Great Wall Prefecture, Merit Office.
The killing chill of late autumn shrouded the towering, forbidding black palace.
This was the heart of Great Wall Prefecture, the nexus of rewards and punishments throughout its territory, perpetually steeped in the pressure of divine edicts that made divine souls tremble.
In a side hall behind the main chamber, Li Dean, a Principal Eighth Rank merit judge, had his head buried in mountainous stacks of documents.
An old hand at the Merit Office, he was specifically responsible for monitoring the "criminal officials" and "criminal cultivators" exiled to serve their sentences in the border wilderness.
Hovering above his desk was a [Heavenly Net Mystic Light Disc], jointly refined through Great Zhou's national destiny and Purple Abode formations.
Several hundred faint red dots flickered across its surface. Each represented an exile struggling to survive in the Bitterly Cold Lands.
Crack—
An exceptionally crisp sound of shattering suddenly rang through the quiet side hall.
Li Dean's brush stopped. He jerked his head up.
On the [Heavenly Net Mystic Light Disc], which had operated without a single error for three hundred years, a previously dim red dot in the far northern sector suddenly erupted with dazzling dark-gold light!
"Wh... what's happening? Formation backlash?"
Li Dean's expression changed drastically. He hurriedly formed hand seals, trying to stabilize the formation disc.
Yet the golden light showed no sign of subsiding. Instead, it spread wildly across the disc with utterly domineering force.
More terrifying still, the [Purple Abode Golden Cangue] mark denoting the exile's status was rapidly melting within that light, like white snow beneath the spring sun!
"The golden cangue shattered?! Someone forcibly broke Lord Zhu's Purple Abode restriction?!"
Li Dean sucked in a cold breath, his scalp prickling. Forcibly breaking the cangue was tantamount to rebellion—a capital crime that