I spent four days corroborating my chosen [Faith]-handling Aspect line, thus finally ending the "work schedule" week during which my Seeker logistician initiation period was lifted and I was promoted to a qualified Seeker logistician.
On the very first day of the new week, in the wake of but a lone hour-long [Cultivation] session to wake me up properly, I passed by Archivist Desideria to ascertain my decision to take up the mantle of logistics auditor, and received instructions on where to find Archivist Osgar's office.
It was a name I was unfamiliar with, but the location he was supposed to be located at wasn't.
The document repository.
The document repository was to the Faith's logistics what the intimidating Archive section was to the Seeker Sanctuary.
A suffocating accumulation of centuries’ worth of records, ledgers, forms, and reports, with a more or less hazardous organization system that made finding anything precise a specialist's meticulous endeavor.
As it neighbored the sanctuary while not being considered part of it, getting there took me only a couple of minutes of leisure flight.
Asking around for the exact location brought the total time from Archivist Desideria's office to Archivist Osgar's to a grand total of seven to eight minutes, which was when I knocked on the door of a room situated in one of those desolate corridors no one used due to how narrow they were.
"Enter," a muffled voice exited through the badly insulated door.
Opening the door with all the grace I could muster as a being barely bigger and most certainly lighter than the handle, I caught my first glimpse of Archivist Osgar, a short Zereth male who made his species proud by being plunged in a [Darkness]-suffused room with the barest of light.
"Hello. Scribe Solaena, here to begin working as a logistics auditor," I shortly introduced myself, totally unbothered by the low-light conditions.
"I'm aware," he replied, soundlessly putting his pen down on a massively cluttered desk heaped with what looked like six piles of a hundred reports each.
"I'm also aware we don't often get willing personnel in this department, as auditing work is rightfully considered one of the most tedious, monotonous, and mind-numbing logistics work one could aspire to do. Until you get to managerial roles, that is."
"I wouldn't know," I said with a shrug, "Managing is more of a [Leadership] kind of thing, and I dismissed it in favor of pursuing the [Inspiration] Aspect. Better fitting for my circumstances."
"Right." He nodded as if what I said made sense.
"So, see this pile?" Archivist Osgar's hand hovered above one of the piles of documents littering his desk. "This is everything you are required to know to carry out your duties. And I mean everything."
"From how the document repository is organized, to all the document types you'll ever encounter, to all the auditing methods you may or may not yet be aware of, to the present organigram of the auditing department, who to ask in case of complications, who to report to depending on the severity of your findings, everything-"
He tapped firmly on the pile, producing a muted thud.
"-is there. Every new logistics auditor receives that when they start, and you're expected to know everything within four months. In the meantime, you should have been given some introductory missions to help you get started, but am I assuming correctly that you would prefer to be left alone?"
"I would prefer that, yes," I confirmed. "I'm not certain how my plan to operate on my own and inspire others through finding problematic documents will endure through whatever is contained inside, though."
"Right." He tapped some more on the pile while staring me in the eyes, as if thinking about something, then eventually looked back down at his desk and picked up his pen where he had left it.
"If you want to start somewhere, start with coin ledgers. They're always a headache to audit, even when up to ten percent of the coins involved vanish. You don't need me to wish you good luck, do you?"
An hour later, following multiple back and forth between the document repository and Archivist Osgar's office, I had a new nest made out of hundreds of document pages perched on top of a previously very dusty shelf dedicated to coin ledgers dated 1458 to 1461 in the Resurgence Era Calendar.
Obviously, while I theoretically could, I wasn't in any hurry to start auditing coin ledgers.
Getting up to speed with the wisdom of my predecessors was a much more intelligent course of action before I began tackling the humongous task of commencing the [Cultivation] of my [Faith]-handling Aspect line.
Hence, I started studying.
And the more I read, the more similarities I found with the logistics auditor books originating from this very branch of the Faith of the Aspects that I had uncovered during my initial research, with only rare points of contention.
Overall, the duties of a logistics auditor were pretty much exactly what I anticipated.
I had to extract the [Truth] from the staggering complexity created by the intersection of hundreds of document types, overlapping, contradictory, conflicting forms, and years of accumulated records.
It wasn't about a single "category" of documents anymore.
A Sentinel assignment order placing an operative on patrol had to align with deployment rosters, which themselves had to correspond with patrol schedules and, eventually, after-action reports documenting the operation’s outcome.
And even then, that only established whether the Sentinel had truly been where the records claimed they had been.
From there came the logistical consequences.
Wages recorded within coin ledgers had to correspond to active deployment durations.
Transportation schedules had to justify how supplies, personnel, and equipment had physically reached their assigned locations within the required timeframe.
Maintenance records had to reflect the wear expected from the reported operational tempo.
Equipment registries had to account for every issued weapon, tool, and replacement component.
And the deeper I dug, the wider the web became.
Supply requisitions requested resources.
Supply manifests tracked their movement.
Supply origin registries justified where they had come from in the first place.
Expenditure reports measured their depletion.
Inventory ledgers confirmed whether any of it still remained by the end.
Every document depended on another.
Accordingly, every discrepancy ought to propagate outward like rot or necrosis spreading through interconnected veins.
A single falsified patrol duration could justify inflated wages, excess rations, fabricated maintenance costs, nonexistent supply transfers, and missing inventory across entirely separate departments.
And somewhere within all of it, buried beneath layers upon layers of procedural noise, delays, redundancies, and human error, sat the [Truth] I was duty-bound to look for as a logistics auditor.
To uncover it, entire methodologies had been developed over centuries—or more like they predated this Era—of accumulated logistical experience.
Cross-referencing, comparing independent records against one another until contradictions surfaced through sheer incompatibility.
Ledger reconciliation, forcing expenditures, reserves, inventories, and reported totals to align into a mathematically coherent whole.
Inventory auditing, physically verifying that what existed within warehouses, vaults, and storage facilities truly matched what documentation claimed remained there.
Then came paper trail tracing, perhaps one of the most exhausting processes of all, following the complete lifespan of a resource from procurement to transportation, allocation, usage, maintenance, and eventual depletion.
Variance analysis sought abnormalities hidden within expectation itself, identifying when actual consumption exceeded—or suspiciously failed to exceed—what operational circumstances should naturally have demanded.
Procurement review examined acquisitions with equal suspicion, searching for inflated pricing, favoritism toward recurring suppliers, or unauthorized purchases hidden beneath procedural legitimacy.
And beyond straightforward accounting techniques came the more interpretative methods.
Anomaly detection focused less on individual errors and more on patterns.
Repeated shortages tied to specific routes.
Recurring discrepancies surrounding particular officers.
Statistical irregularities that became impossible to dismiss once viewed across a sufficient scale.
Chain-of-custody verification reconstructed every authorized transfer of responsibility, ensuring resources had only passed through approved hands and identifying precisely where opportunities for tampering had emerged.
None of those methods alone uncovered corruption reliably, however.
Individual-upheld systems were too vast, too flawed, too saturated with ordinary mistakes for reality to ever remain perfectly clean.
A delayed caravan could resemble embezzlement.
A poorly trained quartermaster could produce records indistinguishable from deliberate falsification.
An exhausted clerk misplacing a shipment identifier could trigger discrepancies propagating through dozens of unrelated ledgers.
That was why logistics auditing was not solely about finding errors.
It was about interpretation.
Pattern recognition.
Understanding which inconsistencies belonged to the natural tendencies of Civilization, and which had possibly nefarious intents hiding behind them.
It took me a single day to go over the grand lines of the stack of documents Archivist Osgar handed me.
Then it took me a week of dedicating all my idle time towards it to truly grasp all the subtle nuances and paradoxical realities [Guided] had no choice but to be aware of to parse the [Truth] from what I would not otherwise dare to touch with a kilometer-long stick.
Once I ascertained I had nothing more to learn, the time had come to transition from theory to practice and unleash [Guided]’s fearsome capacity to never forget, never overlook, and never miss a single detail.
I expected a lot of document browsing, followed by lots of report writing alongside planning for how to spread my logistics auditor achievements in the most efficient ways...
◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇
"...I heard they already passed through the rift."
"...probably some initial scouting work. No one wants to set a direction and find their path barred by a colony of sand elementals."
"...do you think I should join up? It's not like they'll only need flyers, they'll also need some grounded units to act as support."
"...I think it doesn't matter. I'll enjoy the chaos from their frantic acquisition of supply and gear, and that will be it."
The news about the arrival of a Nexus Order company coincided relatively heavily with my—or rather [Guided]'s—first major findings on the logistic auditing side of my mostly unchanged [Cultivation] routine.
Just as I intended, going through the motions of reading thousands of documents did not induce any sort of relevant Essence development by itself, and as I wholly dissociated myself from the long hours I passed with my eyes stuck on one ledger or another, it left me with plenty of time to explore the inherent potential of idle time.
I had nothing to do but think while scrutinizing hundreds of reports, ledgers, and records, after all.
Concerning [Guided]'s auditing findings, honestly, I had no idea how they were unearthed, and did not have any intention to learn how to do it.
It had nothing to do with the complexity involved in rifling through all the documents dated 1458 to 1461—the latest yearly quartet available in the document repository, with the ongoing quartet being the 1462 to 1465 years of the Resurgence Era Calendar.
I could have otherwise treated this endeavor as some manner of [Cultivation] for the synthesis of my [Comprehension] Aspect by allowing myself to be [Guided] through calculating the normal distributions of coin expenditures or whatever.
But no.
I plainly could not be bothered until I at least had access to the—probably—better logistics auditing books from the Everwell Sector.
It would be pointless to learn things and cause undue Essence development only to have the whole thing be proven worthless in the blink of an eye, wouldn't it?
So it was that I ended up with a concise report on a seven-year embezzlement scheme spanning from 1455 to 1461 of the Resurgence Era, centered around the gradual falsification of weekly Sentinel patrol operations on the twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth floors.
The irregularities had first emerged through deployment rosters and Sentinel assignment orders, whose listed personnel counts consistently exceeded or subceeded those appearing within corresponding after-action reports.
At first glance, the discrepancies appeared insignificant—rotational replacements, reassigned patrols, delayed documentation—but the pattern repeated too consistently across too many cycles to remain coincidental.
Cross-referencing patrol schedules with transportation manifests revealed the next inconsistency.
Several supply requisitions accorded to support those regular patrols had reported reduced capacity despite full operational staffing supposedly remaining active within deployment records.
The missing Sentinels, however, still continued receiving wages according to the coin ledgers.
From there, the web expanded rapidly.
Supply requisitions tied to the affected patrol routes consistently requested paste boxes, new gear, and maintenance materials appropriate for larger active formations than were ever physically fielded.
Expenditure reports confirmed those resources had officially been consumed.
Inventory ledgers recorded corresponding stockpile depletion.
And yet inventory auditing of reserve warehouses revealed no proportional operational wear across the supposedly deployed equipment.
Maintenance records documented repair cycles for weapons and armor that after-action reports barely referenced participating in combat or extended field operations at all.
The final confirmation emerged through chain-of-custody verification.
Multiple requisition approvals, transportation authorizations, and stock release signatures repeatedly converged around the same cluster of Sentinel quartermasters, Seeker Scribes, and transportation coordinators across all seven years.
None of the individual discrepancies alone would have justified suspicion.
Together, however, they formed a coherent pattern.
Inflated patrol staffing used to justify excess logistical allocations, with the resulting surplus quietly siphoned away through manipulated inventory depletion and fabricated maintenance consumption.
By the time I finished writing the report and reviewed it, I realized that [Guided] had uncovered a scheme that had touched assignment orders, deployment rosters, patrol schedules, after-action reports, supply requisitions, transportation manifests, maintenance records, expenditure reports, inventory ledgers, and coin ledgers alike.
And all of it—seven years of coordinated corruption hidden beneath procedural complexity—had unraveled because one set of numbers in one innocuous document had failed to align with another, and [Guided] had forced me to browse through hundreds of dusty records to find where hundreds of other potentially related documents were.
Reading the sixty-page-long report that came with what could arguably be called an entire shelf of related and incriminating documents, I could only wonder how long it would have taken me to discover and prove something like that without [Guided].
Half a year with [Fate] smiling upon me at all times, I assumed.
With the subtlety and the relatively small amount of supply siphoned, however, realistically, the timeline could be extended to years.
All for a puny embezzlement scheme that did not warrant more than a rank demotion and a somewhat painful coin penalty.
If I, who didn't care for my Sentinel and Seeker ranks and my coins, had been the one subjected to the Faith's judicial punishment for the crime I uncovered...
I wouldn't have batted an eye.
That wasn't the subject, though.
Because now that I had uncovered this petty scheme, it was up to me and [Guided] to transform this affair into something that could generate a kind of [Inspiration] none of my genius studying, prodigious healing, ever-growing fighting ability, and unique socializing could incite.
I wasn't anticipating any sort of big reaction for this first occurrence of me discovering something, so that already negated a plethora of "grandiose" dissemination methods relying on a pre-established reputation as someone who accomplished the seemingly impossible.
That left commencing to establish that very reputation as the foremost outcome I could get out of it.
If I could pull it off at once, that would be for the best, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took two, four, or eight more.
Thus, it all came down to in-depth planning.
When to deliver my report to my hierarchical superiors.
When to share the news of my success in finding my first case.
How to spin that success to both elevate me without being too derogatory to my fellow auditors.
How to also become a source of [Inspiration] to my fellow auditors.
How to develop my relationship with my fellow auditors from then on, either keeping them away or taking them in as assistants to fetch documents for me and take care of time-consuming things...
With [Guided] having proven its outstanding ability to follow through with auditing inspections on a scale measured in years and scattered across hundreds of documents that did not present any apparent aberrations or irregularities, it truly became a matter of long-term planning.
Or rather, with it having reached that point...
It became about making my first attempt at long-term [Inspiration] [Cultivation] a reality.
And if that attempt allowed me to form the [Inspiration] Aspect, synthesize the [Exemplar] Aspect from it, and advance it by one, or [Ideal]istically, two Tiers, it would be even better.
As for the Nexus Order company's arrival to verify the existence of an atmospheric station...
Red Sand's internal conflicts degenerating further and further into violence, prompting me to partake in some healing rounds...
Those were irrelevant to my Path.
Though I admitted to being moderately curious about meeting actual members of the Nexus Order that weren't the symbol force that was present in the Red Sand Sector before that.