The Keeper of Thresholds, whose designation was Ghen-7, was a creature of angles and nervous energy. His form was like folded parchment, and his eyes darted around the Warrens' intake hall as if expecting the walls to sprout auditors.
"The list," he whispered, placing a crystalline chip on the table. It glowed with a soft, internal light. "Every override. Timestamps, authorizing codes, destination points. It's a ghost circuit. They use it to move… favors. Information. Souls marked for fast-tracking."
Lin picked up the chip. It was warm. "And you let a transfer through on this circuit."
"Not let," Ghen-7 insisted, his parchment body rustling. "The authorization code was valid! It matched a Vice-Director's signature in the register! My duty is to check the code, not the intent! But the data that went through… it was a classified audit report. About procurement fraud in the Spire. Now the Vice-Director claims the code was forged, and I'm the one who 'failed to verify the source.' They need a head. Mine fits."
It was a classic setup. A mid-level functionary taking the fall for a superior's shady deal. The kind of case that usually ended with a quiet "reassignment" to a soul-grinder.
Lin plugged the chip into a reader Feng had sanitized. The list unfolded in the air—hundreds of entries, a secret nervous system within Diyu's bureaucracy. It was dynamite. And Article Zero forbade him from lighting the fuse. He could only use it if it directly pertained to Ghen-7's defense.
"Your defense," Lin said, thinking aloud, "is that you followed procedure. The code was valid. Your error, if any, was systemic—relying on a verification protocol that can be exploited. Therefore, the fault lies not with you, but with the protocol's designers and maintainers."
Ghen-7 blinked. "You want to blame… the System Security Protocols?"
"I want to examine them. In the context of your specific case. To see if their flaw makes your reliance on them reasonable, and thus your action not negligent."
It was a razor's edge. He wasn't attacking the Vice-Director or exposing the ghost circuit. He was questioning the tool the Vice-Director used. A tool maintained by a different department entirely.
He filed a "Motion for Expert Testimony on System-Wide Code Verification Standards," requesting that a representative from the Office of Cryptographic Purity be summoned to explain, under oath, how a Vice-Director's code could be so perfectly forged as to pass all checks. He was positioning Ghen-7 not as a culprit, but as a victim of a security failure.
The motion was, predictably, opposed by the prosecutor and the Vice-Director's department. They called it a "fishing expedition."
Lin then filed a "Motion to Compel," citing a precedent where the integrity of a foundational security tool was deemed relevant to establishing a defendant's state of mind. He buried the opposition in legalese, forcing the judge—a weary-looking entity named Magistrate Vor—to actually read the arguments.
Vor denied the motion to compel. But in his written denial, he made a mistake. He wrote: "The Court finds the alleged 'security flaw' to be speculative, as the official investigation has concluded the code in question was not forged, but misappropriated by the defendant."
Lin read the sentence twice. Not forged, but misappropriated.
The official story had just changed. The Vice-Director was now claiming Ghen-7 stole his code. A much harder charge to prove, and one that contradicted the initial "failed verification" charge.
Lin had them in a procedural knot. Their story was unraveling because they were trying to thread two different needles at once.
He didn't celebrate. He filed a "Motion for Clarification of Charges," pointing out the discrepancy between "failure to verify a forgery" and "misappropriation of a valid code." He politely, boringly, asked the court which one he was actually defending against.
The prosecution went silent for two days. Then, the charges were quietly amended to the lesser "Procedural Negligence." They dropped the "misappropriation" claim. They were retreating, trying to salvage a small conviction.
Lin pressed. With the charge reduced, he argued that the appropriate penalty was not demotion or attenuation, but retraining. And he knew just the place.
He proposed that Ghen-7's sentence be served in the Warrens' newly established "Code Verification and Ethical Routing" workshop—a theoretical training program Lin invented on the spot, to be overseen by Feng. There, Ghen-7 would "study flaw detection" using, hypothetically, anonymized data samples.
The judge, Magistrate Vor, just wanted the case gone. He accepted the proposal. Ghen-7 was found guilty of negligence, sentenced to "remedial training" in the Warrens, and released into Lin's custody.
14/1000. Another fractional point. Another soul saved.
But the real prize was Ghen-7 himself. And the crystalline chip, now securely archived, its data a map to a hundred corrupt transactions.
That night, in the secure core of the Warrens, Ghen-7 sat with Lin, Feng, and Cui. The Keeper was no longer nervous. He was furious.
"They were going to grind me for spare parts," he seethed. "For doing my job."
"You still have your job?" Lin asked.
"Suspended. Without pay. But my access… my knowledge of the thresholds… it's still in here." He tapped his parchment temple.
"Then you can be more than a victim," Lin said. "You can be a sentry. The ghost circuit they use—we can't expose it. But we can map it. Without interfering. Simply by… observing the traffic. Noting patterns. For research purposes, to improve our own internal security, of course."
Ghen-7's eyes gleamed. It was a purpose. A righteous, secret purpose. He became the Warrens' first true spy, not in the enemy's camp, but in its walls, listening to the whispers in the plumbing.
Over the next cycle, the "Database of Anomalies" grew not just from court filings, but from live data. Ghen-7, using his deep understanding of the threshold systems and Feng's stealthy data-siphons, began logging the ghost circuit's activity. They saw favors moving: a harsh sentence reduced for a spirit whose cousin worked in logistics; a lucrative maintenance contract awarded to a shell-company that traced back to a judge's silent partner; a damning audit report "lost" after a transfer to a certain department head's private cache.
It was a map of the ecosystem of corruption. Useless for a direct attack. Invaluable for a defender.
The next case that came to Lin was a spirit of a broken clock, accused of "Temporal Mischief" for causing a minor official to be late to a meeting, which allegedly caused a missed budget approval, which led to a shortfall. It was absurd, tenuous—a case designed to be lost.
But the Paradox-Engine, cross-referencing the official's name with Ghen-7's logs, found a hit. That same official had received a large, unauthorized data-packet via the ghost circuit the day before the missed meeting. A packet containing… the finalized budget documents.
Lin didn't mention the packet in court. He simply, during cross-examination, asked the official a series of dull, precise questions about his preparation for the budget meeting. Did he review the materials? When? How were they delivered? The official, confident and dismissive, tripped over his own timeline. He claimed to have studied documents he couldn't have received through official channels yet.
Lin didn't accuse him of lying. He just noted the inconsistency for the record. The case against the clock-spirit, built on a chain of causality, snapped at its first weak link—the official's credibility. The charge was dismissed.
14.3/1000.
It was a new kind of warfare. Lin wasn't fighting the corruption. He was using its shadow to dismantle the false cases it spawned. He was turning their own hidden system against their public one.
Yama Heng, monitoring from on high, saw the victories pile up—small, legal, unassailable. He saw the Warrens not as a raging fire, but as a patch of damp slowly spreading through a wall, weakening the structure from within with patient, lawful moisture.
He couldn't attack the damp with a hammer. He needed a new tool. Something subtle. Something that didn't violate Article Zero, but tightened its grip.
He found it in the form of a reform.
A new directive was issued from the Council of Equilibrium, broadcast to all departments:
"IN THE INTEREST OF TRANSPARENCY AND EFFICIENCY, ALL DEFENSE-RELATED MOTIONS, FILINGS, AND REQUESTS FOR INFORMATION MUST HEREAFTER BE COPIED TO A CENTRAL 'PROCEDURAL INTEGRITY DATABASE' (PID) FOR REAL-TIME AUDIT. FAILURE TO LOG A MOTION WILL RENDER IT NULL. THE PID WILL UTILIZE ADVANCED HEURISTICS TO IDENTIFY PATTERNS OF 'PROCEDURAL REDUNDANCY' OR 'FRIVOLOUS INQUIRY' WHICH MAY RESULT IN SANCTIONS."
It was a masterstroke. Every move Lin made, every question he asked, every tiny anomaly he highlighted, would now be fed into a central machine designed to spot patterns. His greatest weapon—the slow accumulation of pinpoint data—was now being actively monitored by the enemy. The system would learn from his methods, in real time, and adapt to shut them down.
The long game had just gotten infinitely longer. And the walls of his cage, while not moving, had grown intelligent, sensitive eyes.
Lin read the directive, then looked at the Archive, at Ghen-7's flowing logs, at the quiet, determined faces of his team.
Yama Heng had built a mirror to watch him. Lin smiled.
Every mirror, no matter how smart, shows two sides. And sometimes, what you see in it isn't what's truly there. It's what you're meant to see.
He had just been handed a new channel of communication. One he was required to use.
The game was now about feeding the beast the right lies.