The rumor reached the guild before Aerin did.

  He knew because the room went quiet when he walked in.

  Not dramatic silence—no one stopped talking outright. Conversations just… shifted. Voices lowered. Eyes followed him a fraction longer than politeness allowed.

  Aerin ignored it and headed for the counter.

  The clerk didn’t.

  She hesitated when she saw his badge, fingers pausing over the ledger. “You’re back early.”

  “Contract didn’t take long.”

  Her eyes flicked up. “That’s not what I heard.”

  Aerin raised an eyebrow. “Then you heard wrong.”

  She slid the ledger toward him anyway. “You’ll want to sign.”

  He did—and felt it. A faint pressure, like static brushing the back of his neck.

  Someone was watching.

  Behind him, a bronze-rank adventurer scoffed quietly.

  “Funny,” the man said to no one in particular. “Three survey teams find nothing. Then an iron-rank strolls in and fixes it.”

  Aerin didn’t turn. “Didn’t fix anything.”

  “No?” Another voice chimed in. “Lowlands stabilized. Mana flow normalized. That’s what the notice says.”

  A pause.

  “That kind of result usually comes with a name attached.”

  Aerin closed the ledger.

  “Then maybe you should ask the land,” he said calmly. “It seemed picky.”

  A few chuckles. Not friendly ones.

  The bronze-rank woman from the patrol pushed off the wall near the stairs, arms crossed. “You didn’t kill anything out there.”

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  “No.”

  “You didn’t retrieve an artifact.”

  “No.”

  “And yet the anomaly resolved itself the moment you arrived.”

  Her gaze sharpened. “Care to explain how?”

  Aerin met her eyes.

  “No,” he said.

  The room went still.

  That was the wrong answer—and they all knew it.

  She studied him for a long second, then smiled thinly. “Fair. Just know this—exploration results like that don’t stay quiet.”

  She leaned closer, lowering her voice.

  “And the guild doesn’t like things it can’t categorize.”

  As she walked away, a new shimmer surfaced at the edge of Aerin’s vision—faint, easily missed.

  Attention Accrued

  Source: Guild (Unspecified)

  Status: Monitoring

  Aerin swallowed.

  They are circling, Liora said softly. Not to attack. To measure.

  “Measure what?”

  How much you change the places you pass through.

  He looked around the hall again—really looked this time.

  At the adventurers pretending not to stare.

  At the notice board where new contracts had already been pinned higher than his reach.

  At the subtle way the clerk avoided meeting his eyes now.

  Progression had a shape.

  So did suspicion.

  Aerin stepped back outside, the cool air grounding him.

  “Next time,” he murmured, “we should probably break something obvious.”

  Liora’s presence warmed, dryly amused.

  No, she replied. Next time, we do it again.

  In the distance, somewhere far beyond mapped territory, something old shifted—

  —not because it was threatened.

  But because it had been noticed.