The parchment lay flat upon the pear-wood table, its white hemp fibers absorbing the dark pine-soot ink with permanent, unchanging clarity.
Across its four columns, the four articles of the Sovereign Basin Non-Interference Promise were transcribed in the formal office script of the Imperial Court. Every phrase had been weighed and measured by Lin Tao to ensure zero jurisdictional ambiguity. The seven southern provinces were declared an autonomous common preserve. The royal debt registers were declared zeroed. And the northern sky-fleets were barred from southern airspace in perpetuity.
Thirty paces back along the meadow trail, a delegation of fifty mortal village elders and terrace farmers stood watching in deep, respectful silence. They wore patched homespun coats and held wooden walking sticks and iron sickles, their sun-darkened faces carved by decades of ruthless taxation. For thirty years, they had watched the golden dragon-ships go down from the clouds to strip their granaries bare. Now, they watched a royal warlord bend before a mortal land-mapper’s table.
Marquis Zhao stood before the scroll, his face pale beneath the mountain sun.
From his heavy belt, the warlord unhooked a velvet-lined rosewood box. He opened the brass clasp. He lifted out the great Dragon-Jade Seal of the Third Imperial Fleet. A four-inch cube of semi-clear royal green jade surmounted by a coiled sky serpent. Carved during the zenith of the Second Dynasty, the seal was infused with dragon-vein deep ring and deeply engraved with eighty-one royal characters that carried the full executive power of the…
