The klaxon sounded at midnight.
It wasn’t a bronze chime or a temple bell. It was an emergency paging horn carved from the horn of a Void-Borer Giant beast, bolted directly into the ceiling of the Dispatch Registry. Its shriek tore through the humid air like a saw through bone. It dropped every scribe’s brush in an instant.
Red emergency oil lanterns began to spin along the walls, casting wild circles of crimson light across the rows of ink-stained desks.
At Desk 14, Scribe Bai Song stood up so wildly his wooden stool clattered backward across the flat stone slabs.
His face had lost every trace of color. His eyes bulged at the glowing bronze relay end-post embedded in the center of his desk. There, a fist-sized lump of raw lightning-quartz was flashing an angry, jagged purple.
“No... No, not Sector Twelve,” Bai Song whimpered, his voice trembling as he grabbed a brass routing peg with both hands. “Sector Twelve is the storm belt! A mortal fighter is attempting the Golden Core breakthrough without an old family appointment! The strike is stalled in the intake buffer!”
“What happens if the queue drops?” Lin Ke asked, stepping up behind the trembling clerk.
