The comet arrived as a contested will. Ling watched it streak across the Cretaceous night, its icy core flashing clauses from the Mesozoic probate code. Chu Feng's moon plow hummed where it hung above their doorway—a relic turned pendulum counting down to some cosmic statute of limitations.
"Plaintiffs from the K-T boundary," Arbiter muttered, its wheat-husk skin flaking to reveal granite courthouse bones. "They'll cite iridium layers as material evidence."
Ling stirred the primordial soup simmering on their stove—tonight's dinner being a class-action mollusk that had overstayed its evolutionary lease. "Tell them we're closed. Post-Jurassic hours only."
The comet struck anyway.
Impact tremors transformed their farmhouse into a legal terrarium. Walls bled sedimentary subpoenas. The floorboards sprouted gavel-shaped mushrooms that banged themselves in procedural frenzy. From the smoking crater emerged Plaintiff Zero—a theropod clad in pinstripe scales, its talons clutching a briefcase forged from the Chicxulub verdict.
"Survivorship bias!" it roared, T-Rex jaws articulating tort reform in perfect legalese. "Non-avian dinosaurs demand compensation for…"
Ling hit it with the soup pot.
The mollusk broth:
Dissolved three clauses of punitive damages
Birthed a parasitic class-action barnacle on the plaintiff's clavicle
Accidentally trademarked the phrase "Cretaceous negligence"
Chu Feng arrived wielding the moon plow as a temporal injunction. "Should've stayed extinct."
Their kitchen became a courtroom.
Trial Phase 1: Discovery
The T-Rex lawyer vomited evidentiary asteroids onto their dining table. Ling countered with:
A saber-toothed restraining order
Li Zichen's triage code spliced into amber
The complete works of Darwin as hearsay
Trial Phase 2: Cross-Examination
Chu Feng plowed through the asteroid belt, exposing fossilized kickbacks in the K-T boundary layer. The plaintiff retaliated by summoning a swarm of quantum locusts that ate through:
The farmhouse's due process foundation
Ling's favorite precedent-preserving jar
Tuesday
Trial Phase 3: Closing Arguments
Arbiter grew to full courthouse stature, its pillars reciting the Magna Carta in dinosaur blood. Ling played her final card—a music box lullaby that made the comet's icy core weep prebiotic tears.
The verdict shook Pangea.
In the aftermath, they drank jurassic tea from mugs shaped like hung juries. Arbiter picked litigious feathers from its granite teeth. "Therapy clause suggests more plaintiffs. Deeper ones."
Ling stared at the crater where their chicken coop once stood. The hens had mutated into barrister-raptors during the proceedings. "They're weaponizing deep time."
Chu Feng sharpened the moon plow with asteroid debris. "Need older laws."
Midnight found them in the root cellar's darkest corner—a vault sealed with Devonian tears and Jiang Yue's fingerprints. Inside:
The original godslayer artifact blueprints etched on dinosaur skin
A jar of screaming dark matter labeled Big Bang Settlement
Arbiter's first gavel, forged from the silence before time
Ling blew dust off a Carboniferous ledger. "We'll need to resurrect the Paleozoic Bar Association."
The summoning ritual required:
Three drops of contested stardust
A perfectly preserved tort reform fossil
The last breath of a dead precedent
They performed it at the Precambrian rift where law first divorced chaos. Arbiter's pillars became conduit stones. Chu Feng's plow cut the ceremonial scar. Ling sang the lullaby backward—unmaking what Jiang Yue had coded into reality's firmware.
The ground gave birth to Jurisprudence Rex—a leviathan of living case law with volcanic gavels for eyes and continental shelves as robes.
"Who disturbs the sleeping codex?" it boomed, each word triggering micro ice ages.
Ling stepped forward, bioserver scars glowing like ancient runes. "The balance needs resetting. Not recalibrating."
The titan laughed in tectonic plates. "You think time's arrow bends to mortal ledgers?"
Chu Feng planted the moon plow in the rift. "We think someone's been cooking the books since the Cambrian."
Jurisprudence Rex unfolded its scales, revealing the fossilized truth—every mass extinction event correlated with a sneaky amendment to cosmic bylaws. The K-T boundary wasn't a meteor strike, but a hostile merger. The Permian extinction? A leveraged buyout gone wrong.
Arbiter's pillars cracked under the revelation. "The system…it's always been…"
"A rigged game," Ling finished. Her hands found the music box—Jiang Yue's final confession etched in its gears. "But every audit leaves traces."
They fought through geological eras:
Silurian Injunctions that tried to erase their standing
Devonian Deposition trenches filled with lobotomized precedents
A particularly nasty Cambrian Contingency clause that weaponized trilobites
At the Precambrian core, they found the source—a black hole law library where Credit Reapers had been rewriting universal statutes since before time. The head librarian wore familiar features—Jiang Yue's face stretched over a black hole's event horizon.
"You balanced nothing," the abyss sneered. "Merely paid installments on infinite debt."
Ling's bioserver scars burned. "We're foreclosing on foreclosure itself."
The final audit required:
Chu Feng's plow cutting the library's event horizon shelves
Arbiter reciting every dismissed case since the Big Bang
Ling's music box playing the lullaby Jiang Yue never finished
When the last law burned, they stood in the ashes of absolute jurisprudence. Jurisprudence Rex lay shattered, its scales repurposed as playground tiles for larval universes. The Credit Reapers' scythes became jungle gyms. Jiang Yue's hologram lingered just long enough to whisper:
"The balance was never yours to carry."
Arbiter crumbled to sand, its final verdict etching itself in fossilized light:
Case Dismissed With Prejudice
The farmhouse returned, different.
The moon plow grew morning glories
Barrister-raptors laid precedent eggs
Li Zichen's triage code cured the soup of litigious aftertaste
Ling found Chu Feng reprogramming the music box to play something new. "What's that?"
"Unregulated lullaby."
They let the fields grow wild.
Somewhere beyond time, a child version of Arbiter built sandcastle courthouses on a Carboniferous beach. Somewhere deeper, the last Credit Reaper learned to laugh.
The audits would continue.
The balance would shift.
But here, now—between the uncharged miracles and the rusting plow—they let the music box play.