Chapter 10 · free to read
Eleven cash on the eleventh. Seven and a half by the middle of the twelfth. The Pingyang bureau had stopped buying salt for labourers who did not exist on the day an honest superintendent took up his post.
The first endorsement on all nine was a Pingyang salt factor. The second on all nine was the household steward of the Ministry of Rites. The third was a name she did not know at all.
OWED, TO BAI LIAN, ONE FAVOUR, UNSPECIFIED. She kept that tablet for eleven years and it cost her a great deal more than twenty strings of cash.
Pingyang. The Ministry of Rites. And a household whose name a broker would not say out loud in her own locked room.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.