The air inside the Logistics Clerk hall reeked of spilled ink, stale mutton fat, and sheer, distilled office panic.
Tall stacks of parchment manifests teetered on every cedar table like fragile stone cairns. Dust motes swirled in the slant of afternoon light, kicked up by twenty junior clerks running back and forth with bamboo slip cases, their foreheads shiny with cold sweat.
Behind the massive blackwood ledger desk, Elder Wu DeZheng sat slumped in his high-backed chair, his round face the color of curdled tofu.
His ritual grey robes were stained with dried ink across the cuffs, his official jade hairpin sat crooked in his thinning topknot. His right hand was twitching with a reflex tremor as he clutched a sheaf of casualty reports.
“Three hundred and twelve,” Elder Wu wheezed, not even looking up as Lin Ke kicked the heavy oak door shut behind him. “Three hundred and twelve casualties across the northern border pickets in under forty-eight hours! And the Disciplinary Hall in the Central Mountain has already stamped an emergency check audit on my forehead!”
Wu slammed a trembling palm onto a vermilion-sealed document.
“If the ore output drops another ten percent, Elder Yan will have my skin stripped and hung from the gatehouse as a windsock! My pension! Thirty-four years of flawless supply order filings. I’m going to end up in the soul-scourging pits because a few unwashed blood-cultists don’t respect country supply chains!”
