The central weighing platform of the Azure Cloud Sect’s iron-silt quarry was a stone-built monument to institutional theft.
Built upon a raised terrace of dressed gray granite, it stood four feet above the muddy floor of the haulage trench. This height served a dual purpose. It kept the overseers’ pigskin boots out of the foul coal slurry. It ensured that every debt-bound laborer was forced to look upward toward power. Meanwhile, their daily labor was weighed and judged.
In the center of the terrace sat the master balance. A huge bronze beam twenty feet long, cast during the middle epoch of the sect’s spreading.
The beam was suspended from a massive tripod of aged oak by heavy iron chains whose links were thick as a man’s wrist. On the left side hung an open box-shaped basket of cold-hammered iron, capable of holding half a ton of raw shale. On the right hung an iron balance weight cage filled with lead metal bars. It was stamped with the official wax seal of the Sect’s Disciplinary Logistics Bureau.
Overseer Hu sat in a carved cedar chair behind the bronze scale.
His swollen, broth-scalded thighs were wrapped in thick swathes of coarse linen soaked in rancid mutton fat and sulfur ointment. Every time the mountain draft blew through the pavilion, his heavy face twisted in a silent grimace of agony. Beside his chair rested his iron-banded heavy club, three feet of heavy, seasoned oak wrapped in rusted iron bands, its blunt tip resting upon a flat anvil stone.
Lin Tao pushed his wooden ore cart up the sloping timber ramp leading to the terrace.
Beneath his ragged hemp tunic, the four-inch iron land-mapper’s metal pen remained tightly lashed across his fractured left collar bone with four feet of spider-silk cord. The rigid splint held the broken bone ends in total immobility. While a deep, throbbing soreness radiated through his chest wall, the blinding, bone-grinding agony had subsided into a cold, manageable ache.
Beside him walked Tie Shan. It pushed a heavy cart piled high with blue-black shale, his massive bare torso glistening with morning frost and cold sweat.
“Halt the carts,” Hu barked, his voice sounding like dry stones grinding in a mill.
Two junior guards, clad in blue cotton vests and armed with long iron hooks, stepped forward. They caught the wooden lip of Lin Tao’s cart and tipped its contents into the bronze balance basket.
The blue-black shale poured out with an ear-splitting, echoing roar, throwing up a cloud of crushed stone dust that coated the bronze chains in gray soot.
The huge bronze beam groaned under the sudden five-hundred-pound impact. The chains squealed in their iron shackles as the basket plunged downward three feet.
Yet the back-and-forth swing settled. Then, the brass pointer on the mast hovered stubbornly five degrees to the left of the upright center line.
Lin Tao’s left eye cataloged the clockwork mismatch in half a second.
The pivot point of the bronze scale was physically misaligned. A five-pound slug of raw lead had been driven into a recessed cavity beneath the right balance arm, hidden by a layer of pitch and soot. The offset shifted the balance point by fourteen tiny fractions of an inch, ensuring that every single cart brought to this platform was officially recorded as ten pounds short.
It was an elementary accounting drain tube.
With five hundred carts crossing this platform every day, Overseer Hu was skimming two and a half tons of high-grade spiritual iron shale every twenty-four hours. Ore that was quietly passed to night wagons and sold to rogue pill-refiners in the southern border valley.
Hu leaned forward over the cedar table, his pig-like eyes glistening with malicious triumph.
“Ten pounds short,” Hu announced. He tapped the flat of his iron heavy club against the bronze dial. “Ten pounds of black shale missing from the quota. Punishment regulation four: any slave whose haul falls short of the morning muster forfeits his food token and receives ten strikes of the iron heavy club upon the joints.”
The haulage trench went dead silent.
Forty miners standing in line behind the timber ramp lowered their heads, their knuckles white on their wooden cart handles. Ten strikes of an iron heavy club upon the kneecap of a starving youth was not a punishment. It was an execution. Once the knee joint was shattered into bone meal, the victim couldn’t haul ore. Within three days, he would be thrown into the dead-damp pit to rot.
Tie Shan took two heavy steps onto the granite terrace.
The oak planks creaked under the giant’s six-foot-four frame. Tie Shan reached out with one massive, callused hand. His fingers curled around the iron rail of his own cart. It was heaped six inches above the brim with dense, virgin shale.
“Take mine,” Tie Shan rumbled, his deep voice shaking through the bronze chains. “His deficit. My cart.”
Hu spat a mouthful of betel nut juice onto the stones, his yellow teeth baring in a savage snarl.
“The regulations of the Azure Cloud Sect don’t permit substitution, animal,” Hu hissed, struggling to his feet with a hiss of pain as his scalded thighs pulled against his trousers. He took the heavy iron-banded heavy club in both hands. He stepped down off the cedar dais onto the flat stone slabs. “This clever dog thinks he can split boulders with words and spill soup on an overseer’s legs. Today, I break his knees. Tomorrow, you can haul his carcass to the ditch.”
Hu stepped forward until he was five paces from Lin Tao.
The overseer was not an ordinary mortal laborer. He was a fighter of the third stage of Qi Gathering. As his anger surged, a dull, oily gray spiritual aura coiled around his forearms, sinking into the rusted iron bands of his heavy club. The heavy weapon hummed with a low, hungry shaking that made the dust on the floor dance.
Lin Tao didn’t step backward. He didn’t drop to his knees to beg.
He shifted his boots, balancing his weight evenly between his heels and the balls of his feet, his breath coming in slow, rhythmic measures.
“Overseer,” Lin Tao said, his voice carrying with unnatural clarity across the frozen terrace. “The bronze balance is tilted on its pivot. The stone upon your scales is true, but the beam leans toward your pocket.”
Hu’s face turned purple with sudden, scared rage.
“Insolent vermin!” Hu roared, raising the heavy iron heavy club above his right shoulder, channeling his full spiritual energy into a downward execution strike. “Die!”