The white granite was cold enough to bite through the thin soles of Lin Ke’s cloth shoes.
Rising in eighty nested tiers around the natural limestone bowl of the mountain peak, the Grand Concourse was a monument to three hundred years of royal vanity. Ten thousand students packed the stone benches: inner sect students in silk robes of peacock green and gold. Outer students shivering in hemp tunics. And high above, perched on floating jade platforms suspended by anti-gravity formations, sat the elders of the ruling clans.
In the southern VIP pavilion, draped in gold-stitched silk canopies bearing the crossed scales of the Grand Fortune Clan, sat Zhao Wuji.
He wore an outer mantle of midnight-blue brocade lined with white ermine fur. His hair was bound by a coronet of carved sky jade. Flanking him were six senior legal barristers in maroon robes, stacks of red-ribboned ledgers piled on lacquer tables, and two grim-faced representatives wearing the blood-red vulture crest of High Elder Kuang.
Zhao was not preparing for a simple martial arts duel.
He had planned the entire assembly into a court execution: invoking Sect Disciplinary Statute 1 to bring Lin Ke directly before the High Punishment Trial on charges of high treason, heretical scripture corruption, and grand embezzlement of sect resources.
