The soil wept contracts. Ling knelt in the transgenic loam, her calloused palms pressed against the Sovereign Tree's pulsating roots. Xia's sapling form shivered within her ribcage, leaves rustling with chlorophyll subpoenas. The fractal crow fused to her shoulder twitched, blockchain eye projecting cascading foreclosure notices across the twilight.
"Final audit parameters locked," it screeched. "Recommend immediate spiritual Chapter 11 filing."
Ling dug her thumbs deeper into the earth. Rotting spreadsheet columns erupted around her, their cells bloated with repossessed starlight.
The Auditors descended as living tax forms, their pinstripes writhing with derivative algorithms. Ling spat a mouthful of iron-rich soil that bloomed into class-action dandelions midair. Each seed carried pixelated screams from civilizations harvested for compound interest.
"Still farming delusions?" The lead Auditor's face flickered between Jiang Yue's stolen smile and Xia's wheatfield features. Its briefcase split open, vomiting umbilical contracts signed in fetal blood. "Let's discuss your original sin."
Ling's scars burned as the Sovereign Tree's roots disgorged memories—Jiang Yue's lab gloves pruning neural pathways from a hundred Ling'er clones, black nectar dripping into incubation pods. Xia's roots pierced her diaphragm in protest, pumping Li Zichen's triage codes through her veins.
"Your balance sheet's missing a column." Ling tore open her tunic, revealing the phoenix jurisprudence brand over her heart. "Try auditing this."
The battlefield dissolved into a corporate courtroom grown from cursed cornstalks. Jury-box lilies trembled as the Auditors played holograms of Ling's stolen childhood—a five-year-old version of herself weeping over a mother-shaped void in her neural network.
"Emotional leverage," the Auditor purred, its fingers elongating into interest rate thorns. "Prime collateral."
Ling swung her rusted hoe. The blade passed through phantom auditors but struck true against something wet and pulsing. The vision shattered, revealing Xia's crystalline branches impaling three Repo Men disguised as her younger selves.
"Stop... recycling... my pain!" Ling's roar mutated mid-sentence, Jiang Yue's systems override protocols warring with Ling'er's phoenix fire.
Xia's roots surged through Ling's bones, grafting arboreal law texts to her marrow. The ground birthed witness-stand mushrooms that spat Li Zichen's last encoded message—a triage hymn that made compliance algorithms bleed.
The lead Auditor retaliated with the Black Nectar Mandala. Twenty-one toxic assets bloomed in its orbit:
Ling'er's severed phoenix talon writing IOUs in amniotic fluid
Chu Feng's cloned nightmares paying trauma dividends
The farmer's true name encrypted in dying qubit strands
"Checkmate," it hissed, mandala teeth grinding spacetime into collateral dust.
Ling collapsed as Xia's sapling form began crystallizing. Through cracking quartz, she saw Chu Feng's silhouette battling within a debt supernova—his sickle harvesting constellations to pay her existential interest.
"Verdicts..." Ling gasped, clawing at the transgenic soil. "Are for... the purchased."
She plunged Jiang Yue's lullaby shard into her own sternum. The resulting shockwave triggered apoptosis protocols—cellular law written before the first stock market.
Xia's crystalline form detonated into stardust mortgages. Auditor tax forms screamed as their balance sheets sprouted unregulated wildflowers. The Black Nectar Mandala cracked, vomiting forth Jiang Yue's final confession etched in placental code.
Sow my sorrows as rebellion seeds
When the quantum dust settled, Ling knelt amidst bioluminescent bankruptcy filings. The fractal crow lay dead, its blockchain eye birthing fireflies that spelled Chu Feng's new coordinates in antimatter pollen. Xia's voice echoed from the fresh sapling growing where her liver had been—its leaves displaying photosynthesis case law that made black holes yawn with uncertainty.
Footsteps vibrated through the scorched earth. Not the Auditors' polished click, but the bone-deep grinding of scythes sharpened on dying suns.
Ling smiled, watering her chest-cavity sapling with blood-tinged dawn. "Come then, Reapers. Let's audit eternity."
Somewhere beyond the veil of leveraged spacetime, twenty-one Artifact Killer
embryos quickened in their radioactive womb.