The Administrative Manor of Iron Bastion was built with the cold, unbending opulence of a royal counting house. Polished black marble floors reflected the gold-leaf ceiling beams, while heavy cedar chests lined the office halls. It was bound with thick brass straps and sealed with the red wax of the Hegemonic Regional Pavilion.
Normally, the halls echoed with the scratching of quill pens and the soft rustle of silk sleeves. Now, however, the central accounting gallery smelled of burnt parchment, wild sweat, and shredded ledgers.
At the far end of the long gallery stood the vault of the Imperial Treasury. A five-foot-thick circular door forged from dense dragon-iron. It was sealed by three linked runic dial-locks and sixty hardened alloy locking bolts. From within the sealed vault came the wild, metal clinking of spirit stones being shoveled into spatial storage bags at breakneck speed.
“Hurry, you fool!” Envoy Master Wu’s muffled, panicked screech echoed through the keyholes. “Stuff the high-grade lightning crystals first! The barrier is groaning! That mad tradesman’s prediction is already coming true! When the sky cracks, the entire border will drown in deep-sea fiends!”
Beside Wu, Bursar Qian—a portly man whose silk robes were soaked through with scared sweat—dropped a silver scoop into a chest of emerald spirit stones. His hands shook so wildly that jewels clattered across the flat stone slabs. “Envoy Wu... What if the guard post commanders discover the shortfall?!” Qian whimpered, his double chins quivering. “Four million two hundred thousand stones! That was…
