The iron spear tip trembled three inches from Old Chen’s coarse linen tunic.
The gate guard, a lanky young cultivator named Zhao Wu with grease on his chin, stared at the stamped gold seal on the cedar post. His crimson morality score flickered with nervous irritation: -15/100.
“You’re bluffing, old man,” the guard scoffed, trying to sound menacing while shifting his weight from boot to boot. “The Sect Master was drinking wine with twenty clan lords. He would never let four hundred workers walk out of the gate in the middle of the night without paying a single copper stone.”
“The ink is still tacky,” Old Chen replied, not flinching an inch before the spear point. “And the blood-seal belongs to Sect Master Yan Lie himself. If you obstruct an official sect decree, boy, your head will sit on that gatepost by morning.”
Before the guard could reply, heavy leather boots stomped through the dark pine needles behind the outer barn.
“What is all this infernal racket?!” a harsh, nasal voice barked from the darkness.
A stout man in greasy purple silk robes waddled into the yellow lantern light. In his right hand, he held a coiled leather whip with brass studs. In his left, he carried an empty wooden crate.
