Book 3: Chapter 28: Political Moves and Horrible Searches

Yin Hu stared at the two men standing before him in the courtyard.

Neither moved, spoke, shifted, fidgeted, or even seemed to be breathing, which was less remarkable for Da Ruis than it was for Zhong Da.

The recruitment ledgers sat on the table between them. Seven days of entries. Seven days of setting up in the slums, processing candidates through the orbs, running Da Ruis's older methods, and filtering the results through the threshold criteria that both men had spent an entire evening debating, refining, arguing over, nearly coming to blows about, and then presenting to him with the unified confidence of two people who had found common ground in the simple act of making his life harder.

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