Inside the System #82 Prison Cafeteria, Great General Jin Xiao stared down at the ten-foot yellow scroll lying across his knees while holding a wooden spoon in his gravy-covered right hand.
“Three... three hundred trillion Grain-Notes?!” Jin Xiao nearly choked on a pickled radish. “Hey! Bookkeeper with the round glasses! How in the nine blazing hells did you calculate three hundred trillion?!”
Abacus Su didn’t even blink. He tapped the scroll with his gold-tipped brush and read off the itemized list in a brisk, cheerful voice:
“Item One: Towing and storage fees for 100,000 unregistered Solar-Fire Chariots parked illegally in an active Star-Train lane—one hundred trillion Notes! Item Two: Emergency bio-hazard cleanup of 1,000 unleashed, unvaccinated Star-Eating Fire Worms threatening public heating boilers—one hundred and fifty trillion Notes! Item Three: Smashing one reinforced glass skylight above Serving Line #1 with your forehead, plus forty-nine trillion, nine hundred and ninety-nine billion Notes for court processing fees—and five copper coins for the six buckets of braised worm-rice you just ‘tactically destroyed’ behind this pillar!”
Jin Xiao opened his mouth to roar that the Golden-Crow Sun Clan never paid traffic fines—only to catch sight of Old Guo walking out of the kitchen carrying a steaming, freshly baked tray of Cheese-Topped Braised Fire-Worm & Meat-Potato Casserole.
