The rain washed the soot from the white jade stones, but it couldn’t wash away the blood.
In the eastern courtyard of the Scripture Pavilion, thirty private merchant wagons belonging to the Grand Fortune Clan were hitched to panic-stricken draft beasts. Court guards and clerks were wildly tossing iron-bound trunks of gold coins, deed ledgers, and stolen high-grade spirit stones into the wagons, preparing to flee through the southern mountain pass.
At the entrance of the underground archives, four fanatical judges who had survived the blast were pouring barrels of sulfur oil across the carved cedar doors, torches raised to burn six thousand years of criminal ledgers to ash.
“Burn it!” a judge captain screamed, his voice wild. “Don’t let the fire slaves read the truth! Purge the records!”
*
Before the torch could touch the oil, the air around the archive doorway went cold and dead.
Lin Ke stood sixty paces away, his out-of-joint right shoulder hanging limp, his chest wrapped in bloody rags. He raised his uninjured left hand, focusing his newly steadied Soul Formation domain across the archive entrance.
A nearby Reality Sandbox snapped into place around the four judges.
