The centipede lowered its head and went in.

The feed dimmed for a heartbeat as the lens passed under the rim of skin. The bug moved with the rhythm of Han Ying’s breathing. In on the exhale, holding on the inhale. The cavity narrowed and widened around it like a slow lung of its own. Past the rim came the sinus, pale and wet, the walls a thin red where the lamp-light filtered through the bone.

Mira drew a translucent skeleton over the feed and marked a point of soft tissue at the back of the right cavity, just behind the bridge of the skull. The centipede climbed three more body-lengths and anchored where she had marked. Mandibles bit gently into the pliant flesh. The carapace folded down against the wall.

[ Anchored. ]

’Disgusting.’

The elder stirred. The arm across his eyes shifted. His free hand rose to his face and scratched the outside of his right nostril with the absent two-finger drag of a man half-asleep, the gesture old, automatic, almost mindless. Then he felt it.

His Qi turned inward, a slow, patient probe, the morning habit of a Foundation Establishment elder out of decades of practice. It moved up the throat, into the cavity, past the bridge. It touched the place where the bug had anchored. It read the firmness, the temperature, the small humming presence. It read Lin Xuan.

The bond did its work. The centipede lodged inside the elder’s body as if it had always been there, dressed in a Qi signature that his own system recognised as native. The probe paused, considered, found nothing to flag, and withdrew. Han Ying frowned in his half-sleep. Something at the back of his head insisted that something was wrong. His Qi insisted that nothing was wrong. The argument lasted three breaths.

[ Now. Push the order. Tell him this is a normal morning. He gets up, drinks his water, starts his day. ]

Lin Xuan pressed the thought down the bond.

This is a normal morning.

The order travelled. Inside the elder’s skull, the centipede shifted a fraction. Han Ying inhaled long, exhaled long, and the frown faded out of him as if someone had wiped it off with a cloth. He pushed the arm off his eyes, propped himself up on an elbow, swung his legs over the edge of the cot, and stood. The bug watched him pour water from the basin into a clay cup and drink it. He did not think about his nose again.

[ Confirmed. The bond is stable. When you are back at Skyedge, you can move him from a thousand kilometres as easily as from here. Distance does not weaken what we built. Look at the feed when you have time. For now, we walk east. ]

Lin Xuan let his head rest against the cold rock at his back, breathed out for the count of five, and pushed himself up onto his feet.

He took two days to come home. The feed lived in the corner of his vision the whole way, small, dim, blinking. He looked at it twice. The first time, Han Ying was at a wooden desk reading something with a brush in his hand. The second time, the elder was eating porridge with a man Mira did not yet recognise. He filed the face away. The centipede was patient. So was Mira.

He came in through the side gate at dawn on the second morning, hood up, no announcement, and went straight to his quarters without crossing the yard. He locked the door behind him.

Lian had cleared the desk, refilled the inkstone, and laid three sheets of heavy paper flat under a stone weight, two brushes in a row beside them. He pulled his outer robe off, took the cushion, and reached for the inkstick.

[ Ready when you are. The insect walked us through every gallery on the third level on the way to Han Ying. We have all three levels at full resolution. There is nothing in this mine we do not now know. ]

He let himself smile at that.

He started with the first level. Mira projected the layout into the centre of his vision, line for line, scale calibrated to the dimensions of the sheet. He ground the inkstick. He wet the brush. He drew.

The brush moved with the patience of a man who had practiced calligraphy under his father since he was nine. Galleries first, bold strokes for the main passages, thinner for the secondary tunnels. Ventilation shafts in dotted lines. Guard positions inked as small black circles, with arrows showing rotation directions where they applied. Ore-cart paths in faint grey. The boundary of the western palisade as a frame around the whole.

The first level closed at midmorning. He drank from the cup of water Lian had left outside the door without knocking, and laid out the second sheet.

Second level was the same work at greater depth. Drainage shafts received their own annotations. The spirit ore vein that ran along the eastern wall got a heavier stroke, marked with the character his father would recognise. Two abandoned galleries went in dashed grey. The cross where the night guards congregated for their smoking breaks went in as a circle within a circle, his small private joke to himself.

By midday, the third sheet was under his hand.

This was the map nobody else had. Galleries that had not been on any record of the Lin family since Blood Fang had walked in. The chamber of Han Ying at the southern end, marked with a cross. The corridor feeding into it. A buried water source Mira had flagged as a possible escape route, drawn in a thin blue line. A forge the bug had passed where two demonic cultivators had been working on something he could not yet name. He marked that one with a question.

When he laid the brush down, the sun had climbed past the line where afternoon began. His back ached. His fingers were stained.

Three sheets. Three perfect maps. Nothing in the mine that had not been seen by either his eyes or the eyes of a horror anchored inside an elder’s skull.

[ Beautiful work. ]

’Beautiful work indeed.’

He rolled each sheet around a slim wooden core, tied each with a strip of red cord, and stacked the three rolls along the inside of his forearm. He pulled his outer robe back on, ran a hand once through his hair, and walked out to find his father.