Chapter 1: An Old Dream in Qingteng Town

Blake crouched at the edge of a muddy puddle, rain streaming down his cuffs and seeping between his fingers. His phone lit up with the airport's flight confirmation; he swiped it away and stuffed the waterlogged loupe case back into his pocket. Qingteng Town's asphalt sheened oil-bright in the downpour, and somewhere in the distance a church steeple flared white under a lightning strike, looking like a snapped iron nail jutting from the grey. He stood; his heel found a depression in the road and the sting shot up through the arch of his foot. The appraisal shop they called *Shiyi* was tucked around a street corner, its rolling shutter plastered with a faded poster of a woman clapping her hand over her mouth, eyes rolled up in theatrical shock. He pushed the door open. The hinge shrieked with rust, a sound that cut brutally through the drumming rain.

The shop had no overhead lights—only a single desk lamp behind the counter, throwing a pool of warm amber into the dark. Mason Hale sat in the shadow beyond it, a sixty-year-old man in a fine cashmere cardigan, fingers tapping the countertop in a slow, maddeningly steady rhythm. "Mr. Blake, you are two hours late." There was no anger in his voice, but it moved through the silence like sandpaper dragged across raw wood. "I would have thought an expert of your caliber factored a storm into his schedule."

Blake set his bag on the floor. Water ran down his trouser legs and hissed into the grout between the tiles. "Flight delay, sir. And Qingteng Town's roads are not built for rushing." He pulled out a chair and lowered himself into it; his knee gave a small, dry click. "Now. Tell me where these 1920s wolf-clan relics are stashed."

Mason slid a wooden crate from beneath the counter. The lid was unlocked, the interior lined with cork that had gone soft and mildewed. "Glaze, inscriptions, dating—all three need a full pass." He raised three fingers. "I spent eighty thousand dollars pulling these together from three states. Next month's Relic Exhibition requires a clean report."

Blake slipped on his gloves and lifted the cork mat. The first object was a copper short sword, its blade encrusted in rust, but the verdigris blooming around the guard held an unsettling, even uniformity. "The dating on this blade is off." He picked up a pair of tweezers, lifted a flake of corrosion, and held it under the lamp. "A 1920s copper piece should show cloud-like discoloration across the oxidation layer—natural mottling. Look at this. The rust is too clean, too consistent. It was acid-washed and then artificially aged."

Mason's fingers froze mid-tap. The rhythm broke for a beat. "You can tell?"

"The patina is wrong." Blake set the sword back with extreme care, as though the fake rust might flake off if he breathed on it. "Genuine wolf-clan relics carry a blue-black patina on the copper surface—that's several generations of hands working into the metal. This one, the copper underneath the green rust is polished far too smooth. Looks like it rolled off a factory bench." He looked up, his gaze tracking Mason through the curtain of rain outside the window. "It's a forgery. Made within the last five years, at that. The aging is rushed. Whoever did it didn't control the acid concentration—look at the white bloom along the edges."

Mason's face went flat and grey in the lamplight. He rose, rounded the counter, and sat directly across from Blake. "Eighty thousand dollars, Blake. I know who you are. I know what you've put under the hammer in New York. Tell me—besides this sword, is there a single piece in the lot that will stand up to scrutiny?"

Blake didn't answer. He turned the cork mat and lifted out the second object: a silver amulet, its chain threaded with three small crescent pendants. The silver's oxidation was natural enough, but the engraved marks on the reverse made his brow draw down. He raised his loupe and leaned close. The scratches on the silver surface varied in depth—some had cut all the way to the base metal, others sat shallow, barely kissing the surface, as though they had been added at entirely different times.

"The base amulet is old," Blake said slowly. His voice sounded oddly cold in the confined space. "But the moon pattern on the back was added later. Look at the angle—the blade's entry point and the direction of the cut are wrong. Old engravers working a moon motif start at the upper edge of the full circle and follow the arc downward. This one was cut from the lower edge upward, and the pressure clearly builds toward the end of the stroke. That's the signature of a novice, or of someone working in a hurry."

Mason stared at him. The disappointment in his eyes rose like a slow tide. "So the entire lot is fake."

"More than fake." Blake turned the amulet face-down on the table; the silver pendants clinked against the wood. "These are components stripped off old pieces and reassembled into what they're calling 'complete relics.' Classic patchwork. They deliberately left some genuine wear marks in place so a casual expert wouldn't catch it." He peeled off his gloves and rubbed his fingers on his knee. "Mr. Mason, you spent eighty thousand dollars on a pile of reassembled fragments, and you intend to put them on public display next month. The moment one informed eye spots the seams, your Relic Exhibition—and your name—will go to pieces along with them."

Thunder rolled outside the shop, rain hammers splitting against the tin roof in dense, ragged bursts. Mason sat in silence for a long while, then finally let out a breath, pulled his phone from his pocket, and dialed a number. "Cancel next month's exhibit preparations." His voice was barely above a whisper, almost a murmur to himself. "And while you're at it, reach out to Miss Nash at the archives—pull the provenance records on this lot."

Hett listened without a word. He could feel the fury smoldering behind Mason's stillness and understood the stubbornness that braced the old man's shoulders. In a town built on lies, the truth was often costlier than any forgery—and far easier to shatter. He rose and made for the door. As he passed by Mason, the old man suddenly called him back.

"You just said the acid-washed edges show a whitish bloom." A tremor threaded through Mason's voice. "How are you certain that technique is from the last five years?"

Hett stopped, glanced back at the old man, then out the window at the wall of rain. "Because I handled a similar consignment of contraband last year," he said. "The antiquing craftsman on that batch is already inside. The wind has turned in Ivy Town, Mr. Mason. Some old debts will come to light sooner or later."

He pushed open the door and the cold rain instantly soaked his shoulders. In the alley at the street corner, a girl clutching a cardboard box huddled under the eaves. She wore a blue nurse's uniform, the cuffs frayed to fuzzy threads, her hair plastered wet to her cheeks. Lily Carter looked up. Rainwater ran down her chin and dripped onto the white bandages peeking out of the box.

"You're finally here." Her voice was shredded by the downpour. "I've been waiting for you a long time, Mr. Hett."

Hett watched her, the rain blurring his sight. A fresh bandage was wound around the girl's knee, its edges weeping a faint yellowish stain. He reached out and patted her shoulder through the rain, his touch featherlight but carrying a barely perceptible hesitation. "The night shift at the shelter is freezing," he said. "Don't linger in the alley."

Lily didn't pull away from his hand; she simply clutched the cardboard box a little tighter. A soft clink of glass came from inside, like a coin rolling around an empty box. She glanced down at Hett's soaked shoe uppers, and the corner of her mouth twitched—a faint expression, bitter and almost there.

"Let's talk inside." She pointed to the awning over the shop's entrance. "Mr. Mason just hung up, but there's a black pickup at the mouth of the alley now. Captain Reid's men don't come out patrolling on a storm night like this."

Hett followed her gaze. Deep in the dark curtain of rain, two headlights cut through the downpour like dull blades, advancing slowly and steadily. He turned and nodded to Mason, saying nothing more. Some words, before the rain stops, no one says twice.

Hett followed Lily into the shop, the cold rain dripping from his clothes onto the doorframe, water beads seeping through the threshold into the gaps between the wooden floorboards. The overhead light was off; only a desk lamp glowed over the table heaped with fragments. Hett sat down and draped his soaked coat over the back of his chair, moving with care, as though afraid to startle something. Lily set the cardboard box in one corner of the table. The packing tape had already come loose, revealing layers of old newspaper stuffed inside.

"That pickup isn't a patrol vehicle." Lily pointed through the window, her voice barely a whisper. "Captain Reid's patrol cars are dark green, license plate in the upper right corner of the windshield. That one's black. The plate's smeared with rain, but the headlights have been modified—the beams are hard and flat. Not civilian."

Hett stared out through the rain, his gaze threading the drizzle to land on the pickup's body. His fingers tapped the tabletop twice, a habitual rhythm when his mind was working. "The records Mason asked you to pull—did you get them?" His voice was hoarse, as though the rain had seeped into his throat.

"Miss Nash's archive room was only open until ten last night." Lily opened the cardboard box and drew out a reel of yellowed microfilm. "I slipped this out of there. She told me the provenance records on this lot underwent a digitization migration in 1998, and one frame of film went missing during the transfer. That missing frame might list the original consignee."

Hett took the reel. His fingertips brushed the frayed edge of the film, and something in his chest went cold. The reel dated to 1998—the last year physical negatives were shot before the digitization. He held the strip up under the desk lamp, and the light passed through the film, resolving into a blurred photograph of a warehouse. The tin walls were streaked with rust, and the color of that rust bore an uncanny resemblance to the antiquing marks on the back of the amulet.

"Are you certain this is one of Ivy Town's old warehouses?" Hett asked. His voice was quiet, but every word drove into the rain like a nail.

"Not sure." Lily shook her head. The frayed edges of her nurse's uniform cuffs were very obvious under the lamplight. "But the warehouse's plate number is 407. There's no number 407 in Ivy Town — the numbering only goes up to 402. That plate number was retired by the Records Office back in 1975 when the road was widened. Mr. Hight, that warehouse was demolished ten years ago."

The shop went quiet for two seconds; only the sound of rain hammering the tin roof. Hight set the film negative down, his fingers pressed against the edge of the table, knuckles gone white. His gaze fell on Lily's face. The girl's eyes looked very bright under the lamplight — bright in a restless way, like some feral kind of watchfulness.

"You're not sleeping tonight." Hight said. His tone was not a suggestion; it was a statement of settled fact.

Lily didn't push back. She swept her soaked hair back, exposing an old scar behind her ear. The scar was faint, but its path was strange — running from the earlobe all the way down to the angle of the jaw, as if something had clawed her, or as if the wound had simply scabbed over on its own. Hight looked at the scar and felt something strike hard at a buried corner of his heart. He rose to his feet, walked to the table, and picked up the talisman again.

"This talisman," he raised it into the lamplight, the crescent pattern on the silver pendant swaying in the flickering glow, "I just called it a cobbled-together trinket. But I missed a detail."

Lily leaned in at once. Her breathing was soft, but it carried an undercurrent of suppressed urgency. "What detail?"

"Inside the engraved lines of the crescent pattern, there's a residue of grease." Hight rubbed the grooves with his thumb. The smell was faint, tinged with a metallic, fishy edge. "This grease was called Moonfat in the werewolf tribes of the 1920s. It was made by mixing wolf oil with powdered silver, used specifically to keep silverwork from oxidizing. But Moonfat has a property — when it comes into contact with certain blood, it changes color."

Lily's face changed. Her hands clenched the cuffs of her sleeves involuntarily, knuckles cracking. Hight watched her without a word. His gaze fell back on the talisman. The silver pendant glowed cold under the lamp, and that cold light spread across his face, dragging his shadow long, all the way to the corner of the shop. In that corner, a floorboard was loose, and beneath it a hidden compartment was exposed, with an old envelope stuffed inside.

The envelope's seal had been soaked through by rain, the paper crumpled, but the handwriting on the front was still legible. Hight crouched down, his knee knocking against the floor with a dull thud. He pulled the envelope out. There was no letter inside — only a scrap folded so small it barely fit. Its edges were ragged, as if torn by some sharp blade. A half-crescent pattern was engraved on the scrap, and beneath the pattern, a line of tiny Latin inscription.

Hight unfolded the scrap. The desk lamp's light fell across it, and where the light passed through the paper's fibers, the grain showed through. His finger stopped at the bottom-right corner, where there was a very faint indentation — the shape of it resembled a signature.

On the back of the scrap, half a signature was faintly showing through.