The central weighing terrace remained trapped in a choking, breathless silence. It was broken only by the ragged, choking sobs of Overseer Hu.
The three junior guards stood frozen by the timber overhead frame, their knuckles white on the brass pommels of their iron sabers, their boots glued to the granite flags. They had seen hundreds of miners beaten to death in this quarry. They had seen men whipped until their ribs were exposed, or crushed into pulp by falling shale.
Yet they had never witnessed a mortal slave stand fully motionless. Meanwhile, an overseer’s own divine martial technique rebounded to shatter his arm to splinters.
To their superstitious eyes, Lin Tao had not dodged. He hadn’t blocked. He had stood as still as an old family grave marker. The mountain itself had reached up to break Overseer Hu’s bones.
“Demonic art,” one guard muttered, his voice trembling so wildly his teeth clicked. “The ditch-rat carries an underground hex from the old graves.”
Lin Tao didn’t look at the guards. He didn’t acknowledge their fear.
He stood balanced on the balls of his boots. He felt the burning heat of the body fever pulsing through his neck and temples. His left arm remained firmly bound to his chest by the spider-silk cord, the iron land-mapper’s metal pen keeping his fractured collar bone in rigid posture. With his right thumb, he pressed the blunt tail of the metal pen through his sleeve. He anchored his mental thread to the physical reality of the mud.
physical check, his internal monitor confirmed. Pulse ninety-eight. Core heat thirty-nine point two. No mental dissociation.
He stepped around the weeping, kneeling overseer and walked calmly toward the huge master balance.
The ground shock from Hu’s failed strike had jarred the oak tripod supporting the twenty-foot bronze beam. The left basket, filled with Lin Tao’s five hundred pounds of blue-black shale, swung gently in the cold mountain draft, the brass dial on the mast still pointing five degrees into the negative zone.
Lin Tao raised his uninjured right hand. He pointed directly at the pivot where the bronze beam rested on its central iron knife-edge.
“Guards,” Lin Tao said, his voice flat, level, and devoid of emotion. “Look at the pivot point.”
The junior guards didn’t move. They stared at Lin Tao as if he were an unchained demon from the nether pits who might turn their blood to vinegar with a word.
Tie Shan stepped forward.
The young giant climbed onto the granite terrace with heavy, deliberate strides, his bare chest glistening with frost. He walked past the screaming Overseer Hu without glancing down, stopping directly beneath the pivot of the huge bronze scale.
Tie Shan reached up with his massive, callused right hand. His thick fingers, blackened by coal dust and scarred by iron wire, probed the underside of the right balance arm.
He found the seam of hardened pitch.
With a single, easy jerk of his thick forearm, Tie Shan tore the pitch away from the bronze casing.
A five-pound metal tube of raw, cast lead tumbled out of the cavity. It bounced across the granite terrace with a dull, heavy clatter. It rolled across the blood-stained flat stone slabs, coming to a halt directly against Overseer Hu’s boot.
Without the fraudulent balance weight, the huge bronze balance swung wildly to the left.
The heavy iron basket containing Lin Tao’s ore cart dropped six inches with a resounding clank of iron chains. Meanwhile, the brass dial on the mast swung straight past the center line into positive quota:
The forty miners standing in line along the haulage trench saw the lead metal tube.
A low, dangerous rumble rose from the line of bowed heads—a sound like dry brush catching fire before an autumn windstorm. Every single man in this quarry had been starved, beaten, or had their winter clothing taken away over the past three years for “light carts.”
The deficit had never been in the mountain. It had been in Overseer Hu’s five-pound lead slug.
“Five pounds,” an old miner from Sector 3 whispered, his voice rising in trembling fury. “Every cart. Every day. He stole our grain to buy his wine.”
The line of laborers took a step forward all at once. In their hands, rusted iron shovels and heavy ore sledges shifted, the metal scraping against the frozen mud with a sound like a drawn sword.
The junior guards scrambled backward, their hands fumbling on their weapon handles, realizing that if forty starving men charged the terrace, no martial art in the lower sect would save them from being trampled into slurry.
“The quota is filled,” Lin Tao said, his voice cutting cleanly across the rising fury of the mob. “The ore is true. We’re entitled to our morning shift tokens.”
Before the scared guards could reach for their token pouches, a shrill, piercing whistle echoed from the mountain pass above the quarry.
Down the winding switchback road came an official carriage of dark polished cedar. It was drawn by four white horned oxen with brass-tipped hooves. The carriage bore the black-and-gold pennants of the Disciplinary Logistics Bureau of the Azure Cloud Sect.
Surrounded by a dozen heavily armored guards carrying gleaming steel axe-spears, the carriage rattled over the timber bridge. Then it drew to a halt at the edge of the terrace.
The cedar door opened, and a tall, elderly man in luxurious purple robes stepped down into the mud. He held a scented silk handkerchief to his nose to ward off the reek of sulfur.
This was Senior Disciplinary Elder Song.
Song’s sharp, hawk-like eyes swept across the shattered flat stone slabs, the screaming Overseer Hu clutching his bone-pierced arm in the dirt, the fallen lead slug. The calm youth standing beside the balanced bronze scale.
Elder Song’s gray eyebrows twitched with sudden, cold fury.
“What’s this chaos?” Song demanded, his voice thin, cold, and razor-sharp. “Who authorized a riot during the morning flux muster?”