Trouble Born of Sleep

Given Sun Shaozong's current power and reputation, there was naturally no trouble at the welcoming banquet that evening.

With Minister of the Dali Temple Wei Yi personally presiding over it, it could be called united yet tense, serious yet lively.

But after the wine had flowed and the guests had dispersed, Sun Shaozong's assessment of it was summed up in four words: occupying posts and drawing pay.

As the institution overseeing legal cases throughout the realm, and the only one among the Three Judicial Offices with independent judicial authority, the Dali Temple was currently failing to live up to its reputation.

The main reason was that its senior leadership lacked initiative.

There was no need to mention Li Wenshan. He was highly skilled at parsing legal texts and weighing sentences, but asking him to do anything beyond that would likely be too much.

Liu Fang, who had already left office, was the typical scion of privilege: high-minded, incapable, and contemptuous of everyone else. He was always dreaming of making some sensational case and becoming famous in a single stroke, yet in truth, he could not even recognize all the clerks in the office.

As for that old fool Wei Yi, he had never possessed much sense of responsibility. He would never sacrifice private interests for public duty or take on tasks that offended others.

With such three men in control, one could easily imagine the passivity and decline throughout the Dali Temple.

In recent years, the Dali Temple had rarely taken the initiative. Every case it tried was assigned to it from above.

But how many cases could the higher authorities send down in a year?

And when local officials reported difficult or unusual cases, it would inevitably affect the court's evaluation of them—who would willingly tarnish their own record