Morning inside the Bone-Ledger Temple after the previous accounting shock; junior clerks gather outside the ledger hall while incense drifts from the doors.

Inside the accounting hall, Su Qing and the elder council resume ritual procedure under hanging bone tablets.

The second debtor arrives at the accounting hall with courtly flair, accompanied by guards and a burst of social noise.

Luo turns the solemn accounting hall into a performance, distributing small gifts and compliments while elders evaluate him.

Luo notices Yana directly, and the lightness of his performance begins to sharpen.

The elders open Luo Qin’s official account and prepare Yana to read him according to ritual.

Yana recognizes the nearly forbidden mark and struggles to keep her reaction hidden in the public hall.

The refund mark throws Yana into a five-year-old impression of the woman with her face performing the correction.

Yana snaps out of the reading, visibly injured by the backlash, while Luo drops his playful mask.

Luo states what the mark means, pushing the elders toward open danger while Yana tries to understand.

Su Qing cuts off the hearing and transforms the public scandal into sealed procedure.

The hearing breaks apart, leaving Yana with an approved lie and a forbidden question.

Yana slips through moonlit corridors toward the cold archive, avoiding curfew guards.

Yana reaches the cold archive where funeral pyre accounts and old debt records are stored.

Yana searches archive indexes for the previous reckoner’s cremation record from five years ago.

Yana opens the death record and reads the precise inventory of the cremation.

Yana notices that the ash weight cannot belong to a full-grown woman and understands the cremation record is false.

Yana copies the ash-weight line and ties it to the contradictions she has seen in the debt marks.

Footsteps outside the cold archive interrupt Yana before she can replace every sign of her search.

Yana hides between archive shelves as an elder’s lantern reaches the doorway.

The lantern glow fills the cold archive while Yana crouches unseen with the copied ash record hidden in her sleeve.