By: magn0lia111
Part One: The Order
The order arrived on parchment the color of old bone, sealed with crimson wax that bore the unmistakable sigil of the Tianquan. Ganyu read it three times, her pale fingers tracing the elegant calligraphy as if the words might rearrange themselves into something more palatable. They did not.
Two months. A Fatui operative. A living chair.
She set the parchment down on her desk with the careful precision she applied to all things, aligning its edges perfectly with the corner of her workspace. Outside her window in the Yuehai Pavilion, the harbor glittered in the afternoon sun, merchant ships cutting lazy paths through waters that had witnessed three thousand years of her quiet, diligent service. Three thousand years of paperwork, of contracts, of the soothing rhythm of bureaucracy. She had survived the Archon Wars. She had watched empires rise and crumble into footnotes. She had never been asked to do anything like this.
And yet.
She thought of the intelligence reports that had crossed her desk over the past year. The Fatui operations that had disrupted Liyue's trade routes, endangered its citizens, created mountains of incident documentation that buried her in sleepless nights. She thought of the bodies—there had been bodies, hadn't there? Somewhere in those reports. Numbers rendered abstract by repetition.
The qilin were a gentle race. Graceful and quiet by nature, the texts said. Peaceful. But Ganyu had answered the call of Morax three millennia ago, had marched to war alongside gods and monsters. Peace, she had learned, was not passivity. Peace was something you built with your hands, maintained with your vigilance, and sometimes—sometimes—enforced with weight.
She folded the parchment and placed it in her desk drawer. Her hands did not tremble.
---
Part Two: The First Day
They brought him at dawn, when the light through her office windows was the color of watered honey. He was tall, with the sharp, angular features common to Snezhnayan operatives and eyes that held the particular cruelty of a man who had learned to enjoy his work. His wrists were bound behind him, but his head remained free, positioned on a low stool that had been placed where her chair normally sat.
The Millelith guard's voice was flat, professionally empty. "Two months. He is your responsibility, Secretary Ganyu."
The door closed. The silence that followed was not silence at all—it was filled with the man's breathing, ragged and deliberate, and beneath that, the distant sounds of the harbor, the cry of gulls, the mundane music of a world continuing without them.
"Do you have any idea," he said, his voice carrying the particular venom of the cornered, "who I am? What the Tsaritsa will do when she learns of this?"
Ganyu did not respond. She stood by her desk, her back to him, studying the mountain of scrolls that awaited her attention. Trade agreements. Resource allocations. The quiet machinery of civilization.
"Look at me when I'm speaking to you."
She turned, finally, and met his gaze. His eyes were the gray of winter storms, and in them she saw what she had expected to see: contempt, rage, the absolute certainty that he was the predator in this room, temporarily inconvenienced but never truly captured.
She had seen that look before. In the eyes of beasts that did not yet understand they were already dead.
Without a word, she approached. She watched his expression shift—confusion first, then disbelief, then something that might have been the earliest seed of fear as she turned her back to him and began to lower herself onto the stool.
The moment her weight settled onto his face, he screamed.
It was a muffled thing, more vibration than sound, and it traveled through her body like a current. She felt his struggles beneath her, the frantic bucking of his bound form, the desperate twisting of his head. She felt the warmth of his breath against the fabric of her bodysuit, the soft give of cartilage and flesh.
She picked up her brush. She dipped it in ink. She began to write.
"Requisition for glaze lilies from Qingce Village," she murmured, her voice steady. "Approved, pending seasonal availability."
Beneath her, the screaming continued. She did not listen. There was work to be done.
---
Part Three: The Breaking
The first week was the loudest.
He never stopped. Not truly. Even when exhaustion claimed his voice and reduced his screams to hoarse whispers, he found new ways to make himself known. He would twist his head, seeking pockets of air, and the movement would send small tremors through her concentration. He would try to speak, to bargain, to threaten, and his words would emerge as muffled, distorted things that buzzed against her like trapped insects.
"I have information," he gasped during one of the brief moments she shifted her weight. "Everything. I'll tell you everything. Just let me—"
She settled back down, and the rest of his sentence was lost.
Keqing visited on the third day, as she always did, her presence announced by a single sharp knock before the door swung open. The Yuheng's gaze swept the room with characteristic efficiency, cataloging details, dismissing irrelevancies. If she noticed the bound man beneath Ganyu, she gave no indication.
"The Chasm mining expedition report," Keqing said. "Status update."
Ganyu began to speak, outlining projected yields and resource allocations, and beneath her, the operative saw his opportunity. He gathered what remained of his strength and screamed.
"Help! She's suffocating me! Help me!"
Ganyu did not pause. She simply shifted her weight, lifting one hip slightly before bringing it down with deliberate precision, directly over his mouth. The sound cut off like a candle flame pinched between wet fingers.
Keqing's eyes flickered downward for a fraction of a second. The corner of her mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but something adjacent to it.
"Projected output seems adequate," she said. "Proceed with the final draft."
When the door closed behind her, Ganyu remained still, feeling the absolute silence beneath her. The operative had stopped struggling. His breath came in shallow, desperate pulls through his nose, and she could feel his heartbeat, rapid and frantic, pulsing against her.
Something unfurled in her chest. Something warm.
She had silenced him. Completely. Effortlessly. With nothing more than the weight of her body, she had rendered all his threats, all his bargaining, all his rage utterly meaningless.
The qilin were a gentle race. But gentleness, Ganyu was beginning to understand, was not the same as weakness.
She returned to her work, and the small smile that touched her lips did not fade for hours.
---
Part Four: The Decay
It began in the sixth week.
By then, the operative had learned. His struggles had ceased, his pleas had died, and he had become what he was intended to be: furniture. A warm, breathing surface upon which Ganyu conducted the business of Liyue. She had grown accustomed to the subtle rhythms of his body—the expansion and contraction of his chest, the occasional twitch of overstressed muscles, the faint dampness of condensation where his breath met fabric.
She had stopped thinking of him as a person. He was simply part of her office, as unremarkable as her desk or her inkstone.
The first time he lost consciousness, she didn't notice immediately.
She was deep in a logistics report, her mind tracing supply routes across Liyue's vast territory, when she became aware of an absence. The subtle resistance beneath her had vanished. The warmth remained, but the movement—the tiny, constant adjustments of a living body—had stopped.
She frowned, shifting her weight experimentally. No response. No grunt, no wheeze, no desperate gasping.
Irritation flickered through her. Was he trying something new? Some pathetic attempt at manipulation?
She leaned forward, craning her neck to peer beneath her. His face was slack, his eyes closed, his mouth hanging open. His chest rose and fell with the slow, steady rhythm of the deeply unconscious.
For a moment—just a moment—something cold touched her spine. Had she gone too far? Had she—
But no. He was breathing. His pulse was steady. He had simply... passed out.
She settled back onto him, feeling the pliant give of his unresisting features. It was, she had to admit, more comfortable this way. Without his tense muscles and subtle struggles, he was simply a cushion. Warm. Soft. Silent.
She returned to her report.
It happened again the next day. And the day after that. Sometimes he would last an hour, sometimes only minutes before his body surrendered to the relentless pressure and lack of oxygen. Ganyu stopped checking on him. The unconscious periods became unremarkable, just another feature of her workday.
What she did not notice—what she had no way of noticing—was what was happening inside his skull.
---
Part Five: The Unmaking
The human brain is a delicate instrument. It requires oxygen the way a flame requires air—constantly, desperately, without interruption. Deprive it for seconds, and thoughts grow sluggish. Deprive it for minutes, and neurons begin to die. Deprive it repeatedly, over days and weeks, and the architecture of consciousness itself begins to crumble.
The operative—though that word no longer applied to the thing beneath Ganyu's weight—had been a clever man once. Sharp. Cunning. A valued asset of the Fatui, trained in intelligence gathering and counter-interrogation techniques. He had resisted torture before. He had been prepared to resist it again.
But this was not torture. Torture implied intention, attention, the focused application of suffering toward a goal. This was worse. This was indifference. This was being slowly unmade by someone who had simply stopped noticing he existed.
The first sign came in the seventh week.
Ganyu was reviewing a trade agreement, her brush moving in careful strokes across the parchment, when she felt a faint vibration beneath her. Not the frantic struggling of the early days, but something weaker. Spastic. His body twitched, and a sound emerged from beneath her—muffled, slurred, barely recognizable as human speech.
"Buh... gway... pwease... mushwooms..."
She paused, her brush hovering above the paper. Mushrooms?
She shifted slightly, not to silence him, but out of genuine bewilderment. The movement pressed her weight more firmly against his face, and he let out a soft, almost contented sigh before going limp.
She stared at the wall for a long moment, something cold and strange moving through her thoughts.
He was breaking. Not his will—that had shattered weeks ago. His mind. The relentless, crushing pressure of her daily routine, her simple act of sitting and working, was systematically destroying the person he had been.
She should have felt horror. Or pity. Or at least the professional concern of a custodian whose charge was deteriorating.
Instead, she felt a dark, spreading warmth. Satisfaction. The same feeling she got when a particularly complex trade agreement finally came together, when all the pieces aligned and the machinery of commerce clicked into place.
This was control. True control. Not just over his body, but over his very selfhood. She was not merely silencing him. She was erasing him.
She returned to her work, and the smile on her lips was not gentle at all.
---
---
**Part Six: The Husk**
By the end of the second month, the man who had been delivered to Ganyu's office had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense.
Oh, the body remained. It breathed. Its heart beat. Warmth radiated from its skin, and when she shifted her weight, she could feel the subtle give of flesh and bone. But the person—the sharp-eyed operative who had threatened her with the wrath of the Tsaritsa, who had bargained and pleaded and raged—that person was gone. Dissolved. Rendered down to nothing by the simple, patient weight of bureaucracy.
What remained was a husk.
She had stopped thinking of him as "he" somewhere around the eighth week. It seemed inaccurate. Pronouns implied personhood, and personhood implied a self capable of thought, of intention, of desire. The thing beneath her had none of these. It drooled. It twitched. Sometimes, when consciousness flickered briefly through its ruined neurons, it would make sounds—wet, gurgling noises that bore no relationship to language. Once, it laughed. A high, keening sound that went on for nearly a minute before trailing off into silence.
Ganyu had not paused in her writing.
The drool was the worst part, from a practical standpoint. She had grown accustomed to the dampness seeping through the fabric of her bodysuit, the faint smell of saliva and something else—something organic and faintly sweet, like fruit beginning to rot. She made a mental note to have the stool thoroughly cleaned when this was over. Perhaps burned. Fire purified all things.
Keqing's visits continued, regular as clockwork. The Yuheng never commented on the deterioration of the operative, though Ganyu knew she noticed. Keqing noticed everything. But there was an unspoken understanding between them now, a shared recognition of what was happening in this quiet office overlooking the harbor.
Justice was being served. Slowly. Thoroughly. Without mercy.
On the final day, Ganyu woke before dawn. She bathed carefully, dressed in her usual attire, and walked to her office through streets still silver with pre-morning mist. The harbor was quiet, the merchant ships sleeping at anchor, and the only sound was the distant cry of gulls and the soft percussion of her footsteps on ancient stone.
She entered her office and looked at the thing on the stool.
It was awake—if that word could be applied to its current state. Its eyes were open, at least, though they stared at nothing, focused on some interior landscape that Ganyu could not see and did not wish to imagine. A thin line of drool connected its slack lips to the stained wood of the stool. Its hair, once neatly trimmed in the Fatui style, had grown wild and matted, crusted with dried saliva and other fluids she chose not to identify.
She sat down.
The weight settled onto its face, and it made a sound—not a scream, not a plea, but a soft, almost grateful sigh. As if this pressure, this darkness, this suffocation had become the only reality it understood. The only comfort it had left.
Ganyu picked up her brush and began to work.
**Part Seven: The Delivery**
The Millelith arrived precisely at noon.
Two guards, their faces professionally blank, their armor gleaming in the midday light that streamed through Ganyu's windows. They did not knock. The door simply opened, and they were there, flanking the entrance like statues come to life.
"Secretary Ganyu," the lead guard said. "The sentence is complete."
She finished the character she was writing—a complex glyph representing agricultural yield projections for the coming season—and set her brush aside with careful precision. She blotted the ink, aligned the parchment with the corner of her desk, and only then did she rise.
The absence of weight beneath her felt strange. Wrong, somehow. For two months, that warmth had been a constant presence, as familiar as her own heartbeat. Now there was only cool air and the faint, lingering smell of human decay.
She turned to look at what remained of the operative.
He was slumped on the stool, his body held upright only by the bindings that had secured him for sixty days. His head lolled to one side, and a vacant smile stretched his features—the empty, meaningless expression of a mind that had forgotten how to do anything else. Drool pooled on his shoulder. His eyes, once sharp with cruelty and intelligence, were the eyes of a fish on a merchant's slab: present, but absent. Seeing nothing. Understanding less.
One of the guards stepped forward and prodded him with a gloved hand. The response was immediate and deeply unsettling: a high-pitched giggle, childlike and utterly devoid of comprehension. The sound bounced off the walls of the office, too loud, too bright, too wrong.
The guards exchanged a glance. Something passed between them—not quite horror, not quite disgust, but something adjacent to both. They had seen many things in their service to the Qixing. They had not seen this.
Without a word, they unbound the husk's limbs and hauled it upright. Its legs did not support it; they dragged uselessly across the floor as the guards maneuvered it toward the door. It continued to giggle, the sound trailing behind it like a ribbon of madness, growing fainter as it was carried down the corridor and away.
Ganyu watched until the sound disappeared entirely. Then she looked down at the stool.
It was ruined. Stained with fluids she did not wish to catalog, warped by two months of constant pressure and moisture. She would need to requisition a new one. She made a mental note, adding it to the endless list of tasks that comprised her existence.
She walked to her window and looked out at the harbor. The sun was high now, burning away the last of the morning mist, and the merchant ships were in motion, their sails catching the wind like the wings of great white birds. Liyue continued. The machinery of commerce turned. And somewhere, in whatever facility the Millelith had taken him, a man who had once threatened her with the wrath of gods was laughing at nothing, his mind a shattered mirror reflecting only fragments of the person he had been.
She felt no guilt. No horror. No pity.
She felt satisfied.
The work had been completed. The sentence had been served. And she had discovered something about herself in the process—something that had perhaps always been there, buried beneath three thousand years of gentle service and quiet diligence. Something with teeth.
She returned to her desk and began to organize her papers. There was always more work to be done. Always more—
The knock on her door was sharp. Different from the earlier arrival of the guards. More perfunctory. More urgent.
She frowned. "Enter."
The door opened, and two new Millelith guards stepped through. They were not the same ones who had taken the husk away; their armor bore different insignia, marking them as members of a specialized unit Ganyu recognized from intelligence briefings. Between them, they held a third figure.
A woman.
She was young—younger than the operative had been—with pale skin and dark hair cropped short in the utilitarian style favored by Fatui field agents. Her uniform identified her as a Skirmisher, one of the Fatui's frontline soldiers, and though it was torn and stained with what might have been blood, she wore it with defiant pride. Her wrists were bound behind her back, but her spine was straight, her chin raised, her eyes burning with cold, intelligent fury.
She looked at Ganyu, and Ganyu looked back, and in that moment of mutual recognition, something electric passed between them.
"Secretary Ganyu," the lead guard said, his voice carrying the same flat, professional emptiness as his predecessor. "By order of the Tianquan, a new asset has been assigned for containment. The terms are the same. Two months."
The woman's eyes widened. She had heard, then. Rumors, perhaps, of what had happened to her predecessor. The Fatui had their intelligence networks; it was possible—likely, even—that she knew exactly what awaited her on that stool.
"You can't do this," she said. Her voice was steady, controlled, but Ganyu could hear the hairline fractures running through it. "I have rights under the diplomatic conventions. The Tsaritsa will—"
"The Tsaritsa," Ganyu said softly, "is not here."
It was the first time she had spoken directly to a captive since this had begun. The words felt strange in her mouth, heavy with implication. The woman fell silent, her defiance flickering like a candle in a draft.
The guards forced her down onto the stool—a new one, Ganyu noticed, already positioned where the old one had been. They must have replaced it while she was looking out the window. Efficient. She appreciated efficiency.
The woman struggled, her muscles straining against her bonds, but she was already secured, already positioned, her face tilted upward toward the ceiling. Toward Ganyu.
"I'll kill you," she hissed. "I swear to every god in Teyvat, I'll find a way, and I'll kill you."
Ganyu regarded her for a long moment. The fury. The defiance. The absolute certainty that she was different, that she was stronger, that she would not break the way her predecessor had broken.
It was beautiful.
"The previous occupant of that stool said something similar," Ganyu said. Her voice was gentle, almost kind. "On the first day. By the end, he could not remember his own name. He could not remember how to speak. He could not remember anything at all, except the weight of me, pressing down on him, day after day, until there was nothing left."
She paused, letting the words settle.
"You will break," she continued. "Not because I will try to break you, but because I will simply... continue. I will sit. I will work. I will conduct the business of Liyue, and you will be beneath me, and slowly, surely, you will forget that you were ever anything else. You will forget your mission. Your loyalty. Your rage. You will forget the Tsaritsa and the Fatui and whatever cause you thought was worth dying for. And when the two months are over, when they come to take you away, you will not even understand that you are being moved. You will simply be... empty."
The woman's face had gone pale. The defiance was still there, but it was brittle now, a mask over something deeper and more primal.
Fear.
Ganyu smiled. It was not a gentle smile.
"I'm looking forward to it," she said.
She turned her back on the woman and smoothed her dress with careful, deliberate movements. She took a deep breath, savoring the moment—the anticipation, the quiet thrill of what was to come. Then she began to lower herself onto the stool.
The woman screamed.
It was a raw, animal sound, full of rage and terror and desperate, futile resistance. Ganyu felt it vibrate through her as her weight settled, felt the frantic bucking of the bound body beneath her, felt the heat of panicked breath against fabric.
She reached for her brush. She dipped it in ink. She pulled a fresh sheet of parchment toward her and began to write.
"Trade agreement between Liyue Harbor and Fontaine," she murmured, her voice calm and steady. "Section one: terms and definitions..."
Beneath her, the screaming continued—muffled now, distorted by pressure, but still audible. Still defiant.
Ganyu did not mind. She had two months. She had patience. She had the quiet, inexorable weight of bureaucracy on her side.
The screaming would stop eventually. They always did.
And when it did—when the silence finally came, when the defiance crumbled and the mind beneath her began its slow collapse into nothing—she would be here. Working. Waiting. Savoring every moment of the unmaking.
The qilin were a gentle race. Graceful and quiet by nature, the texts said. Peaceful.
The texts, Ganyu thought, did not know her very well at all.
---
**EPILOGUE**
*Three months later*
The woman who had once been a Fatui Skirmisher sat in a garden in Bubu Pharmacy, her eyes fixed on a butterfly that had landed on her knee. She watched it for a long time—hours, perhaps—her expression one of simple, vacant wonder.
She did not remember her name. She did not remember the Fatui, or the Tsaritsa, or the mission that had brought her to Liyue. She did not remember rage, or defiance, or the burning certainty that she would never break.
She remembered only weight. Warmth. Darkness. The soft, distant sound of a brush moving across parchment, and a voice—gentle, patient, inexorable—murmuring words she could not understand.
Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt it again. The pressure. The suffocation. The slow, sweet surrender of consciousness.
She always woke smiling.
In her office in the Yuehai Pavilion, Ganyu reviewed the latest intelligence reports from the Fatui front. A new operative had been captured, the documents said. High-value. Dangerous. The Tianquan was considering options for containment.
Ganyu set the report aside and looked at the empty stool in the corner of her office. It had been cleaned and repaired, ready for use. Waiting.
She picked up her brush and returned to her work.
There was always more work to be done.
Part Two: The New Filing
Chapter One: Intake Processing
Every system has its procedures. Every procedure has its forms. And every form, Ganyu had learned across three thousand years of service, eventually gets filled.
The new asset—she had already stopped thinking of the woman as a person, had already begun the mental reclassification that made the work possible—was what the Ministry of Civil Affairs would call a "priority intake." High-value. Time-sensitive. Requiring immediate processing.
Ganyu processed her.
The first week followed the established protocol. Resistance. Threats. Bargaining. The woman cycled through them with admirable efficiency, as if working from a checklist of her own. She screamed until her voice cracked. She thrashed until her muscles burned. She made promises—information, money, political favors—that grew increasingly desperate as the hours bled into days.
Ganyu noted each phase with the detached interest of a clerk observing the progress of a particularly complex requisition. Stage one: denial. Stage two: anger. Stage three: negotiation. The paperwork of the psyche, moving through its prescribed channels.
"You don't understand," the woman gasped during one of the brief moments Ganyu shifted her weight. "I'm not like him. I'm trained for this. I won't break."
Ganyu settled back down, and the rest of the sentence was filed away into silence.
That was the thing about bureaucracy that civilians never understood. It didn't matter how strong you were. It didn't matter how prepared. The system didn't care about your resolve or your training or your desperate belief in your own exceptionalism. The system simply continued. Form after form. Day after day. Weight after weight. Until eventually, inevitably, you were processed.
Chapter Two: The Standardization of Suffering
By the second week, Ganyu had established a routine.
She arrived at her office precisely at dawn, when the light through the windows was the color of weak tea. She reviewed her overnight correspondence—trade disputes, resource allocations, the endless minutiae of governance—while the kettle heated on its small brazier. She prepared her workspace with the same meticulous care she had applied for millennia: brushes arranged by size, ink ground to the proper consistency, parchment stacked in order of priority.
Then she sat down.
The woman had learned, by this point, not to scream at the initial contact. Screaming wasted air, and air had become the most precious currency in her diminished economy. Instead, she would go rigid, her entire body tensing against the inevitable, and then slowly—so slowly—she would begin the desperate negotiations with physics that defined her new existence.
Ganyu found it almost meditative. The subtle shifts beneath her as the woman sought pockets of oxygen. The rhythmic expansion and contraction of desperate lungs. The way resistance gradually softened into something like acceptance as the minutes accumulated into hours.
It was, she reflected, not unlike the process of stamping documents. The initial pressure. The brief resistance of paper and wax. And then the satisfying give as the seal was made, the form completed, the matter officially processed.
She stamped seventeen trade agreements that morning. Beneath her, the woman passed out twice.
Efficiency.
Chapter Three: The Accumulation of Increments
The genius of bureaucracy, Ganyu had long understood, was not in grand gestures but in accumulation. No single form changed the world. No individual stamp altered the course of history. But stack enough forms together, apply enough stamps, and eventually you had shaped reality itself. Mountains moved. Rivers redirected. Empires rose and fell. All through the patient accumulation of incremental actions.
The woman was being accumulated.
Each hour beneath Ganyu's weight was a form filed. Each period of oxygen deprivation was a stamp applied. Each loss of consciousness was a document moving from one tray to another, progressing through the system toward its inevitable conclusion.
Keqing visited on the ninth day, as scheduled. The Yuheng stood before Ganyu's desk, reviewing production reports, while beneath them the woman made a sound—a wet, muffled keen that might have been a plea for help.
"The silk quotas from Yilong Wharf," Keqing said, not acknowledging the sound. "They're projecting a twelve percent shortfall."
"I've drafted a contingency allocation," Ganyu replied, shifting her weight slightly. The keening stopped. "Redirecting surplus from the Qingce stores should compensate."
"Approved. Submit the requisition by end of week."
The meeting lasted fourteen minutes. The woman was unconscious for eleven of them. Neither Ganyu nor Keqing remarked upon this. It was simply part of the office environment now, as unremarkable as the furniture it had become.
After Keqing left, Ganyu made a note in her personal log: Asset integration proceeding on schedule. Resistance metrics declining. Projected completion within standard parameters.
She was, above all else, a thorough record-keeper.
Chapter Four: The Audit
The third week brought complications.
The woman, despite everything, had not yet fully surrendered. There were moments—brief, flickering instances—when something like her former self would surface. A tensing of muscles. A muffled curse. Once, impossibly, she managed to twist her head just enough to sink her teeth into Ganyu's thigh.
The bite did not break skin. The bodysuit was too thick, and the woman's strength had deteriorated too severely. But the intent was there. The defiance. The refusal to be properly filed.
Ganyu responded as any good administrator would respond to an irregularity in the system. She audited.
She spent the next three hours seated with particular attention, adjusting her position not for her own comfort but to maximize the pressure on specific points. The woman's nose. Her mouth. The soft hollows of her eye sockets. She varied the rhythm of her movements, denying the woman the ability to predict when oxygen would be available and when it would not.
By the end of the audit, the woman was a trembling, sobbing wreck. Whatever defiance had surfaced had been thoroughly documented, reviewed, and corrected.
"Procedural deviation noted," Ganyu murmured, making an entry in her log. "Corrective measures applied. Asset compliance restored."
She returned to her trade agreements. The woman did not attempt to bite her again.
Chapter Five: The Quarterly Review
One month in, Ganyu conducted a formal assessment.
She rose from her seat—feeling, as always, that strange sense of absence when the warmth beneath her was removed—and walked a slow circle around the stool. The woman's eyes tracked her movement, but there was a quality to that tracking that had not been present in the early days. A slowness. A lag. As if the signal was traveling through damaged wiring.
"State your name," Ganyu said.
The woman's mouth worked. Sound emerged—broken, slurred, but still recognizable as speech. "Kat... Katya. My name is Katya."
"State your mission."
A longer pause. The woman's brow furrowed, her expression that of someone trying to remember a dream upon waking. "I... we were supposed to... the harbor... intelligence on..."
She trailed off. Her eyes went distant, unfocused.
"State your name," Ganyu repeated.
"Katya." The response was faster this time. Automatic. A reflex rather than a memory.
"State your mission."
Nothing. The woman stared at her with the blank incomprehension of a ledger that had been wiped clean.
Ganyu made a note: Cognitive degradation proceeding ahead of schedule. Long-term memory showing significant erosion. Asset approaching final processing stage.
She sat back down. The woman let out a soft, almost grateful sigh as the weight returned—the only constant in her shrinking universe, the only fixed point in a reality that was dissolving around her like paper in water.
One more month. Ganyu had processed difficult cases before. This one was simply a matter of continued application.
Form after form. Stamp after stamp. Day after day.
The system always won in the end.