The dim corridor smelled faintly of wet cedar, stale ink, and the particular brand of ozone-heavy tension Ryan usually associated with an eleventh-hour budget review. The breathless page led him straight through a pair of heavy, sliding cedar screens into the lord chamberlain’s private antechamber, where a stern-faced official with salt-and-pepper hair and an immaculate silk kimono waited like a regional director preparing to read out a list of redundancies. Without preamble, the chamberlain gestured toward a towering stack of freshly brushed, ink-darkened scrolls laid out across the lacquered desk, demanding an immediate, itemized inspection of the newly forged records before the daimyō's tribunal formally convened in the adjacent hall.
Ryan approached the desk with the heavy, unblinking resignation of an events coordinator handed a disastrously misprinted venue contract ten minutes before doors opened. Flipping open the stiff parchment rolls, he immediately spotted the glaring discrepancies: phantom grain tariffs, impossible winter provisions, and a series of administrative authorization stamps bearing his own exact, forged initials rendered in flawless feudal calligraphy. It was a staggering, beautifully orchestrated paper trail designed entirely to absorb a massive regional deficit under his employee profile, laid out on traditional rice paper as though it were just another standard quarterly variance report.
Sighing quietly, Ryan reached into his canvas messenger bag and pulled out his trusty plastic-bodied ballpoint pen—the sole piece of modern, mundane reality he possessed in this absurd historical theater. With the deadpan calm of a salaryman simply trying to close an administrative ticket before lunch, he pointed out a glaring arithmetic error in the third ledger column to the bewildered chamberlain, politely suggesting that if the tribunal was going to frame him for a provincial tax scandal, they at least needed to reconcile their floating-point decimals.