The candle on the drafting desk had burned down to a greasy pool of yellow sheep fat, sputtering against the damp slate table.
Four hours remained until dawn.
Outside the air-flow slit of the underground cellar, the rhythmic thud of Zhao Wuji’s staging rams struck the canyon walls at measured two-minute intervals. It was a deliberate, agonizingly slow dramatic performance designed to buy time while keeping Yan Tiexin’s scrying mirrors focused on the northern approach.
The cellar smelled of damp saltpeter, crushed sulfur dust, and the foul, oily dregs of Apothecary He’s nerve-soothing decoction.
The old physician had slammed the clay flagon onto the table an hour earlier before stalking out to tend the forge workers. “Drink the whole jar, boy,” He had barked, waving a stained horn scraper. “Ginseng marrow, powdered stag horn, and charred nightshade. Your eye vessels are swollen like red yarn. If you burn out your optic nerves running mental counts in the dark, I’m not nursing a blind cripple through the inquest.”
Lin Ke wiped the bitter residue from his lips and placed the green mutton-fat jade metal tube against his forehead.
A massive torrent of tightly packed spiritual records poured into his mind. Three thousand years of royal tax edicts, patent registration logs, court precedents, and the dense coded layout of the Imperial Soul-Leash Protocol.
