The records annex beneath the Central Plaza smelled of dry rot, decomposing ink, and ancient dust.
Down here, four levels below the polished marble, ten thousand stone pigeonholes stretched into the gloom, stacked high with moldering rolls of zinc-paper dispatch tallies dating back through three dynasties.
A single brass oil lamp sat on a heavy granite table in the center of the room. Around it stood Lin Ke, Zhao Wuji. Inspector Cui Heng, whose midnight-blue robes were pinned back with silver clips to keep them from trailing in the dirt.
“Three hours until dawn,” Cui Heng said, tapping his jade ruler against the stone. “The High Court convenes at the first stroke of the morning bell. If I present an indictment against Lord Lei Qian without an unbroken evidentiary chain linking his private ledger to the macro-grid deficit, his advocates will have me impeached for political slander before the second cup of tea.”
“Then we don’t present an estimate,” Lin Ke said, sitting on an iron stool. “We present the exact commit where the leak started.”
In his sea of mind, Lin Ke mapped the four-thousand-year timeline onto a huge twin search tree.
Manual check was impossible. Reviewing four million scrolls would take a team of three hundred scribes eight decades. Lin Ke didn’t need to read every scroll. He only needed to find the exact boundary where the total recorded mortal sky-trial energy split apart from the measured output of the world-size intake chimney pipes.
