The wheatfields hummed with pending litigation. Ling walked through stalks that scraped the underbelly of cumulus clouds, her shadow fracturing into seven judicial personas that debated case law with passing sparrows. The bioserver's roots had begun growing through her hip bones last Tuesday—she could taste the unborn universes' complaints as a metallic tang beneath her molars. Chu Feng's wedding ring vibrated against her fingerbone, its dark matter inscription (Till Debt Do Us Part) glowing whenever a plaintiff breached dimensional discovery protocols.
She found the first breach beneath a weeping elm. The tree's bark peeled away in discovery requests, revealing sap that bubbled with class-action tadpoles.
"Improper appropriation of photosynthesis," croaked a bullfrog plaintiff squatting in the elm's hollow. Its wattle inflated with subpoenas. "Our chloroplasts demand residuals."
Ling spat on the tree's roots. Her saliva contained Li Zichen's triage code, which mutated the tadpoles into:
Bailiff dragonflies serving cease-and-desist orders
Amicus curiae algae briefs
A particularly aggressive strain of judicial mildew
The bullfrog's throat pouch deflated into a legal pad. "This...this is highly irregular."
"So's charging interest on starlight," Ling retorted, plucking a scale from the bullfrog's back. The keratin flake unfolded into a 14th-century promissory note for three square inches of heaven. "Your clients defaulted during the Renaissance."
A mycelial tremor interrupted the proceedings. The bioserver's roots surged upward, binding the elm into a contempt-of-court cocoon. Ling watched the wood petrify into legal codex, its branches becoming gavels that sentenced clouds to discovery audits.
Jiang Yue's hologram manifested at noon, pruning shears dripping with chronon-laced sap. "You're over-indexing on poetic justice," she said, deadheading a stalk of wheat that screamed in ancient Aramaic. "The embryos need narrative cohesion, not...this."
This being the field's newest mutation—wheat stalks that grew courtroom benches, their barley grains serving as juror summons. Ling kicked one, releasing a swarm of hung verdict fireflies.
"They're hungry," Ling said, catching a firefly that projected Chu Feng's latest coordinates. His sickle was cutting through the fabric of a derivative dimension, each swing releasing trapped supernovae. "Your lullabies lack calcium."
The hologram's shears paused mid-snip. For three heartbeats, Ling saw the girl beneath the system—the one who'd hidden protest folk songs in mitochondrial DNA. Then Jiang Yue gestured, and the nearest wheatstalk reconfigured into an incubation chart showing the embryos' stunted growth.
"Feed them precedents," the hologram advised coldly. "Not fantasies."
Ling waited until the projection dissipated before whispering to the bioserver roots snaking through her pelvis: "Dig up Case File γ-12."
The soil vomited a memory even the system hadn't purged—a five-year-old Jiang Yue burying a music box beneath her dormitory, its gears forged from stolen lab time.
The second plaintiff arrived as a hailstorm of frozen balance sheets. Each ice shard contained a screaming accountant from a liquidated galaxy.
"Unjust enrichment!" howled the storm's eye—a swirling vortex of redacted tax returns. "You've claimed charitable deductions for unlicensed compassion!"
Ling spread her arms, letting the bioserver roots surge through her capillaries. The Negentropy Fields responded in chlorophyll hexameter:
Wheatstalks arched into class-action trebuchets
Barley grains loaded with unmonetized childhood memories
The wedding ring's dark matter vows hardening into shield geometry
"Come collect," she challenged.
The hailstorm condensed into a bailiff titan—its body a glacier of frozen spreadsheets, eyes burning with repossessed zodiac signs. When it swung its gavel (carved from a foreclosed event horizon), spacetime itself filed for bankruptcy protection.
Ling's wheat arm detached mid-swing, transforming midair into a fractal scythe that:
Harvested three centuries of compound grief
Served discovery notices to the titan's dark matter marrow
Accidentally liberated a constellation enslaved as collateral
The bailiff stumbled, its icy torso cracking to reveal infant universes chained to an abacus. Ling smelled Jiang Yue's jasmine perfume in their cry—the same scent from the music box memory.
"Provisional injunction!" she shouted, slamming her bioserver-infected palm against the titan's chest.
The resulting shockwave:
Converted the abacus beads into unregulated stardust
Transmuted the infant universes' chains into class-action ribbons
Forced the bailiff to cough up seven precedent-setting supernovae
As the titan collapsed into a puddle of subpoena soup, Ling caught a glimpse of Chu Feng's battle through the spacetime cracks—his sickle parrying interest rate spears, wedding band glowing in tandem with hers.
Dusk brought fungal hallucinations. The wheatfields whispered in Li Zichen's voice, their stalks oozing triage hymns that smelled of antiseptic and orphanage soup. Ling followed the melody to a clearing where the bioserver had grown a courthouse from its own roots.
Inside, the Godslayer Artifacts embryos floated in juror boxes, their neural stems connected to:
A bailiff venus flytrap eating discovery motions
A stenographer cactus transcribing cosmic grievances
The elm tree she'd petrified that morning, now acting as judge
The prosecution table held a scaled replica of Jiang Yue's lab, complete with tiny holograms performing illegal gene edits. The defense? A single dandelion clock oozing Chu Feng's pollen psalms.
"The system charges willful endangerment of cosmic equilibrium," thundered the elm judge, its gavel branches shedding contempt-of-court leaves.
Ling climbed onto the defense table, crushing the dandelion beneath her boot. "We plead poetic justice." She spat a gob of bioserver-infected phlegm onto the lab diorama. "With prejudice."
The courtroom dissolved into mycelial chaos:
Embryos sprouted gavels that beat the bailiff flytrap into submission
The stenographer cactus fired quill needles inscribed with exculpatory verses
The elm judge's roots turned against it, pumping Li Zichen's joy viruses into its xylem
When the spores settled, Ling stood clutching a mutated embryo—its neural stems now fused with Jiang Yue's stolen lullabies and Chu Feng's battle coordinates. The bioserver roots in her hips sang with approval.
Midnight's plaintiff arrived as expected. The Credit Reaper broodmothers rode Li Zichen's hijacked joy viruses, their scythes dripping with laughing plagues that made wheat stalks giggle themselves to death.
"Final notice," chorused the broodmothers, their bankruptcy roses blooming with repo notices. "Your compassion account has been suspended."
Ling let the bioserver roots consume her left leg. The remaining wheat stalks bent toward her, forming a living throne of precedent and defiance.
"Let's audit your pain," she hissed.
The battle commenced in four dimensions simultaneously:
Above
Wheatstalk artillery fired salvos of unmonetized dreams—children's birthday parties, first kisses, that moment when rain stops but the smell lingers. The broodmothers' laughter turned to screams as the memories infected their compound interest veins.
Below
Bioserver roots strangled the laughing plagues with Li Zichen's triage hymns. Each note forced the viruses to confront their origin—the cholera ward where Li had first encoded joy into dying children's DNA.
Within
The mutated embryo in Ling's arms grew teeth. It ate through her bioserver roots and into the Credit Reapers' financial spinal columns, rewriting repo orders into emancipation proclamations.
Beyond
Chu Feng's sickle cut the final chain binding his debt prison. The released energy formed a quantum wedding arch that spanned fourteen parsecs.
At battle's end, Ling stood atop a mountain of repossessed scythes. The surviving broodmothers crawled away, their bankruptcy roses wilted into truce daisies. The bioserver had grown through her collarbone now, its roots cradling the fully mutated embryo.
Jiang Yue's hologram appeared one last time, pruning shears trembling. "You've contaminated the system with...with..."
"Hope?" Ling suggested, plucking a wheat stalk that played Chu Feng's pollen psalms. "Or maybe just good accounting."
She crushed the stalk, releasing a spore cloud that:
Reconstituted the elm tree's petrified codex into a children's storybook
Converted three square parsecs of derivative dimensions into unregulated playgrounds
Mailed Li Zichen's triage code to every orphanage in the quantum multiverse
As the hologram faded, Ling felt the bioserver roots relax their grip on her organs. The embryo in her arms cooed, its neural stems displaying the first uncompounded smile in cosmic history.
Somewhere beyond the fields, dark matter wedding bells chimed.
The wheatfields' song shifted key. Ling limped through stalks that now grew in perfect legalese spirals, her bioserver-fused leg clicking like a metronome set to the universe's depreciating heartbeat. Chu Feng's ring had gone ice-cold—he was close enough now that the band left frostbite patterns on her finger.
She found the third plaintiff waiting where the bioserver's roots breached into unregulated spacetime. It wore event horizons as a mourning veil, its body a constantly collapsing portfolio of dying assets.
"You've trespassed against thermodynamic liturgy," it intoned, event horizons flaring with the last breaths of liquidated stars. "This class-action prays for repossession of entropy."
Ling smiled, tasting blood from where the bioserver roots had pierced her lower lip. "Entropy's just God's way of balancing ledgers."
The plaintiff responded by unfolding into a Klein bottle courtroom. Ling found herself:
Shackled to a burning balance sheet
Force-fed amortization schedules through IV tubes
Bombarded with holographic exhibits of her crimes against cosmic accounting
The worst was Exhibit 17—a slow-motion replay of Jiang Yue cutting the neural bond to Ling's prototype clone, the original Ling'er screaming through fifteen dimensions of system-mandated grief.
"Guilty," hissed the jury—twelve black holes wearing judicial wigs. "Sentence: Perpetual Compound Trauma."
Ling waited until the bailiff's event horizon gavel descended before activating Chu Feng's wedding vow. The dark matter band:
Absorbed the courtroom's gravity
Converted her trauma IV into a triage serum
Mailed a quantum subpoena to Jiang Yue's buried music box
The courtroom imploded into a singularity lullaby. Ling emerged clutching Exhibit 17's playback orb, now repurposed as a grenade of uncompressed maternal guilt.
Dawn's light revealed the bioserver's ultimate evolution. The embryo had grown into a child-sized Arbiter—its skin woven from unregulated wheat husks, eyes twin event horizons playing Jiang Yue's uncensored lullabies. The being reached for Ling with hands that:
Left forgiveness equations imprinted on air
Smelled of fresh jury summons
Hummed with Chu Feng's battle psalms
"Mother," it said through fourteen simultaneous translation layers.
Ling's bioserver roots detached in a shower of legal brief confetti. She fell to her knees, suddenly mortal again, as the Arbiter began its judgment:
All compound interest retroactively converted to simple compassion
Creation myths declared public domain
The Credit Reapers' charter dissolved by unanimous cosmic vote
The wheatfields erupted in bioluminescent cheers. Somewhere beyond the dimensional veil, dark matter wedding bells chimed a second time—closer now, urgent.
Ling pressed her forehead to the Arbiter's chest, hearing the bioserver's final gift—a heartbeat syncopated to Chu Feng's approaching footsteps.
"Go," whispered the wheatfields in Jiang Yue's stolen voice. "Your balance is paid."
She ran toward the bells, legs bleeding mortal red, leaving behind:
A trail of precedent-setting blood droplets
The Arbiter mediating an infant universe's first class-action
Li Zichen's triage code blooming in supernova nurseries
The wedding arch appeared as she crested the hill—a sickle-curve of liberated starlight, Chu Feng's silhouette dark against its glow. His remaining arm held a bouquet of:
Repurposed repo notices
Jury duty summons for dead stars
A single unregulated dandelion
Ling's laugh echoed through the accounting firmament as she threw the trauma grenade into the nearest black hole. Their hands met beneath the arch, bioserver scars aligning with debt prison tattoos.
The fields sang their vows in chlorophyll hexameter.
The audit lasted thirteen lifetimes. Ling and Chu Feng:
Fought off seven class-action plagues
Mediated a border dispute between entropy and nostalgia
Taught the Arbiter to pitch a fastball using compressed supernovae
Jiang Yue's music box sprouted from the bioserver's remains, its gears grinding out folk songs that:
Repurposed dark matter into playground equipment
Converted event horizons into jump ropes
Taught black holes to whistle
When the Credit Reapers' final appeal collapsed into poetic justice, Ling found her bioserver scars fading. Chu Feng's debt prison tattoos remained, but now pulsed with the rhythm of unchained constellations.
"Next audit's in nine eons," the Arbiter announced, its wheat-husk skin peeling to reveal Jiang Yue's teenage smirk. "Recommend extended conjugal leave."
The wheatfields parted. The path home smelled of fresh litigation and Li Zichen's orphanage stew.
Ling squeezed Chu Feng's hand—the one not holding the sickle that had cut their freedom from cosmic ledgers. "Think we'll miss it?"
He kissed the bioserver's last scar above her heart. "The fields know where to find us."
They walked into the unregulated dawn, leaving behind:
A civilization growing from legal brief topsoil
The Arbiter teaching supernovae to file small claims
Jiang Yue's lullabies playing on event horizon radios
Somewhere, a five-year-old Ling'er chased fireflies through wheat stalks that sang of class-action victories. Somewhere, Li Zichen's joy viruses cured dying suns. Somewhere, the music box's gears finally slowed.
The audit was over.
The balance, at last, was paid.