The engineers laid out Yun Cang’s diagram and the furnace-routing pages in a guarded room. Gu compared the handwriting and recording with his old copies.
“Yun tested a transformation pathway for destructive feedback,” he said. “The catalyst drawing is unfinished. It does not identify a chosen successor.”
Qinghe compared the diagram with Yan’s recorded experiments. The shapes matched, but the laboratory’s records were incomplete. They still needed the original Ashfall batch ledger and the final recording pages to verify how the catalyst had entered Yan’s medicine.
“We can’t rest the conclusion on resemblance,” she said.
Wei assigned a guard to the originals and asked the engineers to keep copies separate. Yan read the available notes himself, looking for a line that explained his awakening. The pages contained no prophecy or direct handoff. They described an experiment that remained unfinished when the committee shut it down.
Gu opened the cylinder log. Its missing minute could hold another clue, but there was no evidence that the recording had been deliberately cut. The spirit-glass had simply degraded.
“The Ashfall records may tell us what happened to the material after the committee seized it,” Gu said. “Until then, we have two ends of a chain, with the middle missing.”
