Beneath the salt ridge of the Seventh Salt Camp, Lu Xu dives underwater to retrieve star-shard bones. Camp Chief Pei Zhao accuses him of stealing marrow and publicly breaks his leg. The bookkeeper reads out the charges, but when he reaches the line stating that the Seventh Camp collected thirty-seven memory ingots but paid forty-nine to the Heaven-Balancing Pavilion, leaving a shortfall of twelve, his tongue ties itself in knots, and he dares not continue. Bracing himself against the salt crust, Lu Xu scratches the numbers thirty-seven and forty-nine into it with his finger, then demands to know whether the twelve ingots were offset against the quota of Abyss Fillers or taken from the private treasury. The old bone collector Jin Changshui steps forward and says that receding waters and shrinking caves have left all thirty-seven households in the camp in debt. Pei Zhao tells the bookkeeper to read out Old Jin's name as well, forcing him to retreat into the crowd. The whip strikes Lu Xu's shoulder, and blood seeps through the seams of his clothes, but he neither dodges nor falls silent. Clenched in his palm is a piece of star-shard bone bearing an old mark at its base. It is not the Heaven-Balancing Pavilion's memory-ingot stamp, but half of a check mark his father left beside a line of missing figures in the same ledger, on the night his name was struck off seven years ago.
