At the Eastern Wilds Letter Shop, the queue had reached number forty-one when Chu Bei pushed a folded paper slip across the counter to apply for a supplementary registration notice. But the junior clerk dug up an old account from the yellow paper: ten years ago, Fan Wuju had registered 3,742 word-entries in the Eastern Wilds as collateral. The pledge term was ten years, and the due date was today.
The shop erupted. Then the clerk publicly pointed out that Chu Bei was an outsider, his name absent from the Jade Register, and he had no standing even to acknowledge the debt. The director said he would have Chu Bei's face entered into the Registration Office's records. Chu Bei did not argue. Lowering his head, he caught the faint smell of paste on the account page and spotted two things that were wrong. In front of everyone in the shop, he said, "This isn't an old account. It was altered just yesterday." He pinned the director's hand to the paper. Whose name had been pledged in those 3,742 word-entries under Fan Wuju's name?
