The word override hung over the pear-wood table like a sulfur flare.
Lord Scribe Wu scrambled to his feet. He wiped the wet clay from his crimson damask robes with trembling hands. His eyes darted between Marquis Zhao’s murderous golden gaze and the calm, unbending expression on Lin Tao’s soot-streaked face. In the sky above, the Heavenly Mandate’s engine hum seemed to deepen. That rhythmic throbbing rang through the bedrock beneath their feet.
“Lord Marquis,” Scribe Wu stammered, his voice dropping to an anxious whisper. “A manual override on a main tributary ledger needs the joint application of the Commander’s Blood Seal and the Sixth-Rank Ministry Stamp. It bypasses all regional proof checks. If... If there’s an error in the underlying registers, the feedback will propagate directly into the capital’s central accounting array!”
“I don’t care about the capital’s abacuses!” Marquis Zhao roared, slamming his golden gauntlet onto the pear-wood table.
The impact sent a blast wave through the wood that rattled the jade paperweights. But the current-carrying red stone-jade ink on the silk merely pulsed with an angry violet shimmer. It took in the moving shock through its internal ley-line capacitance. The pear-wood groaned, small hairline fractures racing across the polished varnish. But the ancient silk remained flawless.
