The tendrils went even farther than that; Judge Fang had known this for a 
long time. Many of the gang members running around the Leased Territories with 
Judge Fang's cane marks
across their asses had connections on the mainland that could ultimately be 
traced back to Dr. X. It was rarely useful to dwell upon this fact; if it 
hadn't been Dr. X, it would have been someone else. Dr. X was unusually 
clever at taking advantage of the principle of grith, or right of refuge, which 
in the modern usage simply meant that Coastal Republic officials like Judge 
Fang could not enter the Celestial Kingdom and arrest someone like Dr. X. So 
usually when they bothered to trace a criminal's higher connections at all, 
they simply drew an arrow up the page to a single character, consisting of a 
box with a vertical slash drawn down through the middle. The character meant 
Middle, as in Middle Kingdom, though for Judge Fang it had come to mean, 
simply, trouble.