There were always people who wanted the shortest road to success. The world never ran out of them.
Radeon hated that kind of hunger. Calyx hated it too. So did anyone who earned by honest work, even the rchants who skimd every legal edge just to survive.
Seventeen n tried anyway. All mortals. All listening where they should not. They overheard secrets that were not theirs, then decided those secrets could be turned into profit if they moved fast enough.
They planned to point the white robed n of Radeon Bank toward vaults that did not belong to them, to claim another man’s buried fear as their own reward.
They told themselves they were here first. They didn’t know wraiths were evil by nature, like lions eating at and gazelles grazing grass.
The ghost attendants could taste malice the way Radeon tasted enmity, not with fine detail, but still with the sa certainty.
A stench. A wrongness. They nodded politely, as if taking instructions.
All the while, small traces were already being pulled loose under Radeon’s Myridion Seersight.
Blood lineage traces. Soul residue. Contacts braided karma.
Deep under the Terrace, the tunnel ghosts moved. They did not take only the seventeen.
Bandit groups vanished from their dens. Fences who bought stolen goods disappeared from back rooms.
Blood relatives were dragged out of beds. Friends were taken from taverns. Even pigs and dogs were seized.
The next day, a crowd gathered where the long term shop renters did business.
People ca thinking it was another spectacle, another attraction to feed the dawn.
A line of standing captives, held in place by sigils that made escape feel impossible even to the strong. Adults and animals alike.
Stones were already being thrown by curious hands. At first, the crowd laughed.
Then soone noticed the tattoos on the faces of the n in front.
Seventeen of them. The ones who had tried to steal through lies.
Large signs hung around their necks.
"I tried to deceive the Radeon Terraces banker with treasure that is not mine."
Behind them stood four whole organizations that lived on rot. Stolen goods. Fraud. Pillage. Banditry. Illegal slavery.
Their nas were pinned for all to see. Their cris were listed on boards long enough to make the eye ache.
One board belonged to a Nascent Embryo cultivator, and it dragged on and on, like a confession that refused to end.
Then the sentences were displayed. The shortest was a three days. The worst were twenty years.
People looked again at the captives and realized sothing else. Their bodies did not bruise. They did not bleed. They did not rot.
They did not need food. The stones did not break skin. The pain went straight to the soul.
Every impact made their spirits scream. The only relief was the tears they could still shed, and sotis the agony was so sharp that even those tears ran red.
Children were chained too. Not spared. Not hidden. So were too young to understand why the world had turned on them.
So only understood that they were afraid. The worst of it was not the guilty n at the front. They had chosen their path.
The worst were the distant relatives, dragged in by blood alone. Seventh generation. Ninth generation.
People who had never t the man whose na they shared. People who did not even know his face, only his punishnt.
By the ti the stones started to fly in earnest, nobody in the crowd thought it was an attraction anymore.
They watched, and they learned what the Radeon Terraces did to those who tried to steal with other n’s secrets.
The larger organizations, the Five Summit Emperors and the Silent Severance, had known this day would co.
Eldric could joke with them, laugh with them, share tea and light words, but at the end of the day he was a monster wearing a man’s skin.
Not a grandfather. Not a great grandfather.
An antiquity.
Patience tempered past the point of rcy, and pride kept sheathed in the sleeves like a blade.
Everyone in their circles understood that. You could bargain with such a being. You could flatter. You could even profit beside him.
You did not spit on him.
Yet people did.
Overnight, the sleeping tiger moved, and it moved ruthlessly.
The criminals were not so scattered handful you caught with luck. Divining four thousand n should have been almost impossible, not in a city full of noise and borrowed nas.
Yet they were dragged into one parade, a line of guilt that kept walking and walking, proving that the Terrace saw farther than it should.
The onlookers still had conscience, or at least enough fear to imitate it. Those with no fault to their na were not stoned.
People looked at the chained innocents and thought, if I were placed there, would I want stones thrown at my face.
The answer was simple.
So most hands stayed down, and the crowd’s cruelty focused where the signs and boards told them it belonged.
Even the ones who had co with ulterior motives, the quiet thieves who planned to steal through shops and slips of paper, felt their plans dry up in their mouths.
It was too terrifying. Horror was too small a word. It was a lesson carved in soul in the literal sense of the word.
And with all the ruckus, all the whispers and fear, sothing else spread just as fast.
Belief. People started to accept what Radeon wanted them to accept.
The Terraces were ironclad. The rules were rigid. The system would not cheat you. It would not let others cheat you either.
You might be afraid of it, but you could trust it, and trust was worth more than comfort.
That was the aim. Now he did not need elaborate preparation. The next step required sothing simpler and louder.
A blatant show of wealth. Treasures laid out so openly and so confidently that people would drool just from looking.
"Calyx. Send your ghosts. I’ll feed them human greed. In the purest form possible."
Reviews
All reviews (0)