A week passed by and the sound of the soft scratch of brush on parchment filled Fang Yuan's study.
Stacks of scrolls sat neatly on the edges of his desk, but the one in front of him kept drawing his eyes back.
He was reading through the scrolls while wearing a frown.
Who won't be, the numbers were bleeding red.
Ever since the purge during the banquet, too many elders had vanished.
With them went oversight of critical family businesses, storefronts, auction houses, even spirit herb contracts once painfully secured.
But that wasn't the worst of it.
What made Fang Yuan's knuckles whiten as he held the brush was the discovery that some of those elders had looted their posts before leaving.
They took away the contracts, spirit stones (if any was left at this point), even stripped some merchant caravans that bore the Fang family crest.
"Had they not given up and instead planning a revolt?" he muttered. "I probably should have just killed them all when I had the chance huh."
