Wei’s report confirmed that Wuchen remained alive in the Registry hall under guard. The broken brush and open ledger had been separated and sealed as evidence. The guards kept him in a room with medical care, away from the command panel.
Qinghe stood beside Yan at the furnace. “No one moves the records until the provincial copy team arrives,” she said. “They need to compare the originals with the station copies.”
Yan kept the physical anchor while Gu disconnected another old population line. The ledger could no longer send orders through the severed nodes, but it still held the records of the obligations. Qinghe directed the engineers to preserve the pages while disabling the coercive contact strips.
A runner brought the command copies from the hall. They listed Wuchen’s orders to reconnect unsafe stations, with times and local readings written beside them. Gu recognized the format he had helped design. He identified which copper strips corresponded to each command, but did not handle the pages until the clerk recorded their arrival.
He signed the evidence receipt and gave one copy to the archive clerk. The second copy remained with the engineers, who needed its strip numbers for the isolation work. The original ledger stayed sealed in the Registry hall.
