"Time to work!"
"Little ones, time to get to work!"
At Shen Le's command, the little ones pounced in perfect formation. Ink Line snapped and twanged, marking straight horizontal and vertical lines across the spiritwood. Saw rushed in after it, cutting the spiritwood into tiny wooden pieces.
Chisel charged second, carefully carving borders and patterns into the wooden pieces. Since these were miniature versions, Shen Le did not require the reduced plaques to have mortise-and-tenon structures, but the carvings around the borders were still indispensable!
After working hard to finish its task, Chisel bowed and withdrew gracefully. Shen Le picked up his smallest brush, loaded it with spirit ink, and carefully wrote on the plaques:
"Grand Tutor to the Crown Prince," "Provincial Graduate," "Presented Scholar," "Regional Commander"—
And, of course, the most important one: the plaque bearing the words "Upholding Justice," inscribed by Navy Admiral Sa Zhenbing.
Unlike the other plaques, the four characters for "Upholding Justice" were not written in neat regular script, but in a running script that carried an air of soaring spirit.
As for the signature he had personally written, that was even more so—practically clawing and baring its fangs. One could easily imagine just how bold and impassioned the admiral had felt when he wrote the inscription.
Even when Shen Le laid a sheet of semi-transparent tracing paper over such an inscription and traced it once, he broke out in sweat. And now he had to copy it onto wood with his finest brush—
"Shh—"
"Don't talk, don't talk—"
"Look, Shen Le's forehead is about to start sweating! If we keep making noise, he'll faint!"
Fainting was unlikely, but if his hand trembled again and he ruined the writing once more, that was practically guaranteed.
Sweat beaded across Shen Le's forehead as he struggled to