Fine on the Outside, Rotten Within; No Ordinary Man

"A serious crime?"

Su Che looked at the uneasy Wang Jian. Though the man wore an official robe, his face had gone ashen. The Langya Wang Clan really is declining with each generation.

Granted, keeping a Primordial Aberration as a pet was indeed a crime.

Primordial Aberrations were temperamental. Who could say whether the docile little pet of this moment might turn around and smash Jiankang City into a barren wasteland?

To put it another way, it was like loading a trunk with explosives and going out to play bumper cars.

The charge was certainly no small matter.

But who were the two of them? One belonged to the Langya Wang Clan, the other to the Chen Commandery Xie Clan.

If they did not break laws and flout taboos, were ordinary people supposed to do it instead?

The foremost great clans were foremost precisely because they had the audacity to treat the laws of the court as nothing.

On second thought, Su Che understood some of Wang Jian's concerns.

The Prince of Wuling was the least favored of the current emperor's sons. The fact that Chief Clerk Wang had been assigned to work for him showed that he did not amount to much within the Langya Wang Clan either.

Chief Clerk Wang was probably considered a disappointment in his own clan. Su Che only wondered why Lady Xie had chosen him in the first place.

"Which of Jiankang's great households doesn't have something guarding its home?" Su Che reassured Chief Clerk Wang. "They can't investigate that sort of thing too closely."

There were reasons great clans could survive dynasty after dynasty without falling.

The court could not simply invent a charge and wipe out an entire clan whenever it pleased.

"Ordinarily, the law couldn't punish everyone. But now a prince