Ch. 007| We'll Handle It

October 24, 21:30.

Ren Yi walked home. On the way she wore no earphones, no wrist terminal either—the wrist terminal was still on her desk; she hadn't picked it up before leaving.

Downstairs in the apartment, mailbox No. 305. Empty. She went up, opened the door, stepped inside, didn't take off her shoes right away—first walked to the desk and bent down to look it over: nine sheets of white paper, the watermark at the foot of the letter, the muji booklet, the fountain pen, the Moleskine notebook.

Not a single sheet had moved. Not a single thing was missing.

She sat down in the chair, did nothing, just sat and looked at the broken ring resting where it was on the second sheet of white paper, looked at it for maybe ten minutes.

She thought of the lit window on the third floor. She thought of the one she couldn't remember whether she'd closed.

She didn't go back to check.

---

October 25, 06:42.

She woke. The fifth time.

She lay there for a minute, confirmed she was awake, and only then got out of bed. She didn't look at the desk first—she'd already looked the night before. She went to the kitchen, made coffee, toasted bread, sat down to eat.

When she finished, something occurred to her—she usually took the previous night's kitchen scraps down to the bin downstairs, the thing she did at a fixed 07:30 before heading out. Now she was holding the trash bag, opening the entryway door.

She'd just opened the door when she noticed something.

On the gap of her apartment's front door, there was a strand of hair.

It hadn't fallen there at random. She had a habit—when leaving, she'd pull a strand of hair from her own head and lay it horizontally along the lower edge of the door gap, near the inner side of the frame, roughly 30 centimeters off the floor. If someone had opened the door, that strand would be disturbed, would fall, or shift position.

She remembered placing it every day. She'd been doing this for a year now (maybe longer—she genuinely couldn't remember when it had started).

Now that strand of hair was not in its original spot. It had moved from the lower edge of the gap to the middle of the gap—roughly 60 centimeters off the floor.

It hadn't fallen. Its position had changed by 30 centimeters.

---

Ren Yi stood in the entryway for about a minute, holding the trash bag, looking at that strand of hair.

Someone had opened her door. Maybe last night after she'd fallen asleep, maybe this morning while she was eating breakfast. She didn't know who, didn't know what they'd come in to look at, didn't know whether they'd taken anything.

She backed inside, shut the door, put the trash bag back in the kitchen, and walked through every room once more—the desk, the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom, the closet, the iron box under the desk. She checked the iron box especially—the position of that 2060 group photo from Wankou matched where she'd put it back the night before.

Everything was in its place. She had no way to confirm whether the other party had taken something, or hadn't taken anything at all and had only come in to look.

She sat back down at the desk. She wanted to write the seventh entry in the muji booklet—"the hair on the front-door gap, wrong position this morning." But she stopped.

The habit of "placing a hair"—she couldn't even remember when it had started—was the same kind as the third muji entry, "lock the office drawer." If even the habit itself might not be something she'd actually ever had, then "wrong position" wasn't valid evidence.

She needed external evidence.

---

10:00, she went downstairs. She wanted to check the mailbox again, even though she normally wouldn't check at this hour.

Mailbox No. 305, opened—there was something inside.

Not an advertisement, not any routine bill.

It was a cream-colored heavy-paper envelope, the three characters For Ren Yi written in brush ink, no postmark, no sender. Same paper stock as the one from 10/15.

She didn't open it. She went upstairs, came inside, shut the door, sat back down at the desk, and looked at the front-door gap again—that strand of hair was still lodged at the 60-centimeter mark, hadn't fallen. She opened the letter.

Same paper—blue-green sheen, fibers running in irregular directions. The handwriting was the same too—her own.

Student Ren Yi,

The Academy saw your record of GR-1857-A last night. That is a low-risk residual echo we have already filed; it will not harm you. You do not need to write it into your internship log, and you should not mention it to anyone within the museum system.

But the sixth muji entry you wrote—"I am being watched"—that judgment is correct. The 19:00 visitor was not sent by us. We are looking into it as well.

Please take personal leave next week. Starting today, for at least two weeks, do not enter the museum, do not go to the Greek vase hall, do not touch any artifact replicas. Tell your supervisor it's a cold; no further explanation is needed.

We'll handle it.

We will contact you about the next step.

— S

At the foot of the letter, in the same position as the first one, was a watermark of the broken ring. With a fine pencil, Ren Yi lightly marked a small point 1 centimeter outside the break, as a baseline. The time was 10:14.

She closed the letter.

---

"S" should be Sekhet.

She needed to confirm three things.

Sekhet knew that the sixth muji entry said "I am being watched"—that booklet had only been written last night, kept on the desk in her home, seen by no one. Either it was the person who'd been inside her home that morning, or Sekhet could somehow read what she wrote. The Academy confirmed the old woman was not sent by them; they were looking into it too; a third party existed. The prohibition at the foot of the letter extended to the entire museum.

She sat for a moment. The old woman wasn't one of the Academy's people—then who was she?

In the car on 10/22, Sekhet had hinted, "later you'll know," "it'll be read out by others."

"Others." That old woman was one of the "others" Sekhet had mentioned then.

---

Was she really going to take leave as the letter instructed?

She decided to do it—which didn't mean she trusted the Academy. The Academy had just proven that it knew the contents of paper records she'd written on the desk in her own home. It was because the danger of the 19:00 old woman was something she knew nothing about, and the Academy had at least pointed out one direction; if she kept going to work at the museum, she might run into the old woman a second time in the Greek vase hall.

In the short term, the Academy was a little more predictable than the third party. This was short-term risk avoidance, not trust.

---

11:00, she picked up the wrist terminal (she'd switched it on when she came in) and called her supervisor.

"Supervisor, sorry, I've had a cold that won't go away. I might need two weeks of personal leave."

"Two weeks?" The supervisor's voice wasn't angry, but a little surprised. "Have you seen a doctor?"

"Yes, the doctor said my immune system's run down, just need rest."

"All right. We'll see after two weeks, then. I'll have Ah-Pei cover the Greek vase hall for you, and I've arranged the Byzantine section too." The supervisor didn't mention that GR-1857-A number. She remembered checking it against the display placard yesterday; the number was a concrete thing she and the supervisor had both touched on just yesterday, and now the supervisor acted as if the number had never existed.

"Thank you."

"Take care."

The supervisor hung up. Ren Yi set the wrist terminal back on the desk and turned off the screen.

Before hanging up, the supervisor had said only one thing, "take care," and asked nothing else—didn't ask why it was so sudden, didn't ask what the doctor had said.

After 10/15, Ren Yi had become sensitive to "the supervisor's reactions"—that time, too, the supervisor hadn't asked why she wanted Engineering to pull last night's surveillance footage.

The supervisor might be a good supervisor, or might have been told not to press. She didn't know which.

---

11:30, she picked up the muji booklet, turned to below the sixth entry, and wrote the seventh:

Seven: the letter itself (2065/10/25, the second one). **Status: candidate, different kind from the others**—may not be a cursed object, may be the Academy initiating contact.
Anomalous evidence: paper stock same as 10/15; handwriting is my own; Sekhet knows what I wrote in muji entry six last night (whether someone entered my home last night—the entryway hair shows yes); Sekhet knows GR-1857-A details and the Academy's internal classification (not something the museum side could know).
Not classifying it for now as a "cursed object" candidate like the fountain pen, but it really is the next layer of "I think I remember acquiring it, but actually don't": **I don't remember when the Academy started knowing about me.**

She finished writing, closed the booklet, and set it beside the Moleskine.

---

She picked up the fountain pen—the one that made the ring spin on its own—and held it in her hand.

What could she trust now?

The Academy's letter she had no way to verify independently. Sekhet knew things she shouldn't have known. The muji was written by herself, so it didn't count as external. Whether the supervisor's "take care" was kindness or being told not to press, she didn't know. Chen Yufang "knowing" her, the strand of hair in the door gap, the old woman at the museum—all of it could be real, or could be her own imagination.

The only thing she could still trust was the ring she'd drawn herself—that second sheet of paper, that broken ring, that turned on its own.

That was the one thing she could verify right now, the only fact that didn't require trusting anyone.

She put the fountain pen back in the pen holder, leaned back in the chair, and looked at the motionless broken ring on the second sheet of white paper on the desk.

---

It had already stopped. All through the morning of October 25, it hadn't moved again.

Until 11:50.

Something suddenly occurred to her—from 10:14, when she'd finished the baseline mark, until now, 1 hour and 36 minutes had passed, and she hadn't looked at the watermark at the foot of the letter again. She grabbed the notebook, turned to the letter, and checked the mark against the watermark's relative position.

The watermark had drifted off the baseline point, by roughly 1/96 of the circumference.

At 10:14, the baseline point had still been dead center, just outside the watermark—she remembered clearly, because she'd taken three seconds to align it when making the mark. Now it had drifted. At some moment in those 1 hour and 36 minutes, the watermark had moved.

With the fine pencil, she lightly marked a new point 1 centimeter outside the watermark's current position, as a second baseline. The time was 11:52. She decided to check again at 12:30.

【Ch. 007 End · Ren Yi's Apartment】