The Mandatory Acceptance Rate was a bludgeon. Cases began flooding Lin's docket—not from the Warrens, but from across Diyu. Petty grievances, ancient clerical errors, borderline frivolous suits. All deliberately routed to him. A spirit of a broken teacup suing the spirit of a careless maid from three centuries past. A minor river deity charged with "unauthorized meandering." A ghost of a librarian accused of "information hoarding." The system was throwing sand into his gears, hoping to grind him to a halt through sheer, soul-crushing triviality.
He couldn't fight them all personally. But he didn't have to.
"We institutionalize," he announced to the Vengeance Ledger. "We turn the Warrens into a factory. A legal clinic."
They repurposed the nascent hall built around the Silence-Sphere. It became the intake floor. Xiao Bai and Lao Jin, now assisted by a dozen of the quickest Warren spirits they'd trained, manned desks. They triaged the incoming case files, fed by a constant, cursed stream from the system.
Feng and the Paradox-Engine were the heart. The Engine, now more stable, was fed every case. It didn't just predict outcomes. It began generating form responses. Standardized motions for dismissal, templates for plea bargains, pre-filled evidentiary request forms tailored to specific judge's known preferences. It was a legal autocannon, churning out procedural ammunition.
"But the Engine can't argue in court," Mei pointed out, her arms crossed as she watched the chaotic yet orderly flow.
"It doesn't need to," Lin said. He pointed to a group of spirits in the newly designated "Litigation Wing"—former scholars, failed advocates, even a few chatty ghosts with a knack for rhetoric. They were being trained by Cui, using the Engine's templates as a base. "They're not full defenders. They're paralegals of the damned. They handle the procedural hearings, the filings, the negotiations. They keep the machine moving."
Lin himself became the surgeon, only stepping in for the complex, high-stakes, or treacherous cases—the ones the Engine flagged with a high "Yama Heng Interference Probability."
The first test was a batch of fifty minor cases, all set for simultaneous "streamlined review" in a bulk hearing chamber. It was a notorious rubber-stamp court where overworked arbiters cleared dockets by the hundreds. Lin sent a team of five paralegal spirits, armed with Engine-generated packets for each case. The packets didn't argue the merits. They exploited loopholes in the bulk-hearing protocol itself—requests for individual evidentiary review that, if denied, would invalidate the batch. The arbiter, facing a mountain of paperwork that threatened to collapse his entire schedule, dismissed forty-eight of the fifty cases outright just to make the problem go away.
11.5/1000. Fractional progress, but progress at scale.
Word of the "Warrens Clinic" spread among the lower strata of Diyu. Souls who could never afford a defender, whose cases were too small or too hopeless, began to find their way. Not through official channels, but through Mei's resurgent underground courier network, which now bypassed the information cordon using the chaotic signal-scatter of the Paradox itself as a smokescreen.
The Clinic didn't always win. But it always fought. It turned the system's weapon—volume—against it, creating a tidal wave of procedural pushback that began to clog lower courts and annoy mid-level administrators.
Yama Heng's next move was subtler. A new case appeared on Lin's docket, flagged by the Engine with a 99.9% danger rating.
*Case #7781: In the matter of the Soul-Sieve Malfunction, Sector Theta.*
It was an engineering disaster. A "Soul-Sieve"—a massive filtration device that purified incoming soul-stuff—had collapsed. Thousands of souls awaiting processing had been damaged, their memories scrambled, their identities rendered unstable. The engineering spirit foreman was the scapegoat. The charge: "Cosmic Negligence."
The client was the foreman, a grim, solid spirit named Bor. The real defendant, the Engine's analysis screamed, was the Department of Celestial Works, which had ignored maintenance requests for centuries due to budget cuts. The case was a political grenade. Win, and Lin would make a powerful enemy in a major department. Lose, and he'd fail a client who was genuinely innocent, damaging the Clinic's hard-won reputation.
Yama Heng was offering him a choice between a rock and a hard place, wrapped in a genuine tragedy.
Lin took the case. But he didn't go to the evidence locker. He went to the Warrens' new archive, where the Echo-Scroll was housed. He didn't ask it for legal precedent. He asked it for corruption.
"Show me every case, every report, every budget line that has ever involved the Department of Celestial Works and the Soul-Sieve program," he commanded the Scroll.
The Echo, ever eager to prosecute, vomited forth a torrent of data. Not just the official records, but the shadow trails—deleted maintenance logs, whispered auditor concerns buried in meeting minutes, the paper trail of funds diverted to a senior official's pet project—a "Garden of Perpetual Sunset" in his private demesne.
Lin had his ammunition. Not to defend Bor, but to attack the Department.
The trial was in a high engineering tribunal. The prosecutor was a sleek, confident spirit from the Department's internal affairs. He painted Bor as a careless fool.
Lin stood. He didn't mention Bor. He addressed the judges—three senior engineer-spirits.
"Respected tribunal. Before we determine how the Sieve failed, we must acknowledge why it was allowed to reach a state where failure was inevitable." He projected the Echo's data. The deleted logs. The budget diversions. The Garden of Perpetual Sunset, its cost listed as "Sieve Maintenance, Line Item 7b."
The courtroom stirred. This was not defense. This was mutiny.
The prosecutor spluttered. "Irrelevant! The foreman's actions—"
"—were governed by the resources he was given," Lin finished. "You cannot convict a man for failing to build a wall if you gave him only sand. I move that the true negligence lies with the department that systematically defunded its own critical infrastructure. I submit a formal request to expand the scope of this trial to include an investigation into departmental malpractice."
Chaos. The judges, engineers at heart, were fascinated by the technical data, appalled by the neglect. The prosecutor was apoplectic. Bor, the foreman, watched Lin with stunned, grim gratitude.
The tribunal recessed. They returned not with a verdict on Bor, but with an order: the case against the foreman was suspended pending a full audit of the Department of Celestial Works' maintenance protocols. Bor was released back to his post (under supervision). The department was put on notice.
It wasn't a clean win. It was a bloody stalemate that left a major department humiliated and scrambling. Lin's counter ticked up. 12/1000.
But the cost was immediate. As Lin left the tribunal, a messenger intercepted him—not a courier, but a Herald, a spirit of pure announcement. Its voice boomed through the corridor, devoid of emotion.
"BY ORDER OF THE COUNCIL OF EQUILIBRIUM, THE PRACTICE KNOWN AS 'SCOPE-CREEP DEFENSE' IS HEREBY UNDER REVIEW. EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, ALL DEFENDERS ARE REMINDED THAT THEIR MANDATE IS THE CLIENT, NOT THE SYSTEM. SANCTIONS FOR PROCEDURAL OVERREACH WILL BE SEVERITY-BASED."
It was a new rule, written just for him. They were criminalizing his tactic of attacking the root cause.
He returned to the Warrens. The Clinic was buzzing, a well-oiled machine processing dozens of small victories. But he felt the walls closing in. Yama Heng was a master strategist. For every move Lin made, a countermeasure appeared, codified into new law, new procedure.
That night, in the quiet hum of the headquarters, Cui spoke, his voice like dry leaves.
"You are fighting a hydra, boy. Cut off one head of corruption, two more grow in the form of new regulations. You cannot win a war of legislation against the legislature of hell."
"Then what do I do?" Lin asked, the fatigue deep in his bones.
"You change the game," the old archivist whispered. "You don't fight the law. You fight the lawmakers. But not with accusations. With… an alternative."
Cui's blind eyes seemed to stare into the Silence-Sphere.
"The Warrens is more than a clinic. It is becoming a community. It has its own rules now. Its own economy of effort and care. The Silence brings stability. The Paradox brings power. The Echo… brings a perverse form of accountability. You have built a prototype. A smaller, messier, but perhaps fairer system."
Lin understood. He wasn't just building a legal defense force. He was building a counter-Diyu. A tiny, functioning model of what justice could look like when it was about repair, not retribution.
Yama Heng's power came from being the system. Lin's only hope was to build a better one, right under its nose. And then force a comparison.
The next case that came in wasn't from the system. It was a plea, carried by a trembling kitchen-spirit from one of the mid-level bureaucratic citadels. Her friend, another low-level clerk, was being "processed for re-evaluation" after filing a minor complaint about working conditions. It was a purge, disguised as procedure.
Lin took the case. But he didn't file a motion in the clerk's court. He had Mei deliver a different document—not to the judge, but to every spirit in the clerk's department. A pamphlet. "Know Your Rights: A Warrens Guide to Unjust Processing."
It contained no accusations. Just clear, simple explanations of procedural rules, how to request hearings, how to document abuses. It was a seed of insubordination, wrapped in a user manual.
The war was no longer about winning cases. It was about spreading a virus. A virus of expectation. The expectation that one did not have to simply accept the grind.
Yama Heng could write all the rules he wanted. Lin Wei was teaching people how to read them.
And in doing so, he was committing the ultimate crime in a bureaucracy: he was encouraging independent thought.