Seven cranes were carved into the third jade step. They carried a crown between them. Pei Jing put his foot across the carving. The ring of the old cleaver settled against the seam of his trousers.
Ling Xiao leaned back. His fingers folded over the silk across his lap.
“A balance sheet,” he said. “You sound like a judge from the Board of Revenue. Very well. Let’s count.”
He named the five elders one by one. Yan Tianheng, Ge Yan, Xiao, Hu, and Meng. He counted Ge’s surrender as a loss alongside the others.
“Sixty years and two hundred thousand stones to train one Golden Core cultivator. You destroyed a million stones of sect assets in forty minutes. Then there are the thirty-six pylons. It took three generations to set the anchors, cast the conductors, and cut the founder’s runes. Replacing them will cost three million stones and thirty years of quarry work.”
He gave Pei Jing a thin smile.
“You broke three generations’ work over forty carts of crude iron and a dead deacon. The iron would fetch eighty ounces of silver in the capital. Leave it with the hungriest moneylender in the southern ports for a hundred years and it still won’t come to what you’ve cost this mountain.”
