Rising Echo sighs at the trade agreements with the Guild. Those would take some time to remove, without bringing the entirety of the Guild down upon Lotus. He'd need to give Zephyr at least a little time to get the guard and an army together.

However, he'd break those as they came up.


For the moment though... "We have a major trade imbalance here." Rising Echo waves several documents around, his voice rising. "Those with a noble title have a forty percent reduction of taxes, just because they're noble. A handful of nobles crush the multitude of common craftsmen, because they can skate just about every tax! Not anymore." Ink flies from pen to parchment, as Echo slashes and rewrites a portion of the code. "Ten percent, not forty. We'll revisit dropping it all together later."

He continues reading through the tax codes. "Ninety-five percent maximum allowed for a noble to take from those who work his land? Ninety-five? How do you live off of five percent of the land. That's just a few potatoes and a cupful of rice! Sixty percent, and the nobles can come complain to me about it." The paper becomes a mass of slashes and rewrites as Echo continues moving through the documents, toning down the ludicrous excesses that nobles and merchants alike have had written into the laws over the years. Laws that singly do not give much advantage, but taken as a whole beat the entire structure of Lotus into the morass of sluggish trade that it is today.

Transval had done his own work well enough for his purposes, but they were now going to be reversed.

Coming to the end of the documents, Rising Echo looked at the piles of parchment he'd already run through, and then the hundreds more documents that were the special trade partners of the Guild forms. Those... those would be dealt with in due time. However, taking a few clean parchments, he calmly rewrote the things he'd slashed, dashed, and corrected.

"Any member of the Guild that comes through Lotus must speak with me before he is allowed to enact any portion of a trade contract that they have. There will be no exceptions." Rising Echo says, finally finishing the new copies of the trade and taxes for inside Lotus.

Spoiler
Show

Int+Bureaucracy, spending 8 personal on First excellency, 1 Willpower for an auto success: (16d10)[2][7][5][8][8][4][7][7][5][8][9][8][3][2][6][3](92)