The person Yuxing met at the corridor's end was another handler — the one whose job it was to clear the dead. He knew that Yuxing had made a copy of the storeroom key: soft wax impression, duplicate cast somewhere above. Yuxing wasn't certain how much evidence the man actually held, but it didn't matter. Every meeting, the man took something from him. Food. A sliver of medicinal compound. A tool gone missing. Yuxing kept feeding him because the alternative was being reported.
"His name," Pei Jin said. "Which section."
Yuxing told him.
The resolution took one day. The corpse-handler ran Corridor Three every night near dawn, consolidating the floor's dead for processing. One stretch of the corridor had no light — a broken fixture, unmaintained for months.
Pei Jin waited in the dark.
There was no struggle. No noise. The man barely had time to register there was someone in the corridor before he joined the bodies on his own cart, and was wheeled to the processing area along with them.
He went in alive. He did not come out.
The next morning, Yuxing tucked a jar wrapped in rough burlap under the edge of Pei Jin's bunk. Said nothing. Walked on.
Pei Jin waited for deep night, then retrieved it. He worked the red wax off with his thumbnail.
The smell arrived immediately — sharp, cloying, like fresh blood stirred into overripe fruit. Something that made the body want to step away from it.
He didn't step away.
He brought the mouth of the jar close and just breathed it in first, paying attention to what happened at the body's level. No nausea. A warmth in the throat. A faint resonance in the bones, like a string plucked lightly on an instrument you didn't know was in the room.
He tilted the jar and swallowed a mouthful.
It didn't burn going down. It was heavier than that — a flooding weight, the sensation of something pouring into every available space in him, finding the gaps and filling them the way water finds stone.
He drank the rest.
Then he sat and waited.
After roughly half an incense stick's time had passed, he was not dead.
The compound was being processed — not expelled, converted. He could feel it being broken down into something dry and dense and directed inward, pressured against his skeleton. The mass of char-dark substance in his core began to expand. Not burning hotter — compressing further. Growing denser. He felt the increase in his own weight, a gram-by-gram accretion, as if he were slowly becoming more difficult to move.
Then the pain arrived.
Deep-marrow pain, blunt and total, the kind that doesn't cut — it saturates. It occupied every channel of sensation without leaving room for anything else. He pressed his palm flat against the bunk and pushed down and waited for it to pass.
It passed before dawn.
He stood. Held his balance for a moment. Felt the floor under his feet in a way that was different from yesterday — more contact, more grip, like he had grown another layer between himself and the stone.
Across the room, the young man with the burned arm turned over in his sleep and opened one eye. Looked at Pei Jin without curiosity. Looked away.
Pei Jin crushed the clay jar in his hand, worked the pieces into the rubble in the corner, and lay back down.