A Thousand Years of Half Badge

Zhao Wenyuan was already awake when the hour of the ox sank deep enough to feel endless. A half-finished embroidered mandarin square lay in his evidence box, and the cloth seemed to stare back at him like a face cut in two. He had spent seven years inside a rival school, smiling at men he did not trust and reporting to people he was no longer sure he served. That made him useful. It also made him hard to sleep beside. He could question a servant, read a brush mark, and spot a staged room in minutes, but he still flinched when a file matched the pocket-watch hidden under false paper. Each case gives him a clean answer on the surface and a worse one underneath. The worst part is that the clues...