The cold edge of the saber bit into the skin of Lin Ke’s throat.
A trickle of warm blood slid down his neck. It soaked into the rough linen collar of his grey clerk robes. The scarred guard leaned in, his grin widening. He waited for the mortal boy to whimper, shake, or soil himself.
Lin Ke didn’t blink. His pulse remained at fifty-eight beats per minute.
With his left hand, hidden entirely behind the cedar intake counter, Lin Ke reached out and tugged a slender copper wire running along the wainscoting.
The wire was connected to the pavilion’s main office alarm bell.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
A massive brass gong mounted on the roof of the office pavilion began to toll. An ear-splitting, rhythmic alarm that signaled an active armed breach of an office post.
The sound rang through the timber roof beams, shaking the teacups on the shelves and echoing across the entire Seventh Ward.
“What did you do, you little bastard?!” the scarred guard barked, his sword twitching.
Before he could slash downward, the inner double doors leading to the elder’s personal residence burst open with a violent crash.
* * *
Elder Wu DeZheng charged into the antechamber, tripping over the hem of his sleeping robes, his silk cap clutched in one hand and a half-eaten steamed bun in the other.
“Who’s ringing the Territorial Breach Gong?!” Wu shrieked, his flabby face purple with fury. “Who’s disturbing my digestion?! If this is about the pine charcoal—”
Wu froze mid-stride.
He stared at the three armed guards standing in his intake hall with drawn blades.
He stared at the steel pressed against his Assistant Clerk’s throat.
And he stared at the red blood dripping onto the polished cedar counter.
The scarred guard quickly stepped back, lowering his sword by half an inch, offering a curt, arrogant nod. “Elder Wu. We’re officers of the Grand Fortune Clan executing a legal debt seizure under Ancestral Promise 409. This clerk obstructed a legal collection.”
Lin Ke stepped forward, sliding the yellowed debt promise off the counter with steady fingers.
He walked past the drawn swords, bowed with perfect forty-five-degree clockwork care. Then he placed the parchment directly into Elder Wu’s trembling hands.
“Elder Wu,” Lin Ke said in a calm, cold and exact drone that cut through the silence like an audit blade. “Please inspect Section Three, Sub-clause D.”
Wu adjusted his glasses, his watery eyes squinting at the spidery characters on the yellowed parchment. “Sub-clause D...?”
“The Zhao Clan guards entered this precinct without an office clearance docket,” Lin Ke stated clearly. “They drew weapons inside a chosen clerical zone. Under Sect Administrative Statute 19-C: ‘Territorial Jurisdiction Failure’, if secret body blood is spilled on the floor of an office precinct during an unvalidated debt collection, the entire ward is placed under immediate military quarantine by the Disciplinary Council.”
Wu looked up, his brow furrowing with confusion. “A... Quarantine?”
“Yes, Elder Wu,” Lin Ke continued. His voice dropped into the terrifying, steady pace of a headsman reading a seizure notice. “And Under Sect Treasury Regulation 88: Section Four... All office pension allotments for the head elder are frozen during the pendency of the subsequent Disciplinary Council hearing.”
Lin Ke leaned in by half an inch.
“An hearing,” Lin Ke added softly, “which takes a lawful minimum of three years to resolve.”
Three years.
Elder Wu had exactly four years and one month left until his old family retirement payout.
If his pension was frozen for three years under an office quarantine hearing, his service records would be locked, his accrued longevity credits would be audited by the inner peak accountants. His sixty-year retirement lump sum would evaporate like dew in a fire blast.
The steamed bun slipped from Elder Wu’s fingers, rolling into the soot on the floor.
The color fully drained from the old elder’s face. That turned him the sickly gray of curdled soy milk. Then, as the sheer horror of a three-year pension mid-air fully colonized his nervous system, the blood surged back into his cheeks in an explosion of blazing bright, frantic rage.
“My...” Wu squeaked.
His chest swelled like an overpressurized bellows.
“MY PENSION!” Wu roared.
* * *
The old fighter’s Qi Gathering Stage 6 aura erupted from his body with the force of an erupting volcano.
The spiritual pressure blasted through the antechamber. It tore the curtains from their bronze rods and swept three heavy cedar chairs across the floor.
Wu scrambled to his desk, grabbed his massive, four-pound solid bronze office seal—the old family badge of office granted by the founding sect masters—and slammed it down onto the cedar table with such titanic, frantic fury that a fine china teacup shattered into powder.
“YOU INSOLENT, DOG-BRED MERCENARY SCUM!” Wu screamed, spit flying from his lips like arrows, his finger stabbing toward the scarred guard’s nose.
“You dare bring drawn iron into my pavilion?! You dare threaten my clerk with a butcher’s knife?! You dare try an unvalidated extrajudicial asset seizure on my floor and endanger my sixty-year retirement payout?!”
The scarred guard took two steps back. His face was pale, stunned by the sheer, unhinged ferocity of an old bureaucrat who had just realized someone was trying to touch his retirement fund.
“Elder Wu, wait!” the guard stammered, raising his hands defensively. “This is a legitimate debt signed by his father—”
“I DON’T CARE IF IT WAS SIGNED BY THE JADE EMPEROR HIMSELF!” Wu shrieked, slamming the bronze seal down again, cracking the cedar desktop straight down the center.
“GET OUT OF MY PAVILION BEFORE I STRIP YOUR Training BADGES AND CONSIGN YOUR ENTIRE CLAN TO THE PENAL SALT MINES FOR ARMED INSURRECTION!”
Wu lunged forward, brandishing the four-pound bronze seal like a war club, ready to smash the guard’s skull in with official office power.
The three guards didn’t wait for a second warning.
Scared by the old elder’s suicidal fury, they snatched up their sword sheaths, scrambled backward through the antechamber doors. Then they fled into the pouring rain like whipped dogs.
The heavy doors slammed shut behind them.
Silence dropped over the shattered office. It was broken only by the sound of rain drumming against the roof and Elder Wu’s wild, wheezing gasps as he clutched his chest, leaning heavily against his ruined desk.
Lin Ke walked calmly over to the table, picked up the yellowed debt promise from the floor. Then he folded it neatly into his sleeve.
“A fourteen-day stay of execution under office review,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat and unperturbed. “Thank you for your decisive intervention, Elder Wu.”