The private partitions were not hidden behind magical wards. They were hidden behind layers of office obfuscation.
Magistrate Cui Jue sat at his long ebony desk. His hands shook so wildly that three separate bone cups of bitter underworld tea had already splashed onto the stone floor. Between his trembling fingers, he held the Master Administrative Key. A heavy tablet of carved tortoise-shell that granted read-only access to the Netherworld’s historical archives.
“The Sovereign said it was an emergency contingency reserve,” Cui whispered, his eyes darting wildly toward the towering granite doors of the hall. “Three hundred years ago, when the Upper Celestial Court reduced our annual spiritual pay, King Qin Guang issued an emergency decree. He said we had to store incoming souls in deep swap space until sky capacity swelled.”
Zhao Wuji stepped forward, pulling a pair of brass-rimmed glasses from his brocade vest. The young merchant heir pulled a thick ledger of mortal mortality statistics from his satchel, laying it flat alongside Cui’s tortoise-shell tablet.
“Contingency reserves don’t run a ninety-five percent diversion rate for three hundred in a row years, Judge Cui,” Zhao Wuji said coldly. “In the merchant guilds, we have a name for an executive who hides ninety-five percent of his inventory in offshore warehouses while claiming supply-chain shortages.”
