The Procedural Integrity Database was not a thing; it was a process. A silent, omnipresent digestion. Every motion Lin filed, every request for clarification, every cited precedent was now consumed, indexed, and weighed by the PID's heuristic mind. It was the ultimate bureaucrat: infinitely patient, devoid of malice, and programmed to find inefficiency.
Lin's first move under the new regime was to feed it exactly what it wanted.
He took a simple, straightforward case: a poltergeist of a minor library accused of "wilful disorganization." The defense was clear-cut—the spirit was merely reflecting the chaotic state of the library's mortal owners. Lin filed a standard motion to dismiss for lack of intent. It was logged in the PID. He won the case quickly. 14.4/1000.
The PID registered a clean, efficient defense. A data point of normality.
Next, he took a case with a slight wrinkle—a river nymph charged with "unauthorized irrigation." He filed two motions: one standard, one slightly more complex questioning the definition of "authorized" based on seasonal flood tables. He made sure the complex motion was legally sound but ultimately unnecessary. He withdrew it before the hearing. The PID logged a "self-corrected procedural redundancy." He won the case on the standard motion. 14.5/1000.
He was teaching the PID what his "normal" looked like: mostly efficient, occasionally overly meticulous but self-policing. He was building a baseline of trustworthy noise.
Meanwhile, in the Warrens' deepest vault—a chamber shielded by the Silence-Sphere's null-field—the real work continued. Ghen-7's data stream flowed. Feng, with Cui's guidance, had built a mirror of the PID's likely logic structure. They called it the Echo-Trap. It wasn't a weapon to attack the PID; it was a model to predict its blind spots.
"The PID looks for patterns in form," Feng explained, lines of code reflecting in his eyes. "Repetitive motion types, keyword frequency, citation clusters. It's a grammarian. It doesn't understand story. It doesn't understand why you ask a question, only that you asked it."
"So we give it the right grammar," Lin said, "and hide the story in the footnotes."
The next real case was a delicate one. A Scribe of Final Words, a spirit who recorded the last utterances of the dying, was accused of "Fabricating Sentiment" for adding a poetic flourish to a mortal's garbled last breath. The charge came from the Bureau of Literal Truth, a department known for its fanatical, joyless adherence to fact. The presiding judge was Magistrate Karn, a known literalist and a stickler for rigid procedure.
This was the test. Lin needed to win this case, which meant exposing the Bureau's absurd rigidity, but he had to do it in a way the PID would see as a unique, one-off event, not part of a pattern.
He crafted his filings with surgical precision.
Motion for Definitive Clarification of 'Fabrication' vs. 'Interpretation' in Post-Mortal Linguistics. (A broad, philosophical motion. The PID would tag it as "high-level conceptual inquiry—low redundancy risk.")
Request for Exemplars of 'Approved Poetic License' from the Bureau's own historical archives. (A request for the Bureau to contradict its own dogma by providing examples it couldn't possibly have. The PID would see it as a standard discovery request.)
Motion to Suppress the Testimony of the Bureau's Lead Verifier on grounds of 'Idealogical Bias.' (The risky one. This attacked a core practitioner. But Lin filed it citing a narrow, obscure precedent about expert witnesses in matters of subjective aesthetics. To the PID, it would look like a niche legal argument, not a systemic attack.)
The PID digested the filings. Motion 1 was flagged as "non-standard but precedent-exploring." Motion 2 was "standard discovery." Motion 3 triggered a higher-level review due to the "bias" claim, but its citation of the obscure aesthetic precedent made it seem like a quirky, specific argument, not a template.
In court, Magistrate Karn was irritated by the philosophical motion but felt compelled to address it. He spent hours defining and redefining 'fabrication,' tying himself in knots. Lin then used the Bureau's inevitable failure to provide "approved poetic license" exemplars to undermine their authority. Finally, he presented the narrow bias precedent, arguing that in matters of artistic interpretation—which a last breath's recording could be—a dedicated literalist was inherently incapable of impartial judgment.
Karn, frustrated and intellectually cornered, dismissed the charge. The Scribe was free.
15/1000.
A solid win. The PID's report on the case would likely read: "Case #88234. Unusual but legally sound defense strategy involving linguistic philosophy and niche bias precedent. Successful outcome. No procedural violations detected. Pattern: Isolated anomaly."
Lin had performed a magic trick. He had made a systemic critique—attacking the Bureau's fundamental premise—look like a one-off academic debate.
He repeated the process. Case after case, he varied his tactics just enough to keep the PID's pattern-recognition at bay. He would use a historical argument here, a technical loophole there, a procedural gambit somewhere else. The underlying thread—following the pain to a corrupt or absurd systemic rule—was always there, but the legal clothing he put it in was always different.
The Echo-Trap model grew smarter, learning to predict what kinds of motions would trigger PID alerts. It became a co-pilot, suggesting ways to phrase a dangerous idea in safe language.
Yama Heng watched the PID's reports. They showed a defender winning an unusually high number of cases, but through a dizzying array of legitimate, non-repetitive methods. It was frustratingly competent, not rebelliously systematic. The Judge could sense the manipulation, but he couldn't point to a rule that was being broken. Lin was dancing in the spaces between the rules, and the PID was dutifully recording the dance steps without understanding the music.
The real breakthrough came from an unexpected source: the Echo-Scroll.
Confined to its display, the Scroll had been a passive source of legal venom. But Feng, in a moment of inspiration, fed it the PID's own publicly listed heuristic parameters. The Echo, a creature of prosecution, did something extraordinary. It began to generate fake motions. Not real ones to file, but hypothetical legal documents designed to be the perfect PID food—documents that looked complex and varied on the surface but were, at their core, empty, circular, and designed to consume processing power with zero legal value. "Motion for Quantum-Jurisdictional Clarification of Trans-temporal Liability in Non-Linear Causality Events." It was glorious nonsense.
They didn't file these. They used them as camouflage. Now, when Lin filed a real, dangerous motion, he would sometimes attach, in a supplementary and clearly marked "theoretical appendix," one of the Echo's fake motions. The PID would dutifully analyze the appendix, wasting cycles on nonsense, while the real, sharp motion slipped through categorized as "primary filing with academic supplementary material."
They were feeding the beast junk food to spoil its appetite for the real meal.
Months of Diyu time blurred into a rhythm of quiet, relentless, algorithmic warfare. Lin's counter climbed with agonizing slowness. 16... 17... 18... Each point was a masterpiece of subterfuge, a victory stolen from under the nose of an all-seeing, uncomprehending eye.
He was no longer just a defender. He was a programmer, writing justice in a language the system's compiler would misunderstand.
And in the sterile silence of the highest spire, Yama Heng stared at the latest PID summary. It showed a defender operating at 99.7% procedural compliance with a 94% success rate. The statistical anomaly was screaming at him. But the machine, his own machine, was telling him everything was according to code.
For the first time, the Judge felt a cold drip of something unfamiliar in his ancient soul.
It wasn't anger. It was the faint, distant precursor to doubt.