The formal sealing of the Sector Three accounts in the Hall of Decrees took two full hours of relentless, machine-like court accounting.
Seven trial scribes sat at their side desks, their horsehair brushes flying across rolls of royal gold silk parchment, recording the itemized seizure decrees dictated by Senior Inspector Han.
In the center of the hall, the four disgraced conspirators—Senior Deacon Lu, Deacon Sun, Captain Zhao. Vanguard Commander Yue—knelt in heavy star-iron collars. Their training suppressed by burned crimson runes that bit into their neck bones.
“By decree of the Grand Punishment Trial,” Han announced, his severe voice echoing through the vaulted green jade arches:
“One. The entire personal estate of Senior Deacon Lu, valued at one hundred and twenty thousand silver bits across seven outer valley manors and three commercial warehouses, is hereby taken away in perpetuity and passed to the Grand Treasury.”
“Two. The Green-Willow Agricultural Domain is formally dissolved. Its four hundred and twenty stalks of Five-Leaf Frost Lotus are impounded under trial seal, to be refined into breakthrough elixirs for deserving outer court students who have served without corruption.”
“Three. The sixty captured combatants of the Flying Crane Sect, having confessed to secret border incursion under military orders, are remanded to the Deep-Iron Quarries as indentured labor until their war ransom of fifty thousand silver bits is paid in full by their home sect.”
