The Weight of the Seal

The throne was smaller than he had expected.

That was Wei Changming’s first thought upon seeing it — not awe, not dread, but a mild and practical surprise. The throne of the Ninth Hell sat on a raised dais at the far end of the central hall, carved from a stone so dark it seemed to absorb the lantern light rather than reflect it. It was tall and severe, and the armrests were worn smooth in a way that suggested generations of hands resting in the same position. But it was not large. Not palatial. Not the cosmic seat of authority he had vaguely imagined.

“Previous masters tended to prefer function over spectacle,” said the record-keeper. His name, Wei Changming had learned, was Magistrate Shen. He was tall, thin, and appeared to have been middle-aged for approximately eight centuries. “There are three hundred and forty-seven active departments in the underworld. The throne connects you to all of them. Sitting in it without preparation is not recommended.”

Wei Changming had not sat in it. He stood before it with his hands behind his back, examining the seal of succession where it had settled on his wrist — a mark like dark ink pressed into the skin, barely visible unless he turned his arm in the pale light.

“What does it do?” he asked. “The seal.”

“It authorises.” Magistrate Shen produced a ledger from somewhere about his person — a thick, battered thing that smelled of river silt and old rain. “At present, nothing in the underworld can be formally enacted without your mark. Judgements, transfers, resource allocations, interdepartmental disputes. We have been operating on provisional warrants since the previous master’s departure. There are those who have been waiting for formal resolution for…” He consulted the ledger. “Some time.”

“How much time?”

“The longest outstanding case has been pending for eleven years, four months, and sixteen days.”

Wei Changming was quiet for a moment. He was thinking about the cultivation hall he had left behind — the elder still droning, probably, the other students still half-asleep — and about the very specific path he had laid out for himself before the floor had disappeared. Three years of study. A sect recommendation. A slow, methodical rise.

“Show me the backlog,” he said.

Magistrate Shen blinked. In eight hundred years, no new master had asked to see the backlog on their first day. “My lord, the acclimatisation period is traditionally—”

“Show me the backlog.”

Another long pause. Then Magistrate Shen turned and gestured, and the far wall of the hall dissolved to reveal not a corridor but a room filled floor to ceiling with stacked scrolls — red-sealed, blue-sealed, some so old their edges had gone translucent with age. The room was enormous. The scrolls went back further than Wei Changming could see.

He exhaled once, slowly.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll need a better filing system.”