The supply wagons didn’t arrive at noon.
They didn’t arrive at sundown either. By midnight, the limestone staging yard outside the Seventh Ward was fully bare, save for two starving pack mules chewing on dried reeds and an empty delivery manifest flapping in the dry mountain wind.
The Seventh Ward’s storage bins held exactly forty-two bushels of spirit flux.
At current consumption rates, Furnace Four and Furnace Two would burn through the leftover flux by tomorrow evening. After that, the molten hematite inside the heat-proof chambers would cool into a solid, fifty-ton plug of glass-fused melted rock waste, permanently ruining the furnaces and triggering an automatic quota breach under Sect Penal Code Section 8.
Execution by dismemberment. No appeals. No Form 32-B.
Lin Ke stood atop the melted rock waste berm behind the workshop. He stared out across the dark gorges toward the merchant concourse. The distant pavilion lights of the Grand Fortune Clan sparkled like cold, malicious jewels against the jagged mountain ridges.
Zhao Wuji had bought out the regional supply chain.
Every grain of refined red stone, every sack of Five-Element spirit flux, every bushel of bitter-salt cleansing salt headed for Iron Sword Province had been purchased at a two-hundred-percent markup and diverted into private Grand Fortune warehouses under “strategic reserve quarantine.”
