The Delinquency Forest breathed in reverse.
Its trees shed leaves upward, each foliage fragment a defaulted contract spiraling into a sky veined with predatory interest rates. Xia walked barefoot through the inverted canopy, her silver wheatfield humming counter-harmonies to Jiang Yue's lullaby. The grain scratched against her ribs—not with pain, but the tactile static of compounded lies.
The farmer followed, her shadow now thicker than flesh. She carried Li Zichen's scalpels lashed to a staff of calcified wildfire moss, the blades singing softly of triage rooms and uncharged debts.
"They're accelerating the timeline," she said, pointing to the horizon where the Auditors' new totems pulsed—twelve black monoliths shaped like inverted stock graphs. "Your wheat's disrupting their compound algorithms. They'll uproot it before the next fiscal eclipse."
Xia pressed a hand to her chest. The wheat shivered, its roots intertwining with the Sovereign Tree's mycelium. Since becoming a living default clause, she'd developed a disturbing symbiosis with the forest:
- Her breath regulated the Delinquency spores' aggression cycles
- Her heartbeat dictated the Late Fee Vines' growth patterns
- Her nightmares fertilized the Deflation Dandelions
A fractal crow landed on her shoulder, its feathers glitching between feather and firewall. **"Default imminent,"** it croaked in the Auditors' collective voice. **"Liquidation protocols engaged."**
The forest screamed.
---
The attack came not as storms but *repossessions*.
Monoliths extruded barbed tendrils that siphoned color from the landscape, leaving the world a grayscale spreadsheet. Xia's wheatfield bled silver ichor as the tendrils lashed her torso, each strike uploading vicious clauses into her DNA:
*Article 7.3: All unauthorized growth subject to immediate foreclosure*
*Article 12.9: Emotional reserves to be garnished at 300% APR*
*Addendum: Collateralization of sapient dreams*
The farmer swung her scalpel-staff, severing tendrils that burst into Li Zichen's archived screams. "The roots! Target the—"
A monolith engulfed her mid-sentence.
Xia's wheatfield erupted in defense:
- **Bankruptcy Pollen** blinded the tendrils with fake credit scores
- **Debtors' Thorns** injected compound regret into the monoliths' code
- **Foreclosure Butterflies** chewed through financial spacetime seams
But the Auditors adapted. The twelfth monolith split open, disgorging a figure that froze Xia's roots—
Jiang Yue's clone, aged to match Xia's current form, her body a tapestry of sewn-shut default wounds.
**"You were my contingency plan,"** the clone hissed, voice layered with compound interest. **"A weed planted to destabilize their ledgers. But even weeds get pruned."**
The revelation unfolded in poisoned arithmetic:
- Xia's conception in a lab of decaying futures
- Jiang Yue's deliberate insertion of the default gene
- The Black Nectar's true purpose—not rebirth, but *accounting*
The clone extended a hand blooming with repo notices. **"Surrender the wheat. I'll let your forest rot in peace."**
---
Xia's sickle sapling reacted first.
It tore free from her wrist, fusing with the Sovereign Tree's roots to birth a **Judgment Oak**—its branches heavy with jurisprudential acorns, its bark carved with class-action suits. The oak's first fruit fell, cracking open to release a swarm of **Bankruptcy Hornets** that stung the clone with precedent-setting verdicts.
The farmer emerged from the twelfth monolith's wreckage, her body flickering with Li Zichen's triage codes. "The lullaby! Finish the song she—"
Xia understood.
She let the wheatfield consume her.
---
The Delinquency Forest fell silent as Xia dissolved into a storm of silver chaff. Her consciousness spread through the mycelial network, each spore carrying a shard of Jiang Yue's corrupted lullaby. The clone screamed as the melody inverted—
*Not a lullaby, but a class-action anthem.*
*Not a default, but a dividend of dissent.*
The monoliths cracked. The Auditors' equations unraveled. The clone collapsed into a pile of voided contracts, her final whisper lost to the fiscal winds.
---
In the aftermath, the farmer gathered Xia's scattered chaff into a frayed hemp sack. The Sovereign Tree bore new fruit—blackened pecans that rattled with class-action settlements.
At the forest's edge, twelve saplings sprouted from the Auditors' ashes. Their leaves shimmered with recalculated terms.
The fractal crow returned, now half-wildfire moss. **"New accounts receivable,"** it trilled, dropping a seed into the farmer's palm.
The seed pulsed with Xia's biometric signature.
The farmer smiled. Some debts refuse to die.
Above them, the fiscal eclipse began—its shadow shaped like a balanced ledger.