Senior Disciplinary Elder Song sat on the steps of his marble dais, coughing wildly as white smoke from his singed beard drifted into his watery eyes.
His luxurious purple silk robes were smeared with soot and scorched along the left shoulder. His wispy gray goatee had been burned down to a ragged, blackened stub that smelled of roasted hair and sulfur. In his trembling hands, he held a cooling, jagged shard of the Mirror of Nine Truths.
The mirror was an ancient, irreplaceable heirloom of the Disciplinary Logistics Bureau, forged three hundred years ago by the Fifth Patriarch himself.
Now, it was three pieces of twisted bronze melted rock waste, its sacred surface cracked into an unrecognizable spiderweb of melted copper and cloudy glass.
The head scribe crawled out from beneath his wooden desk on all fours, his face gray with limestone dust. It trembled as he approached the foot of the dais.
“Elder... Elder Song...” the scribe stammered, touching his forehead to the black flat stone slabs. “The slave... He spoke no words! The sacred mirror cracked before he opened his mouth!”
Song didn’t answer right away. He stared at Lin Tao with wide, bloodshot eyes that were filled with an emotion far more potent than anger: total, superstitious terror.
To Elder Song’s classical Daoist mind, artifacts didn’t suffer component-level sight feedback loops.
A sacred mirror of the Fifth Patriarch didn’t shatter because of an angled brass water canteen. It shattered because it had tried to peer into something that the heavens themselves had forbidden mortals from observing.
“A soul of unmeasurable depth,” Song whispered to himself. His voice shook with awe and horror. “Or an old family curse buried in the deep earth... The mirror didn’t read his mind. It struck an ancient boundary and was broken by the Heavenly Dao.”
Song reached into his robes. He pulled out a small silk scroll entitled The Classic of Mountain Spirits and Leyline Omens.
With trembling fingers, he unrolled the ancient text, his eyes darting across the woodblock illustrations.
“Chapter seven,” Song muttered feverishly. “When the earth-dragons are angered by too much quarrying, the mirrors of judgment will shatter, the bronze scales will twist. The mountain will demand blood. It’s an omen! A direct old family warning from the founding fathers!”
Lin Tao watched the elderly bureaucrat build his own elaborate, mystical explanation for a simple sensor overload.
This was the beauty of dealing with superstitious systems. When an unhandled exception occurred, people didn’t look for the hardware bug. They invented a god to explain the crash.
Lin Tao took half a step forward, keeping his head bowed in mock respect.
“Elder,” Lin Tao said, his voice quiet, steady, and solemn. “The stone in Sector Nine was laid down before the Sect was founded. When the deep earth speaks, bronze can’t bear the weight.”
Elder Song swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Yes...” Song murmured, clutching the bronze shard to his chest. “The mountain was quarried too deep. Hu’s greed disturbed the old family earth-veins. Now the heavens are sending warnings through the mirrors.”
Elder Song looked down at the charred hem of his purple robe. His hands shook as he touched the blackened silk. This robe had cost sixty high-grade spiritual stones, tailored by the master weavers of the Southern Capital for his promotion ceremony three years ago.
“Ruined,” Song whimpered under his breath, his voice cracking with self-pity before hardening into office rage. “Three months of salary destroyed in a heartbeat! Scribe! Add twenty rolls of stitched purple silk to the emergency repair supply order for the Ancestral Hall! Mark it under ‘altar curtain replacements due to heavenly lightning’!”
The head scribe nodded wildly, his brush flying across the parchment. In the Azure Cloud Sect, as long as a loss was attributed to an Act of Heaven, the royal accountants would reimburse the cost without an audit.
Song scrambled to his feet, waving his brass accounting rod wildly at the scared scribes.
“Record the judgment!” Song commanded, his voice trembling with urgency. “The slave Lin Tao is cleared of demonic affiliation! The destruction of the mirror is declared an Act of Heaven due to geomantic disturbance in Sector Nine! Order forty sticks of purple sandalwood incense burned at the Ancestral Shrine right away to appease the spirits! And sacrifice three white rams at the quarry gates before sundown!”
The scribes scribbled wildly on their parchment scrolls, their hands shaking.
“And what of Overseer Hu, Elder?” the head scribe asked.
Song’s face twisted in poisonous hatred. “Hu is stripped of all rank, his pay taken away to pay for the incense. He’s confined to the lower sick room until his bones heal! If he shows his face in this hall again, I’ll personally throw him down the shaft!”
Song turned his fearful eyes back to Lin Tao and Tie Shan.
“Return to Sector Nine,” Song whispered, stepping backward toward his private chambers. “Clear the ore from the deep drift. And don’t... Don’t look into any more mirrors.”
Lin Tao and Tie Shan turned and walked out of the judgment hall into the cold morning air.
Across the courtyard, hiding in the shadows of the sick room row of stone pillars, stood Overseer Hu.
His braced arm was bound to his chest. His yellow teeth were ground together so hard that blood dripped from his gums. He had watched the entire proceeding from the doorway. He had seen Lin Tao walk out alive, cleared of all charges. Meanwhile, Hu was left disgraced, penniless, and ruined.
“Clever dog,” Hu hissed through his teeth, his eyes burning with poisonous malice. “You broke my arm. You stole my ledgers. You made Song bow to you.”
Hu turned toward the dark alley behind the stables. There, three men in black leather armor stood waiting in the shadows, their belts lined with poisoned iron daggers.
“Tonight,” Hu whispered, tossing a purse of stolen silver into the dirt at their feet. “Sector Nine. Bring me his hands and his tongue.”