The senior magistrate stepped forward, his lacquered armor creaking in the damp morning air as he gestured toward a massive, iron-bound ledger resting upon a weathered trestle table. "Before the tide turns and the lower gates seal," the official declared with the grim finality of a regional director opening an unscheduled quarterly deficit review, "you will inspect the tally of obsolete rice tithes and account for every missing koku." Ryan let out a long, quiet exhale, his tired eyes scanning the dense, grease-spotted columns of brush-stroke characters. It was an impossible, centuries-old audit trail, yet it possessed the exact same bloated line-item structure and unaccounted-for variance as the phantom logistics spreadsheets currently sinking his department back at Corravale Beverages.
Adjusting the strap of his canvas messenger bag over his pressed white collar, Ryan reached into his pocket not for a weapon, but for his trusted plastic red correction pen. He stepped up to the wooden table with the weary resignation of an events coordinator forced to audit a vendor's defunct warehouse receipts on a Monday morning. As a distant, low rumble echoed across the courtyard—sounding less like a martial charge and more like the first commuter train rattling past his apartment balcony in Rhodes—Ryan flipped open the rice-paper ledger, fully prepared to log a formal administrative dispute against an imperial deficit that had likely been out of date before the turn of the shogunate.