Ena spread the catalog slips across the chamber table. She had searched for references to a future user of Yun Cang’s catalyst, a lineage, or any instruction about where the sample should go. The surviving records listed experiments, containment, and transfers between offices. None named Yan.
Daro found no sealed prophecy among the adjacent pages. There was only an inventory gap and a warning that the sample’s properties were unknown. He read the notice aloud, then compared its handwriting with the transfer index.
Ena took the catalog slips one by one and arranged them by date. The earliest described a trial on a single practitioner. The next described a contained sample. Later entries tracked its movement between offices. None used a name for a future user or connected the research to a family line.
“The warning is the clearest note about what they knew,” she said. “The sample’s properties were unknown when this entry was made.”
Muo asked whether the line had been added before or after confiscation. Ena could not tell. The ink matched the catalog hand, not the author’s writing. Daro marked that distinction in his copy.
“A blank space is not proof that no one wrote about a recipient somewhere else,” Qinghe said. “It means the pages we searched do not name one.”
