Doubt, in a being like Yama Heng, did not manifest as hesitation. It manifested as a flaw in the crystal of his logic. A single, hairline crack. And from that crack seeped a new strategy: not more rules, but less.
The directive was short, brutal, and bypassed the PID entirely. It came on a sliver of frozen silence, delivered by a Hollow—a spirit whose very essence had been scooped out, leaving only a perfect vessel for a message.
*"By order of the High Bench, all cases involving metaphysical ambiguity, subjective interpretation, or non-quantifiable damages are hereby designated 'Tier-3: Aesthetic Adjudication.' Defense for Tier-3 cases is limited to pre-approved advocates from the Bureau of Ontological Harmony. Contract defender Lin Wei is hereby barred from Tier-3 representation."*
They had cut off an entire limb of his practice. No more poets, artists, grieving echoes, or spirits of forgotten beauty. The cases that most clearly revealed the system's cruel absurdity—the ones where the law met the soul—were now forbidden to him. He was relegated to the clean, dry cases: property disputes, contract violations, clear-cut negligence. The boring, mechanical heart of Diyu where the rules were rigid and injustice was a matter of decimal points, not despair.
Lin read the order in the Warrens' core chamber. The silence was heavier than usual.
"He's herding you," Cui rasped. "Into the narrowest corridor of the law. Where his power is absolute because the rules are absolute. Where there are no philosophical loopholes, only math."
"It's a cage of clarity," Feng muttered, staring at the order. "The PID couldn't pin you down, so he's just… moved the walls. You can only play in the sandbox where the rules have no give."
Mei's form flickered with agitation. "The underground network… half the pleas we get are Tier-3. The broken hearts, the silenced musicians, the ghosts of lost stories. They were our best evidence of the system's sickness. Now we can't touch them."
Lin felt the walls close in, not with pressure, but with a terrible, sterile light. He was being forced to fight on a battlefield made of spreadsheets, where the only weapon was arithmetic, and the only casualty was a number in a ledger.
His first assigned Tier-1 case was a soul-crushing monument to this new reality. The Matter of Soul-Debt Accrual miscalculation, Creditor: Department of Karmic Ledgers, Debtor: Spirit of a Failed Merchant (Designation: Plen-881). The spirit owed 5,472.8 units of karmic debt. The Department claimed a calculation error and revised it to 5,472.9 units. The difference was negligible, a rounding error over centuries. But the principle was everything. Admit the error, and the entire, mountainous debt stood. Fight it, and drown in a billion lines of actuarial data.
This was Yama Heng's chosen arena. A war of receipts.
Lin took the case. He didn't rage. He didn't philosophize. He became an accountant.
He requested the original debt ledger. Then the ledger it was transcribed from. Then the mortality report that spawned it. Then the mortal's original life-contract. He followed the numbers back through a dozen departments, a maze of archaic filing systems and obsolete data-formats. He filed motions not for clarification, but for conversion—demanding ancient clay tablets be digitally rescanned, demanding faded ink on spirit-parchment be subjected to spectral analysis.
He didn't argue the morality of debt. He argued the integrity of the data chain. If a single digit in a thousand-year-old transcript was ambiguous, the entire subsequent calculation was suspect.
The Department of Karmic Ledgers, a bloated, arrogant bureaucracy, was not prepared for this. They were used to debtors weeping or begging. They were not used to a defender asking for the maintenance logs of the optical reader that scanned Tablet-AA-774 in the 302nd cycle.
They refused, of course. Lin appealed. The appeal went to a tribunal of actuarial spirits, beings of pure calculation. They were annoyed by the disruption but fascinated by the technical challenge. They demanded the logs.
The logs were "unavailable." Lost in a archive flood.
Lin then moved to dismiss the entire debt on grounds of "unverifiable provenance." It was a nuclear option in accounting hell.
The Department panicked. A dismissal would set a precedent, threatening billions of units of debt across Diyu. They offered a settlement: reduce the debt by 100 units and call it a day.
Lin consulted with Plen-881, the cowering merchant spirit. "Take it," the spirit whispered, terrified of the attention.
Lin took it. 18.1/1000. A tiny victory. A hundred units of meaningless weight lifted. The system had blinked, but only because he had threatened its ledger, not its soul.
It was exhausting, hollow work. But in the numbingly detailed process, Lin and Feng discovered something. The data-chain of Diyu, this nervous system of numbers and rules, was fragile. It was built on layers of obsolete technology, lazy transcription, and willful oblivion. The system's greatest strength—its age and complexity—was also a critical weakness. It had forgotten its own foundations.
The Echo-Trap model, fed with this new, granular data about data, evolved. It began to map procedural archaeology. It could predict which departments had the shoddiest record-keeping, which ancient laws were built on untranslatable code, which bureaucratic fiefdoms were terrified of an audit of their own archives.
Lin had found a new pressure point. Not the soul of the system, but its memory. And memories, especially old, inconvenient ones, could be a terrifying vulnerability.
He began to take on more Tier-1 cases, but he chose them strategically. He looked for debts, contracts, and judgments that hinged on a single, ancient, poorly documented rule. He became a badger, digging relentlessly at the crumbling foundations of bureaucratic power.
He won some, lost others. The counter crawled: 18.3... 18.5... 18.7.
He was no longer the defender of the broken-hearted. He was the auditor of the damned. It was a grim, grey purpose. But it was a purpose. And it was working.
The change in the Warrens was palpable. The influx of poets and dreamers slowed. The new arrivals were different: scribes with carpal tunnel from endless copying, logisticians haunted by supply chain errors, low-level auditors who had spotted a discrepancy and been marked for trouble. They were the system's own disaffected clerks. They didn't bring stories; they brought spreadsheets. And in those spreadsheets, Lin found more ammunition than in any ghost's lament.
Yama Heng watched this shift. The poetic nuisance was gone. In its place was a dry, persistent, termite-like gnawing at the load-bearing beams of administrative reality. It was, in some ways, more threatening. Passion could be outlawed. But how do you outlaw a request for a better photocopy of a 5000-year-old tax form?
The Judge's doubt-crack widened. His opponent had transformed again, slipping from one form of resistance to another, always finding the seam in the armor. The system was infinite, but it was not infinitely consistent. And Lin Wei was becoming a specialist in inconsistency.
The next case file arrived. It was Tier-1. A dispute over Soul-Matter Density Rights in a shared afterlife tenement. Dull as dust. But the plaintiff was a minor official in the Bureau of Spectral Geometry. And the precedent cited was a law from the First Consolidation, a law known to have been originally inscribed on the now-lost "Tablet of Shifting Sands." Its modern interpretation was dogma. Its original text was a mystery.
Lin looked at the case, then at the Echo-Trap's new "procedural archaeology" module. It flashed a probability: 87% chance the Bureau's interpretation relied on a transcription error made in the 110th cycle.
He took the case. He wouldn't be defending a tenant. He'd be cross-examining a ghost of a mistake.
The war was no longer about good versus evil. It was about the correct version of a footnote in a ledger that had been dead for millennia.
And in that utterly boring, profoundly arcane battlefield, Lin Wei scented something new in the sterile air.
Not victory.
Oblivion. The system's own.
And he intended to weaponize it.