The central judgment hall of the Azure Cloud Sect was a stone-built terror engine designed to shatter the sanity of common mortals.
Twelve giant stone pillars of black dark rock, each four feet thick, rose eighty feet into the vaulted ceiling, where sculpted bas-reliefs depicted ancient dragons dropping through clouds of sky lightning to dismember rebellious mortals. The floor was paved with seamless black flat stone slabs, polished with beeswax and walnut oil until they mirrored the flickering flames of thirty bronze fire bowls suspended from massive iron chains.
At the far end of the hall sat Senior Disciplinary Elder Song upon a raised dais of white marble.
Flanking the dais stood eight armored punishment guards, their faces hidden behind menacing masks of cold-hammered iron, their gauntleted hands resting on seven-foot poleaxes whose crescent blades were etched with frost-runes.
Lin Tao and Tie Shan were marched into the center of the hall, their iron-shod guards halting at the outer edge to leave the two prisoners standing alone in the circle of fire bowl light.
Tie Shan stood with his boots planted shoulder-width apart, his heavy iron pry-bar resting vertically against his right thigh. His scarred, bare chest was impervious to the freezing draft that swept through the high hall. His dark eyes were fixed straight ahead on the marble dais, steady as granite.
Beside him stood Lin Tao, his ragged hemp smock clean but frayed at the hem.
Beneath his loose sleeve, his left arm remained securely locked still by the four-inch iron land-mapper’s metal pen and spider-silk cord bound across his fractured collar bone. His right palm was wrapped in clean burlap soaked in herbal moss sap. Though charred from yesterday’s 48,000-volt spark grounding in Sector Nine, the astringent medicine had prevented black flesh-rot. That left his fingers flexible and alert.
Elder Song leaned forward over his marble reading desk. He tapped his brass accounting rod against the stone.
“Slave Lin Tao,” Song began, his voice echoing off the high dark rock arches with the dry rustle of autumn leaves. “You have labored in Sector Nine for a single diurnal shift. Yet last night, the underground monitoring arrays registered an abnormal energetic surge from Drift 9-B—a pulse of forty-eight thousand volts through the Precursor channel.”
Song paused, his hawkish gaze boring into Lin Tao’s face like a diamond drill.
“At the same time,” Song continued, “sixty-four tons of refined copper flux ore are missing from the lower warehouses. Overseer Hu has submitted a formal settling naming you as a foreign saboteur in league with border syndicates.”
Song unrolled a strip of parchment containing Lin Tao’s slave registry.
“Captured three years ago in the border marshes,” Song read aloud, his voice dripping with condescension. “No spiritual roots. No family lineage. An illiterate dreg from the outer lands. Yet yesterday, you spoke of balance points and fulcrums like a senior artificer. Where did an illiterate slave learn the mathematics of stone and levers?”
The eight iron-masked guards stood with their backs to the dark rock pillars, unmoving as iron statues. They were the Silent Guards of the Disciplinary Logistics Bureau. Men whose throat cords had been cut by spiritual oaths upon entering service, ensuring that no state secret or financial mismatch heard within these walls could ever be whispered in the tea houses of the outer sect.
Lin Tao observed their stance through his left eye. Though their armor was imposing, their weight spreading was flawed. The heavy iron poleaxes forced them to lean forward onto their toes. That left their heels ungrounded against any sudden ground-shaking tremor.
A freezing draft swept through the high vaulted arches above. It carried the bitter scent of pine resin and winter frost from the mountain peaks. The thirty brass fire bowls flickered all at once. It cast long, dancing shadows across the polished floor that looked like grasping claws.
Lin Tao didn’t tremble. He didn’t drop to his knees to beg for mercy.
Through his left eye, the judgment hall lost its terrifying mystical air, resolving into a crisp, pale-green wireframe blueprint of load-bearing loads and runic bus-lines:
Beside the Elder’s desk, resting upon a carved tripod of cast bronze, sat an ornate circular mirror three feet in width.
The face of the mirror was not glass. It was cast from a specialized alloy of refined silver, copper, and crushed spirit-pearls, polished to a brilliant, terrifying finish. Around its bronze bezel were carved nine nested rings of ancient Precursor script. Runes that modern fighters blindly copied without understanding their underlying signal-processing logic.
This was the Mirror of Nine Truths.
Fighters used it to extract confessions from unsafe prisoners. Charged with an elder’s spiritual energy. Then, the mirror emitted a packed, clear beam of soul-probing heat wave directly into the subject’s eye nerves.
If the subject tried to utter a falsehood, the mental sour note in their frontal lobe would cause a phase shift in their spiritual sea. The mirror’s test sensor would detect the flow pushback mismatch, amplify the reflected wave by a factor of ten, and fry the subject’s brain cortex inside their skull like a roasted egg.
Elder Song placed his wrinkled right palm flat against the activation plate on the side of the bronze tripod.
“The Azure Cloud Sect is just,” Song announcedwith oily sanctimony. “We don’t execute men without evidence. Look into the mirror, slave. State your true name, your conspirators, and the location of the stolen copper flux. If you speak truth, you return to the mines. If you lie, the old family light will burn your spirit into gray ash.”
The bronze mirror began to hum. A deep, ringing shaking that made the oil in the fire bowls tremble.
A dull golden light coiled across the polished metal surface. It condensed into a blinding, pencil-thin focal point aimed directly at the bridge of Lin Tao’s nose.
Lin Tao didn’t look away. He slipped his uninjured right hand into the wide sleeve of his tunic. His fingers closed around the cold, polished curve of the dented brass water canteen hanging at his hip.