The silence of the courtroom was replaced by the chaotic hum of the Diyu corridors. Xiao Bai dragged Lin Wei by the sleeve, navigating through crowds of aimlessly wandering spirits and hurrying clerks.
"Do you understand what you've done?" he muttered, his voice trembling with a mixture of delight and horror. "You didn't just buy time. You challenged Yama Heng's decision. Personally! He now has a career blemish in his records. He'll hate you. He'll do everything to prove himself right."
"Perfect," Lin replied dryly, looking around. His mind was already working on the new task. "So, he'll put pressure. We must be one step ahead. Where now? Where is this 'Department of Sudden Deaths'?"
"It's not a 'where'," Xiao Bai paused at a fork. One corridor went upwards, its walls covered in flickering digits. The other went down into pitch darkness, from which the smell of old paper and static emanated. "It's a 'when'. And an 'in what state'. Diyu archives aren't linear. Cases are grouped by type, energy imprint, and... soul entropy."
He pulled Lin Wei into the dark corridor. The lights here burned dimly, and instead of holograms, real, dusty scrolls and decrepit folders hung on the walls.
"We're looking for the raw data on Zhang Mei's soul. Her 'unprocessed' metrics before entering the court. Anything related to her last days, hours, minutes. Any anomalies in the energy trace."
They entered a hall that more closely resembled an endless library from the Qin dynasty crossed with a server farm. Between wooden shelves stood crystal columns, inside which streams of light — data — pulsed. Ghost-archivists with empty faces glided between the rows, sometimes stopping to "inhale" information from a scroll directly through their eyes.
"Here," Xiao Bai led him to one of the columns. He ran a finger over the cold surface, and glyphs snaked inside. "Case #777. Access: restricted. Defender authorization required."
Lin pressed his wrist with the seal to the column. The light flashed brightly for a moment, and a transparent scroll materialized before them. Not video, not text. Something in between — a stream of sensations, images, fragments of thoughts. Zhang Mei's last days.
Lin Wei closed his eyes, immersing himself in the stream.
An office. A crowded subway. Fatigue, heavy as lead. Evening. An empty apartment. Silence. An SMS from an unknown number: "I saw everything. You won't escape me." Fear, sharp and cold. Then — emptiness. As if emotions were switched off. Apathy. And... a decisive step onto the windowsill. But strangely, no feeling of despair. A feeling of... relief? As if it wasn't her decision. As if someone inside her was whispering: "Do it. And it will all end."
Lin opened his eyes.
"Someone was stalking her. Threatening her. And then... something changed in her consciousness. As if her will was disabled."
"Possession?" suggested Xiao Bai, lowering his voice. "A lower spirit, a demon? But possession requires a strong energy trace, a spike. It's not in the data."
"Then it's something else. Something that doesn't leave a trace in your 'energy imprints'. Something... quite material." Lin Wei stepped back from the column. "I need access to the evidence archive. To the items that were with her at the moment of death."
Xiao Bai paled even more.
"The Physical Evidence Repository? It's in another wing. Guarded. And they don't just let anyone in. You need a warrant."
"We have a week. And we have a suspended sentence. That gives us the right to request case materials. Write the request."
While Xiao Bai muttered and summoned a holographic form, Lin looked around. His gaze fell on one of the ghost-archivists. It stood motionless, staring into emptiness, but its fingers trembled finely, incessantly. Not like the others. Not from some internal process, but from... tension.
Lin approached closer.
"Do you work with cases from the 'Sudden Deaths' sector?"
The spirit slowly turned its empty face towards him. Its eyes were like glass beads.
"Category 44... Many cases... Conveyor..." its voice was monotone.
"Case #777. Zhang Mei. Did you process it?"
A pause. Too long a pause for a simple database query.
"Access restricted... Request..."
"I am the defender in this case," Lin showed his seal. "I can see you know something. Something not in the official record."
The archivist-spirit froze. Its trembling intensified. Suddenly, its empty eyes filled with something — panic — for a second. It turned sharply, almost human-like, as if checking if anyone was nearby.
"S-signs..." it whispered so quietly Lin barely heard. "On the wall... in her room. Before... before the fall. They were erased. Erased from the report."
And then its face went blank again, and its body smoothly turned and floated away as if nothing had happened.
Lin Wei felt an icy stab in his chest. Erased from the report.
"Xiao Bai," he turned to the clerk. "What does 'signs on the wall' mean? What kind of signs could be in a suicide case?"
Xiao Bai, who had finished writing the request, flinched.
"Signs? Ritual ones maybe? For summoning... or casting a curse? But that would be in the report as an aggravating..."
"If it wasn't erased," Lin finished for him. "Our request to the repository. Include a clause: 'all items and media carriers seized from Zhang Mei's residence 48 hours prior to the incident'. Special attention — surface cleaning agents. And photographs of the walls."
Xiao Bai nodded obediently, adding to the request. His disk flashed green — the request was sent. Almost immediately, it flashed red.
"Denied," Xiao Bai whispered. "Justification: 'Requested materials are not pertinent to the substantial evidence of case category 44-G'."
Lin Wei gritted his teeth. The system was already throwing up roadblocks. Yama Heng worked fast.
"Then we go another way. Do you have access to... unofficial channels? To those who can 'find' what's been 'lost'?"
Xiao Bai swallowed. He looked like he was about to be sick.
"There's... one place. But it's dangerous. And against the rules. If we're caught..."
"We're already caught," Lin said sharply. "We're in hell. And we have one week to win the first case. Lead the way."
Xiao Bai, hanging his head, led him deeper into the archives. They descended further down, where the light became bluish and ghostly, and the air smelled of metal and oblivion. Finally, they came to an abandoned data transfer terminal — a huge, rusty structure resembling a steampunk artifact.
"Here... sometimes there are data leaks from adjacent departments," Xiao Bai typed a complex sequence on a keyboard made of bone plates. "If someone 'cleaned' the report, the original might be preserved somewhere in the cache. In the buffer. Temporarily."
The screen flickered, filling with lines of unfamiliar code. Suddenly, among them, an image flashed — a photograph of a wall. A home wall with floral wallpaper. And on it, scratched with something sharp, almost invisible if not for contrast enhancement, were signs. Not glyphs. Symbols. Resembling a schematic drawing of a falling person crossed by a wavy line. And next to it — a series of digits. "14-9-22".
The image held for a fraction of a second, then went dark, and the terminal emitted a piercing shriek. Two red scanner beams immediately fell on them from down the corridor.
"ALERT. UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO PROTECTED CACHE. IDENTIFYING INTRUDERS."
"Run!" Xiao Bai screamed.
They bolted back into the labyrinth of shelves. Chasing them now weren't armored guards, but small flying scanner drones emitting red beams. The beams scorched the air and left smoking marks on the floor.
Lin Wei ran, but his mind clung to what he had seen. *Signs. Digits. 14-9-22.* Was it a date? A code? And those symbols... They weren't random. They were ritualistic. Someone didn't just kill Zhang Mei. Someone performed a ritual. And the Diyu system was covering it up.
They burst into a more lit corridor and blended into a crowd of spirits. The drones, losing them among hundreds of energy signals, hovered and began scanning the crowd.
Xiao Bai, breathing heavily, leaned against the wall.
"You... you saw that? Those symbols... I've only seen those in archives on forbidden practices! That's a 'Seal of Silence'. They mark a victim before... before a debt-transfer ritual. Someone wanted to shift their karma onto her! Make her a scapegoat!"
Lin Wei wiped sweat from his forehead. A cold fire burned in his eyes.
"So, it's not suicide. It's a ritual murder disguised as suicide. And Judge Yama Heng, or someone higher, is covering it up. Why?"
Xiao Bai looked at him with horror.
"Because if this comes to light... it means there's corruption within the Diyu system itself. That someone is using the court mechanisms to hide real crimes. That's... that's a scandal of cosmic proportions."
Lin Wei smirked. Soundlessly, without joy.
"Perfect. So we're on the right track. We have evidence. Now we need to figure out what these digits mean. And find the one who made those marks on the wall."
He looked at his wrist. The seal pulsed, reminding him of the score: 0.5/1000.
The first case wasn't just a dispute over an article. It was a key. A key to a dark secret of hell itself.
And somewhere in the high offices of Diyu, Judge Yama Heng must have already received a report about the unauthorized archive access. And his parchment eyes were probably narrowing in anger.
The hunt had begun. And now, they were the ones being hunted.