The atmosphere in the Hanlin Academy changed overnight.
Before yesterday's morning court, Wei Nisheng had merely been the compiler whom people in the Hanlin Academy jokingly called "Wei Punctual."
He arrived at dawn and left at dusk, unshakable as stone, day after day for three years.
But this morning, he was a keen blade, and no one came near.
The clerks in the first courtyard still kept their heads down, copying and writing.
When Wei Nisheng walked past, the ones who usually liked chatting with him all buried their heads a little lower, as though by agreement.
Beneath the Corridor in the second courtyard, two compilers were talking in low voices when they saw him approach.
One abruptly stopped speaking; the other's hand stiffened slightly around his tea cup.
Then both turned away at once, pretending to study the half-dead wintersweet beneath the Corridor.
Wei Nisheng neither stopped nor looked at them. He simply headed straight for his duty room.
He had expected this all along.
The Hanlin Academy was not a battlefield, but everyone in it knew where the battlefield lay.
From the moment his memorial had been read aloud before everyone in the Hall of Supreme Harmony,
he had ceased to be merely a Hanlin scholar compiling books. He had become a blade.
A blade that had pierced the Ministry of Revenue and reached Shen Duan's throat.
No one knew whose hand held that blade.
Perhaps Feng Yan's, perhaps the upright officials', perhaps the emperor's own.
But whoever held it, no one wanted to approach a blade.
Wei Nisheng pushed open the door to his duty room, took off his cloak and hung it on the rack, then sat at his desk.
He opened the manuscript volume of the Treatise on the State's Economy that he