Chapter 318: Neral's Response
The petition arrived the next morning.
It came through the Guild Hall's eastern division relay — a formal filing confirmation from the Assessors' Board, with a copy of the twenty-four-page primary document attached. Neral signed the receipt form without reading it, carried the document to his working desk, and made his tea first.
Then he read.
He read the legal argument before anything else. It was well-constructed. The Gene Distribution Network predated the Guild's eastern division by ten thousand years. It had not been built by the Guild, or by the carrier, or by any institution with current legal standing. Under continental resource law, structures predating institutional authority — especially those with documented commercial output at the surface — fell under public resource classification, with extraction rights subject to licensing.
The logic held. Neral did not enjoy this. He continued reading.
