The heavy pine doors of the Seventh Ward antechamber slammed open. He shivered on their forged iron hinges.
Cold rain swept into the room, with the wet, rhythmic crunch of heavy combat boots. Three men strode across the stone flags, their shoulders draped in rain-slicked dark grey cloaks that parted to reveal gleaming breastplates of refined spirit iron and heavy, broad-bladed sabers sheathed at their waists.
Each of them radiated the dense, aggressive spiritual pressure of Qi Gathering Stage 3 Peak fighters.
In their lead walked a guard with a ragged scar slicing through his left eyebrow, his fingers resting casually on the handle of a four-foot headsman’s blade.
Lin Ke stood behind the narrow cedar intake counter, dipping a dry wooden metal pen into a shallow jar of lamp oil.
Beside him, Meng Shan was stacking metal bars of low-grade flux iron into neat wooden crates. At the sound of the door crashing, the giant paused, his broad shoulders tensing, his skin instantly taking on the dull, non-porous grey hue of dark rock.
“Meng Shan!” the scarred guard barked, his voice echoing through the vaulted hall like a dull hammer striking lead. “Step forward and kneel.”
Meng Shan’s jaw set hard, but he didn’t move. He stood behind the iron crates, his massive arms hanging at his sides, breathing in deep, steady tripartite cycles.
* * *
The scarred guard stepped up to the counter, ignoring Lin Ke entirely.
With a sharp flick of his wrist, he unrolled a yellowed, blood-spotted parchment across the cedar wood. The parchment was old, brittle at the edges, and bore the crimson wax seal of the Grand Fortune Merchant Clan. He was stamped over a faded thumbprint in dark blood.
“Old family Debt Promise 409,” the guard announced coldly. “Signed forty-two years ago by Meng Bao, former Master Quarryman of the Third Ridge. Principal debt: four hundred low-grade spirit stones for load-bearing timber and air-powered drill bits. Piled up compound penalty interest: four thousand six hundred spirit stones. Total outstanding balance: five thousand spirit stones.”
The guard slapped his palm against the parchment, leaning forward until his scarred face was inches from Lin Ke’s nose.
“Meng Bao died eleven years ago,” the man sneered. “His sole blood descendant, Meng Shan, inherits the debt under Sect Clan Succession Law. You have five breaths to produce five thousand spirit stones, or Meng Shan is surrendered into immediate, irrevocable indentured servitude to the Grand Fortune Zinc Mines.”
The zinc mines.
Lin Ke had read the morbidity tables in the archive rolls. The lethal toxic arsenic and zinc vapors in the Grand Fortune Clan’s deep underground shafts dissolved the lung alveoli of fighters within six months. Nobody sent to the zinc mines ever walked out alive.
Meng Shan’s knuckles turned white.
The dark rock gray on his forearms deepened into black glass as Shard One of his breath flow began to absorb the surrounding moving tension. A low, underground growl began to rumble deep within the giant’s chest.
An intentional trap, Lin Ke analyzed in a fraction of a split second.
The guards hadn’t come for the money. Five thousand spirit stones was an impossible sum for an outer laborer. Even Elder Wu didn’t see that much cash in two years.
They wanted Meng Shan to draw an iron crowbar and swing.
Meng Shan raised a weapon against official debt guards. Then, Article 88 of the Punishment Codex applied. Armed pushback against sect-sanctioned debt recovery justified summary battlefield decapitation.
Lin Ke stepped forward.
He didn’t draw a weapon. He didn’t raise his voice. He simply placed his slender, ink-stained hand flat over the center of the yellowed debt promise, covering the Grand Fortune wax seal.
“The document is administratively invalid,” Lin Ke stated in a clear, flat voice.
The scarred guard blinked, staring at Lin Ke as though an insect had just decided to lecture an eagle on the laws of aerodynamics.
“What did you say, scribe?” the guard growled, his hand tightening on his sword handle.
“Article Fourteen of the Sect Commercial Bylaws,” Lin Ke recited without a single pause. “Sub-clause B: ‘Old family and Hereditary Debt Recovery’. Any debt claim exceeding five hundred low-grade spirit stones that seeks physical execution or body servant contract must be formally validated by the head Outer Administrative Elder of the turf prior to any physical asset seizure.”
Lin Ke tapped the copper medallion on his sash.
“This hall is the office property of the Seventh Smelting Ward, under the direct turf of Outer Elder Wu DeZheng. You possess no office seizure warrant issued by this office. Touch him, and you’re committing armed insurrection on an office post.”
* * *
The hall went dead quiet, save for the rain drumming against the roof tiles outside.
The two guards in the rear exchanged uneasy glances. They were hired blades accustomed to crushing illiterate miners who cried or fought back with pickaxes. None of their training had prepared them for a seventeen-year-old clerk in moth-eaten robes quoting hidden office sub-clauses with the deadpan calm of a supreme judge.
The scarred guard’s face twisted into an ugly, murderous snarl.
SHING.
Four feet of razor-sharp steel cleared its sword sheath with a high, ringing hiss.
The guard swung the broad-bladed saber up, resting the cold, polished flat of the steel directly against Lin Ke’s main neck blood vessel.
The spiritual pressure streaming from the blade was freezing, biting through Lin Ke’s grey linen collar, pressing just hard enough to draw a thin bead of crimson blood from the skin of his neck.
“A mortal clerk dares quote regulations to the Zhao Clan?” the guard whispered, his breath hot and foul against Lin Ke’s ear. “You think a copper badge and a piece of paper protects your neck from three inches of folded steel?”
The man pressed the blade a fraction of a tiny fraction of an inch deeper.
“We take his hands first, little dog,” the guard purred, his eyes wild with sadistic bloodlust. “And then we cut your tongue out of your mouth so you can never read a bylaw again.”