The crash of the iron gavel was the sound of a financial dynasty cracking down the center.
In the VIP box, Zhao Wuji took two stumbling steps backward, his silk robes tangling around his boots. It knocked over a lacquer tea table. Hot spiced wine and shattered celadon spilled across the crimson carpet, his six senior barristers already scattering like roaches. It ripped the Grand Fortune badges from their lapels as they fled into the crowd.
“Traitorous dogs!” Zhao shrieked, his voice cracking with frantic venom. “All of you! Lu! Wu! Lin Ke! You think you can strip the Grand Fortune Clan with a piece of paper?”
Zhao reached into his breast pocket. He pulled out a six-inch eight-sided medallion of polished white jade wrapped in golden dragon wire:
A Golden Core Spatial Escape Token.
A supreme life-saving treasure, gifted to the clan’s eldest heir by an elder ancestor, linked directly to the Grand Fortune Clan’s fortified underground teleportation gateway forty miles away in the country capital.
Zhao bit his thumb, smearing fresh bright red blood across the golden runes.
“When I return with the clan’s private armies,” Zhao snarled, his face twisted into an ugly sneer of madness, “I’ll have every slave in the Seventh Ward flayed alive! Every bone in your body will be carved into chopst—”
