An army marches on its stomach. A union of three thousand scribes starves on empty inkpots.
By the second day of martial lockdown, the lower basins were choking. Inquisitor Xie Dong’s guard post had welded the service grates shut, cut the grain elevators, and posted armored sentries at every stairwell. The scribes had water from the cooling water tanks. But their rations of spirit-rice had shrunk to half a fistful of gray gruel per man per day.
More critically, the self-running magic charm queue was running dry.
“We have two days of current-carrying pine-soot ink left,” Shen Yue reported. She rubbed her temples where three cooling acupuncture needles protruded from her hairline. “And forty bundles of mulberry paper. When the paper runs out, the queue stalls, and the paging horns start screaming again.”
In the medical under-road drain, Apothecary He tossed a handful of dried bitter-leaves into his iron kettle, cursing softly under his breath. “I have eighty men in acute heavy-metal pullback. If I don’t get fresh green-lotus rhizomes and cold-spring sulfur within twenty-four hours, their lung channels will seize permanently.”
Lin Ke leaned against a wooden pillar, sharpening the tip of his iron metal pen against a scrap of dark rock.
