doing its job. He'll learn."
Mo Cang crouched in front of the prisoner, slow, as if he had all night.
"Do you have family in Yunzhong?" he asked the man. His Qi pressed outward in a tight, hungry coil.
The prisoner flinched, and the flinch was answer enough.
Mo Cang's smile did not widen, but it settled, as if something inside him had steadied. "Then you will stop running," he said. "And you will stay quiet."
Zhenan felt the familiar pull of disgust rise in his gut.
Before he could speak, another presence, heavier, arrived, and the corridor's torchlight seemed to dull under it.
It was a Night Seat. Yu Cang's Qi hit the corridor like cold water poured over hot iron. Damping. Swallowing. Wrong. He wore a Night Silver sash. Not quite grey; more like the sheen of a blade in the dark. His eyes had that wrong emptiness that Zhenan had learnt to notice over the years, the look of someone who had gone away strong and returned quieter.
Zhenan's own Qi recoiled on instinct before he forced it still.
Mo Cang's chin lifted a fraction, the smallest salute.
Night Seat Yu's gaze flicked once to him, then to Zhenan, then away as if they were both already filed in his head.
"This one comes with me," he said. He did not raise his voice.
Zhenan inclined his head. He did not argue. Arguing was how young men died in this compound. And he intended to stay alive.
Night Seat Yu gestured once, and the masked men hauled the prisoner upright. The bound man struggled, then went still when he saw where they were taking him.
As the prisoner was dragged toward the stairwell that fell into darkness, Zhenan caught the last look the man threw back; not at Mo Cang, not at the guards, but at him, as if he were the last person in the corridor who still resembled a human choice.
Zhenan held the look without flinching. His Qi shifted in his chest, a compressed ache that felt too much like shame trying to surface.
He crushed it ruthlessly. He could not afford to do anything else.
He told himself, as he had told himself a hundred times, that standing at the edge of the machine was not the same as feeding it, and that his duty was to keep order, not to ask where order went when it disappeared underground.
Distance was discipline. Distance was survival.
The lie settled into place almost neatly.
Almost.