The red sandalwood pavilion atop Falcon Roost Peak smelled of expensive Dragon-Saliva incense and cold mountain rain.
Zhao Wuji knelt on a stitched silk cushion, his spine rigid as an iron bar. Before him, draped in robes of dyed vulture plumage, sat Elder Kuang. The Golden Core elder didn’t look at the merchant heir. He held his right forearm out. He allowed the crimson-eyed spirit falcon to tear shreds of raw spirit-beast meat from a silver skewer.
“Your fire slave has moved,” Elder Kuang said. His voice carried the faint, dry rasp of grinding millstones. “Two miles into the Black Crag Basin.
Sinking pylons. Pouring copper.
Preparing for a breakthrough without submitting a potion-made application to the Clan.”
Zhao Wuji’s knuckles turned white against his brocade sash. “The boy filed a Form Eighty-Eight C through that coward Wu DeZheng. A thirty-day quarantine.”
“A piece of paper,” Kuang said, snapping the silver skewer between two fingers like a dry twig. “If Lin Ke breaks through to Foundation Establishment, his name is entered into the Sect Sovereign Ledger.
Under the royal charters, an inner student’s old family debt contracts are legally put out. You lose your three furnaces, your ore options, and your collateral.”
