Deacon Han Tianfeng didn’t unroll a parchment scroll. He didn’t ignite a red stone paper magic charm. To expend a spirit-magic charm upon an unranked mortal, even a peak martial grandmaster who had cut barbarian horsemen in two, would have represented an unrecoverable deficit of three copper spirit-shards—a sum Han wouldn’t spend on a stray hound in the gutter.
In the traditional type-list of the Nine Provinces, mortals didn’t warrant the waste of refined artifacts. They were living substrate. When an ox refused to pull the plow, the driver didn’t consult an astrological chart. He selected a switch of hazel wood and struck the flank.
Around the grand hall, the air had thickened with a terror so acute that the sound of breathing had ceased. Three hundred royal officials remained pressed into the damp tiles, their fingers clawing into the stone joints, their eyes clenched shut. They knew what was coming. For two hundred years, dynastic records had noted with trembling ink the fates of mortal heroes who had dared look an immortal in the eye. Country champions bisected by invisible blades, martial patriarchs reduced to smoking heaps of ash before their assembled students, rebellious generals whose heads were delivered to their emperors in baskets of wet salt.
