Up on the raised marble platform beside the Star-Steel Debtors’ Pit, Pei Xuan took the dark-gold Upper-Realm Spatial Ring from Hong Ling’s hands.
Down at the bottom of the pit, Enforcer Xue Sha—still wearing his flashing neon-yellow Debtor #0001 vest with his ankles glued to the floor by Old Yellow’s golden dragon-spit boots—let out a strangled wail.
“Don’t open that!” Xue Sha shouted, stretching his neck upward like a plucked rooster. “That ring contains my three hundred years of personal savings and confidential Blood-Moon Sect state secrets! If you touch a single Spirit Stone inside, the Upper-Realm Treasury Court will audit your whole planet!”
“Audit us?” Abacus Su adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles and let out a cold, professional chuckle as twenty accounting clerks set up long wooden sorting tables and brass scales across the plaza platform. “Debtor #0001, you are currently looking at the Chief Auditor of the Dry-Well Planetary Tax Ministry. In this jurisdiction, nobody audits us—we audit you! Young Master, please dump the whole ring onto the sorting tarp so we can log his down payment!”
“Alright, stand back a step,” Pei Xuan smiled.
Sending a single thread of his Rank 7 Peak Planetary World Emperor consciousness into the dark-gold ring, Pei Xuan effortlessly wiped away the last remnants of Xue Sha’s spiritual lock and tipped the ring upside down over the hundred-foot-wide velvet sorting tarp in the center of the plaza!
