Morning broke over the capital like pale gold dripping over rooftops.
At first, the city only yawned...shopkeepers lifting shutters, street hawkers warming their throats with tea, guards changing shifts while pretending the night had not been cold.
Then by midmorning, whispers began to gather like smoke in an alley.
By midday, the rumors were no longer whispers.
They were wind.
They ran through the capital with the speed of panic, slipping under doors and leaping across courtyards, changing shape with every tongue that carried them.
A regional official had been found dead in his estate.
Not in the street.
Not in some back tavern where drunken men fell and never rose again.
In his own home.
His neck crushed.
His skin carved with deep, rope-like strangulation marks...except the marks were too thin, too uniform, too sharply cut to have been made by any ordinary rope.
There were no signs of struggle.
No overturned furniture.
No blood spatter.
No broken doors or smashed windows.
No servant screaming about intruders, no guard claiming he'd seen a shadow leap across the roofline.
It was as if the man had simply stood there…
and died.
In the morning markets, merchants leaned close over piles of vegetables and pretended to haggle while trading details like currency.
"They say it was a wire," one butcher muttered, slicing pork with a cleaver that made his words sound heavier. "Thin as hair. The kind assassins favor."
"A wire?" a woman selling bean curd scoffed, eyes darting as if the official's ghost might be listening from the cabbage baskets. "If it were a wire, why no footsteps? Why no guard alarm? No one enters that estate without being seen."
"Karmic punishment," a temple attendant said with hushed certainty, clutching his prayer beads like they might burn. "That man's hands were not clean. Heaven does not forget."
"A ghost," whispered a fishmonger with a face like dried salt. "The ghost of the farmer he condemned. I heard the official had a man executed last season...false charges, they say. The widow begged for mercy. Begged until her voice broke."
Someone nearby spat, not in contempt but fear...as if spitting could ward off fate.
The capital had seen brutal deaths before. Bandits, rival sect feuds, jealous nobles. Violence was not rare.
But this?
This was quiet.
Precision was more frightening than rage.
Because rage was human.
Precision, without noise, without evidence, without effort...precision belonged to something else.
By afternoon, the district around the estate trembled.
Even the dogs seemed restless, pacing alleys, sniffing at corners where nothing had changed.
Doors stayed half-latched.
Mothers called children indoors earlier than usual.
Old men who normally argued over chess boards outside tea houses had suddenly remembered they had chores inside.
And yet, everyone still leaned toward each other with the same question burning behind their teeth:
Who could wrap a man's throat without entering the room…
and leave behind marks as precise as a butcher's cut?
No one knew the truth.
No one could.
Because the "rope marks" were not rope at all.
They were left by a fishing line...thin, silent, nearly invisible in the dark.
Not swung wildly like a weapon.
Not thrown in panic.
But guided.
Measured.
Wielded by a quiet wanderer who walked like moonlight and answered prayers no one else heard.
And the secret behind his strength...the Pulse that stirred faintly within him...remained hidden from every eye.
If anyone had truly watched the official's final night, they would have understood why there was no struggle.
The moment the line touched skin, it was already too late.
Not because the line was sharp...though it was.
Not because the hands guiding it were cruel...because they were not.
But because the line carried something else: a faint, controlled vibration, a Pulse thread moving through the silk-thin filament as naturally as breath.
It did not tear.
It did not saw.
It simply… tightened the world around the man's throat until air became a memory.
No crash.
No shout.
No desperate clawing that left marks on furniture.
Just the brief, soft sound of a startled exhale...
and silence.
That silence now filled the capital like fog.
And it reached the ears of the one person who had prayed for it, though she had not dared to believe it would come.
The widow heard the news while buying rice with her last coins.
She stood in a narrow stall where the air smelled like grain dust and old wood. A vendor poured rice into her sack with the careful slowness reserved for those who looked like they might collapse at any moment.
Her eyes were swollen, the kind of swelling that didn't come from one night of tears, but from weeks of them. From pleading until her voice rasped. From waking up every morning and remembering her life had been cut into "before" and "after."
The vendor, eager to talk, leaned over the counter.
"Have you heard?" he said, voice carrying the thrill of danger like a child with stolen sweets. "The official's dead."
Her fingers tightened around the sack.
"Executed?" she whispered automatically, because that was how death happened in her world: announced, formal, cruel.
"No." The vendor shivered. "Dead. Just… dead. Neck crushed. Marks like rope."
The widow went still.
The sack of rice felt suddenly heavy, as if every grain were a stone.
Her heart pounded hard enough to hurt.
She looked down at her coins, the last of them...thin, light, nearly gone.
She thought of her husband's face, the way he had looked at her the morning he was taken away, trying to smile so she wouldn't break.
She thought of the temple.
The abandoned temple at the edge of the district, where she had knelt with dirt under her nails and desperation in her throat.
Where she had whispered her plea into stone and silence because there had been no one else left to hear her.
"Dead…" she breathed, and the word felt unreal in her mouth.
The vendor continued rambling, eager.
"Some say a ghost did it. Some say an assassin. Some say Heaven finally punished him."
The widow barely heard him.
Her eyes lifted toward the direction of the abandoned temple.
A place she had only visited in desperation.
A place she had left the night before with numb knees and the familiar ache of disappointment, fully expecting her prayer to dissolve into nothing as all prayers did.
And yet...
for the first time in months…
she felt her breath loosen.
Not because her grief was gone.
Not because her life was repaired.
But because the tight, choking hopelessness around her heart… shifted.
Was it really… answered?
Was I heard?
She stumbled out of the market with the rice clutched to her chest like a lifeline. People brushed past her, complaining about prices, gossiping about death, laughing too loudly to hide their fear.
She did not join them.
Her mind held only the temple, the moon, the stone guardian inside.
And a faint, trembling thought she didn't dare say aloud:
If someone heard me…
then someone cared.
As night settled, she gathered enough courage to return.
The capital changed under darkness, becoming quieter but never truly calm. Lanterns swayed along the streets like trapped fireflies. The distant towers of the palace stood black against the sky, cold and untouchable.
She walked without looking at anyone.
She feared someone might read her face and know she was carrying something dangerous: hope.
The abandoned temple stood where it always had, at the edge of the district like a forgotten memory.
Its wooden walls were worn thin by time, roof half collapsed, vines crawling across the timber like scars that never healed.
Inside, moonlight poured through the broken roof in long silver streaks, spilling onto the dusty floor like falling water.
The Suanni statue remained as it had been.
Stone guardian.
Lion body.
Dragon-maned.
Carved in perpetual calm, as if it had watched centuries of human suffering and learned not to flinch.
The widow's footsteps were soft.
She knelt again, dirt cool beneath her palms.
This time, her shoulders did not shake with the same desperate sobbing. There was still grief, still pain...grief did not vanish because justice arrived late.
But there was relief in her chest, trembling like a candle that had survived the wind.
"…Thank you," she whispered.
Her voice trembled with something gentler than despair.
"Whoever heard me… thank you."
The temple did not answer.
It never did.
It remained silent, moonlight unmoving, dust drifting in slow spirals like tiny wandering stars.
But as she bowed her head, something caught her eye.
A small object sat at the base of the Suanni statue.
Placed exactly where she had left her offering the night before.
She froze.
Her eyes narrowed, breath catching.
It was not rice.
Not coins.
Not incense.
It was a smooth river pebble, pale gray, polished by water until it gleamed faintly under moonlight.
And on its surface...
carved with delicate precision...
was a crescent moon.
The widow's breath hitched so sharply it almost became a sob.
She reached out, fingers hovering above it as if she feared it might vanish.
"A… blessing token…?" she whispered.
Her fingertips brushed the stone.
It was cold...stone always was...but steady, as if it had waited patiently to be found.
She lifted it.
No footprints surrounded it.
No sign of a visitor.
No disturbed dust.
No broken twig outside.
Nothing changed…
except this pebble.
The widow stared at the carved moon until her vision blurred.
Her eyes filled again, but these tears were different.
Not hopeless.
Not empty.
They were warm, heavy tears that fell because something inside her finally believed she had not been alone in her suffering.
She pressed the moon-carved pebble to her chest.
"Thank you," she whispered again, voice cracking. "Spirit, god, whoever you were… thank you."
Her hands shook around the pebble like it was fragile.
Like it was sacred.
Like it was proof that the world still held a thread of fairness somewhere, hidden beneath cruelty.
The temple remained silent.
The moonlight stayed gentle.
And the Suanni statue watched without moving, eternal and unreadable.
But somewhere in the shadows beyond her sight, unseen by all, a quiet figure stepped away from the temple wall.
The movement was so subtle it might have been mistaken for drifting mist.
A shadow detached itself from darkness.
A man's silhouette, slender, calm.
He did not linger.
He did not accept praise.
He did not wait for her to turn and see him, because he had never done this for recognition.
Jin Yue did not need thanks.
The stone was enough.
Not as payment.
Not as a reward.
But as a marker...quiet proof that this prayer had been heard, that this injustice had been seen.
Her plea had been heard.
Her justice delivered.
And for the first time since her husband's death, the widow walked away from the temple without trembling.
Her grief still walked beside her, heavy as ever.
But it no longer strangled her.
The moonlit pebble stayed warm in her hand, pressed tight against her palm as if it carried the last heat of a river under night sky.
And somewhere beyond the district, Jin Yue vanished into the capital's sleeping veins...silent as a fishing line in darkness, moving forward with the Pulse hidden deep beneath calm breaths.
In the city, rumors would continue.
They would call it ghostwork.
They would call it karma.
They would call it an assassin's art.
But the truth would remain what it had always been:
A quiet wanderer.
A fishing line.
A crescent moon carved into stone...
and a shattered moon river flowing unseen through the world, carrying justice where it could.