When the Yanhui winter market opened for weighing, Chi Yanzhou invoked the market code, "Register follows the person, crime follows the register," and tore up Shao Qingtang's market registration page, number 37, from the ding section in front of everyone. He said her mother, Shao Huaiyin, had been struck off the rolls and expelled from the market twenty years ago for privately trading military iron, and that Shao Qingtang was still moving iron goods for the Wu family.
Shao Qingtang neither shouted nor argued. She picked up the two halves of her registration page from the mud, wiped them clean, and fitted them together. She demanded the torn page from the clerk so she could keep it as proof that her registration had been revoked. She also asked the tax office to make a stamped copy, offering to pay for the paper herself. Her mother had not even been given that page back then, leaving no way to verify the matter twenty years later.
Meng Deshui, Tian Jiu, Shopkeeper He, and Foreman Sun were all watching from below. Chi Yanzhou actually ordered the clerk to give her the page, then asked whether she wanted to defend her mother's actions. She said arguing for twenty years would not change what was written on the paper, and she would say nothing today.
She packed up her stall and picked up the contract papers, her hands steady. After the crowd dispersed, someone called out that Shao, the contract scribe at the east market, would write a contract that evening for two copper coins.
But she stared at the back of that page for a long time. Whose seal was on it?
