Chapter 97: The Division's Offer

Dr. Lian was shorter than Lin Feng had expected.

He'd built a picture from Gao Jun's descriptions and the monitoring sensors' template data—the four-year field director of the research division's Barrens observation program, the administrator who'd maintained a field team in the western settlement for three years, the woman who sent precise and measured relay messages and asked Gao Jun to pass information along without editorial. The template data read a practitioner of significant capability, cultivation above the regional average, the formation-frequency signature of someone who'd been in field conditions long enough that the field had become her resting state.

She was forty years old and moved like someone who'd spent thirty of them outdoors. She climbed down Hub Fourteen-Northeast's ladder behind her four field practitioners with the economy of someone who'd climbed many ladders and considered none of them remarkable.

She looked at the hub—the single pillar, the workbench, the stone walls—with the thoroughness of a practitioner doing a rapid assessment. Not dramatic. A professional reading a space.

"Smaller than Seven-West," she said.

"Yes." Lin Feng stood near the diagnostic platform. He hadn't planned a formal positioning, but the platform's amber light behind him was unavoidable and she'd read the geometry either way.

Her four practitioners arranged themselves near the workshop entrance without instruction. Not aggression—the particular deployment of a field team that knew its role in these conversations was to be present rather than active. The overlay on each of their templates ran at low output: monitoring, not analyzing.

"The eastern ruin," Gao Jun said to her, handling the bridge between the monitoring data and the conversation.

"Six practitioners extracted. Two collector guards neutralized—not killed, restrained. The captives are being transferred to the division's secure care facility in the eastern administrative district." She was still taking in the hub, the attention distributed between the conversation and the assessment. "The collectors' hybrid architecture was less sophisticated than the three who came to Seven-West. Cai's A-team doesn't sit on guard duty."

"His A-team was at Seven-West," Lin Feng said.

"And reported back to him that you'd already left. Which gave him your general capability and told him you weren't willing to fight for equipment." She looked at him directly for the first time since she'd come down the ladder. The assessment she'd been running on the room was now running on him. "He'll revise his model. You weren't protecting the station. You were protecting yourself and your development."

"Which is accurate."

"Which tells him you're in a growth phase and prefer to avoid direct conflict. That your template isn't ready for what direct conflict with the Archive would require." She paused. "Is he right?"

Lin Feng considered the template at fifty-nine point eight percent efficiency, climbing back toward the integration baseline. The single pillar's most recent passive scan. The two days of reserve burn from yesterday's overreach, not yet fully recovered.

"Not entirely," he said.

"Cai Zhong is a careful man. He builds models before he acts. He's had months to build a model of what you are and what you'll do." She moved to the workbench—not taking the space, just putting it between her and the door, the natural placement of someone who preferred to have walls behind her in unfamiliar locations. "The thing his model didn't account for is us working together. His intelligence on the division says we've been trying to access the conduit network for eleven years and failing. He doesn't know you changed that."

Lin Feng waited.

"What I'm offering," Dr. Lian said, "is straightforward. The division's institutional intelligence on Cai Zhong's network—everything we've built over eleven years, all three collection point locations, Wei Sen's identification and last-known position, the logistics of Cai's operation in the Linfeng region. Field support: my four practitioners here, and I can have eight more from the settlement within eighteen hours. Logistics and secure communications for a coordinated operation." She paused. "What I'm asking for is straightforward. Access to the monitoring data you're pulling from the mortal realm's conduit infrastructure. Shared protocol for the routing sense data—I want my analysts running their tools against what you read through the grid. And after the operation: the division's formal research engagement with the network's infrastructure. Your cooperation in teaching what you know about the direct conduit interface."

There it was.

Eleven years of failed access to the conduit grid, and the division saw what Lin Feng had done in five weeks and wanted it. Not Lin Feng specifically—the research engagement, the protocol, the data. The grid itself, with the division's analytical tools sitting on top of what his routing sense provided.

He filed this next to what Gao Jun had told him about the division's interest in Hub Seven-West. The research division wanted the infrastructure. The Archive wanted the extracted practitioner capability. The two organizations were different instruments playing the same note.

"Gao Jun," he said.

The analyst had been standing in his usual position at the workbench, the rod spinning at the medium pace of processing rather than stress. He looked at Lin Feng.

"Your assessment," Lin Feng said. "Of what she's offering."

Gao Jun looked at Dr. Lian, then back. The move was careful. "The intelligence is genuine. The division's file on Cai Zhong is the most comprehensive operational picture of his network that exists. Wei Sen's position—the last monitoring update places him at the third collection point in the Linfeng region, eighteen hours ago." He paused. "The field practitioners she's offering are competent. I've worked alongside most of them in the field. They do what they're told."

"And what she's asking for."

"The research engagement is what I'd expect." The rod steadied. "The division has spent three centuries developing expertise in pre-Abandonment infrastructure without being able to interface with it directly. What you can do is worth more to the division's research mission than any other discovery in that period." He let that sit for a moment, then added: "I work for the division. This is the part where you factor that in."

Dr. Lian glanced at the analyst with something that Lin Feng's template-reading interpreted as a brief recalibration. Gao Jun had just disclosed his conflict of interest without being asked. The move wasn't in her anticipated script.

"Your practitioner," she said to Lin Feng, "is unusually honest for an institutional analyst."

"He's been in the field for four years," Lin Feng said. "It does that to people."

She almost smiled. Not quite.

"The twenty-eight people from my village," Lin Feng said. "Where are they?"

Her expression changed. The professional assessment remained, but something adjusted in the register of the conversation. "The two collection points our intelligence places in the Linfeng region—beyond the eastern ruin you already accessed—have an estimated forty to sixty practitioners in custody. We don't have individual identification. We don't know if your specific villagers are there."

"But you know where the collection points are."

"We know where they were, eighteen hours ago. Cai's operation moves captives when it senses threat. The eastern ruin extraction will have triggered a response. He'll be moving his people."

"How fast."

"Forty-eight hours. Maximum. After that, the captives are redistributed through his network's broader infrastructure, and finding them requires a much larger operation than what we're discussing." She looked at him steadily. "Forty-eight hours means we act now or the window closes."

Forty-eight hours.

Lin Feng looked at the single amber pillar. His template at fifty-nine point eight. His efficiency had been at sixty-one point one before yesterday's overreach. Not yet recovered.

He looked at Gao Jun. The analyst's rod was still, the flat-palm assessment position. Waiting to be told which way to walk.

"Yes," Lin Feng said.

Dr. Lian nodded once, as if she'd expected this and had found that expectation confirmed rather than surprising. She turned to her four field practitioners. "Relay the operation's preliminary phase to the settlement team. I want the eight additional practitioners here in twelve hours. Tell them to come through the Barrens approach, not the mortal realm access—I don't want Cai's monitoring triggers flagging movement near the collection points before we're in position."

The practitioners moved.

Lin Feng reached into the conduit grid and found Wei Sen's formation-frequency signature.

The third collection point—a former-sect ruin in the northeastern portion of Linfeng County, the edge of his extended routing range—was twenty-three hours old in the monitoring data. Old enough to be uncertain. But the formation-frequency markers of Wei Sen's hybrid architecture were distinct in the substrate: the signature of someone who had once been close to supervisor-class capability before extraction, the particular configuration of an able practitioner rebuilt around absence.

He was there. In the third ruin. Managing the operation, receiving Cai's instruction, deciding how to respond to the eastern ruin's extraction.

Making decisions that determined where twenty-eight people went next.

"I need twelve hours," Lin Feng said.

"For?"

"Template recovery. I burned reserves yesterday. If I go into a direct confrontation at fifty-nine percent, the outcome is uncertain." He paused. "I need sixty-one percent. Twelve hours will get there."

Dr. Lian looked at his template output through whatever monitoring her field-class cultivation provided. "And at sixty-one percent?"

"The outcome is less uncertain."

She accepted this without pressing for specifics. The move of someone who'd been doing field work long enough to understand that practitioners' self-assessments of their own thresholds were usually more accurate than external analysis.

"Twelve hours," she said. "Then we move."

Lin Feng sat on the diagnostic platform and let the integration resume.

Gao Jun poured tea—warm this time, the water recently boiled—and set a cup at the edge of the platform without comment. Then he went back to the workbench and began coordinating the logistics of what they were building.

The substrate held Old Ghost's resonance in its background state—the thin, constant field of the First Operator's ten-thousand-year conversion, present wherever the conduit lines reached. Not comment. Not instruction.

Present.

He let the template integrate and let the twelve hours run.