Violet light from the Judge’s glove cast long shadows across the black glass. Pei Jing stepped over to the flat slab that held his kit. He knelt and moved the bowl aside. Under it were two bamboo ledgers tied with hemp. Their pages smelled of old lamp oil.
Qi Shenxiao tapped the shaft of his halberd three times.
“You’re spending your last seconds arranging your supper things.”
Pei Jing dipped a pen into the inkstone and made a mark in the margin. “A clerk checks what’s in the warehouse against what the owner says is there.”
He rested the pen on the Black Mountain Whetstone.
“You call yours the Immortal Realm. Your elders say they live on light. But a body uses up fuel when it repairs itself. Where do they get theirs?”
“The Upper Realm drinks from the Source,” the Judge said. “The lower worlds feed the roots of the cosmic tree.”
“A tree gives something back to the ground. Alpha listed local withdrawals in gallons. Its dispatch book listed the outgoing cargo after refining. I used the conversion stamped on the freight page. Your own totals show forty million tons of refined marrow from this sector at a solstice. That’s the finished weight that leaves while the fields go dry.”
