87 The Doors Shut

Xiao Ying watched the grandly dressed newcomer walk past the lines of the chief cooks and knock once on the doors in front of him - the doors that led to the screaming bureaucrats all arguing at their desks sitting facing each other with nobody to head the discussion.

The wooden doors seemed to part supernaturally in front of the man, revealing how one lower minister was currently throttling another while two others talked loudly over the carnage that they were both staunchly ignoring as they sat their writing with their brushes in hand and dialogue on their lips.

Xiao Ying felt the wave of incredulity that seemed to wash over all the cooks and himself as he gazed almost with glazed eyes upon the scene.

There were six men in total at their desks.

Two of them were engaged in a wrestling match in the corner with one decidedly younger man suffering a chokehold while simultaneously managing to hook his legs over his possible potential murderer's arms to kick at his chest in a desperate attempt to push the older man away from him.

There were two other bureaucrats who were sat at their desks respectfully as they were required to be, writing down on their scrolls what had been discussed and decided, with one man twirling his beard, almost absentmindedly, between his fingers as the only other dignified individual in the room stroked a hand over his chin as he ran his fingers over some pitiful stubble that looked less like the beginnings of an elegant beard and more the surface of a prickly desert cactus.

One other man, from the general shape of his body and height, looked to be the youngest of them all, was sitting with his legs crossed turned away from the rest of the people in the room, sitting in a corner with an abacus calculating sums away, muttering underneath his breath constantly as he worked out his maths problems and wrote down his answers and solutions, occasionally shuffling back to the desks that had been set up for the meeting to poach the unused papers from the absent and unused desk.

The final man was asleep, snoring away as if there wasn't anything pressing for him to be doing at that very moment, his head face down on his desk as his free and unmarked papers were constantly being snatched away to fuel the young, other mathematician's increasingly jerky and irrational actions as his fingers moved faster and faster, his irises and pupils began to rattle around on the surface of his eyeballs and his neck jerked around from side to side.

The richly dressed representative of the cooks gave a little strained wave at the people behind him before he gave a smile that looked as if it was about to crack into two identical pieces then fall off his face and shatter on the floor into a thousand pieces.

The corners of his mouth twitched and he, his movements stuttering as if Xiao Ying was watching a buffering screen, turned away.

The doors closed behind him with a loud bang.