At Marquis Zhao’s command, four junior scribes in pleated gray robes rushed down from the landing skiff. They carried a heavy folding frame stand table of lacquered pear-wood.
They set the table in the middle of the dirt road, between the line of leveled dragon-guard axe-spears and the muddy patch where Lin Tao and Tie Shan stood. With nervous, hurried movements, the scribes unstrapped three tube-shaped travel trunks of riveted star-iron, breaking the lead security seals with silver snips. The heavy iron bands fell away with hollow clanks. It exposed thick inside padding of purple velvet soaked with dried lavender and crushed bitter pine-resin leaves to protect the sacred parchment from damp mountain rot.
From within the velvet-lined trunks, they lifted the Master Tributary Ledgers of the Southern Realm.
These were not ordinary paper scrolls. They were sixty yards of heavy, gold-threaded sky silk, each yard woven with current-carrying red stone-jade ink traces that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic crimson glow. For seven hundred years, every sack of grain, every basket of raw iron ore, and every high-grade spirit stone pulled out from the southern provinces had been cataloged upon these fibers. It was bound by royal blood-oaths and ministerial encryption matrices that linked directly to the Central Treasury.
