Marquis Zhao stood in the road mud. The five-foot dragon-bone broadsword was resting across his open gauntlets.
For three decades, the name of Marquis Zhao had made country governors tremble and sect patriarchs bow until their foreheads bled. He had carried out three royal extermination edicts. He had burned the floating pagodas of the Azure Cloud Sect. He had commanded forty thousand sky soldiers across the northern steppe. In all those years, no enemy had ever forced his feet to touch the dirt of a defeated province.
Now, he stood in two inches of pig-manure mud on a frontier cart track. He looked into the eyes of a mortal with burned hands.
“You have humiliated the Central Celestial Empire, Lin Tao,” Zhao said, his voice a hoarse, raspy croak that barely carried above the evening breeze. “You have grounded the Emperor’s Third Fleet without drawing a bowstring. You have made a mockery of thirty thousand years of royal divine law.”
“Your law made a mockery of itself, Marquis,” Lin Tao replied, his voice level, calm, and devoid of mockery. “A law that demands the impossible isn’t divine power. It’s an unhandled exception. I merely let your system run until it ran out of memory.”
