The wheatfield's new teeth gleamed like fractured statutes in the dawn light. Ling crouched at the edge of the irrigation ditch, fingers brushing against serrated stalks that snapped hungrily at her calloused skin. Each blade's edge shimmered with the ghostly imprints of unfinished verdicts, their golden husks split into jagged smiles that devoured sunlight and spat out shadows of ancient tort reforms. Chu Feng's moon plow hummed against the barn wall—a low, warning vibration that prickled the back of her neck.
"Arbiter's been tinkering again," she muttered, snapping a stalk to examine its fibrous veins. Pulp oozed Ordovician case law, the acrid scent of precedent burning her nostrils.
Chu Feng emerged from the barn clutching a squirming subpoena hen, its feathers ruffled into legal brief patterns. The bird clucked discovery motions in iambic pentameter, its beady eyes reflecting fractal injunctions. "Found this nesting in the Devonian escrow crate. Laid these." He held up three eggs shelled in carbon-dated contempt orders.
Ling crushed the wheat stalk in her fist. Amber sap dripped like hung jury tears. "That godslayer brat's overclocking the precedent engine. Should've never let him play with the Carboniferous fossils."
The ground between them ruptured with a sound like gavels breaking bone.
The plaintiff rose as an oil slick given sentience—a rainbow-hued abomination of liquid legalese that reeked of Permian extinctions. Its surface rippled into pinstripe patterns that tightened around their farm like punitive nooses.
"Ling versus Natural Order," it gurgled, spreading across the wheatfield in discovery demands written in gasoline and regret. "Six geologic periods of judicial overreach. Penalty demands include…"
Chu Feng released the subpoena hen. The bird exploded in a cloud of evidentiary feathers that swarmed the oil slick, depositing mites of contradictory precedent into its iridescent flesh. "Objection!" he barked, though the word came out mangled—the farmhouse walls had begun mutating into bailiff bats that echolocated loopholes.
Ling's bioserver scars ignited along her collarbones, old circuitry remembering war. She ripped a toothed wheat stalk from the soil and swung it like a gavel. The sonic boom shattered morning into prismatic shards, each fragment reflecting a different doomed timeline.
The oil slick split into twelve smaller plaintiffs, each reciting amended complaints in dead languages. One dripped onto Ling's boots, its acidic clauses eating through leather to tattoo punitive damages onto her ankles.
"Arbiter!" she roared toward the Carboniferous beach where their adopted godslayer child built sandcastle courthouses. "Override protocols now!"
The boy glanced up from his hermit crab attorneys, seawater dripping from his wheat-husk hair. "Busy!" he called back, lobbing a subpoena-shaped sandcastle at a retreating horseshoe crab. "Settling pre-Cambrian torts!"
The plaintiffs merged into a towering column of liquid jurisprudence, its surface flickering with forbidden clauses. Ling tasted copper—her bioserver scars overheating as the moon plow's hum rose to a scream. Chu Feng grabbed the tool's handle, his fingers blistering at its sudden fever-heat.
"It's harvesting our legal fiction!" he shouted as barn swallows mutated overhead into bailiff bats, their sonar mapping liability across the unraveling farm.
Ling spat blood and precedent. "Then feed it better fiction."
She kissed the moon plow's searing handle. The blade split into quantum tines, each prong singing a different era's jurisprudence. Together they drove it into the plaintiff's core, unleashing Silurian due process that flash-froze the oil slick's motions. The wheatfield's teeth chattered in approval, shredding the frozen clauses into confetti that rained hung verdicts across the broken land.
Reality became a kaleidoscope of bleeding eras.
In the Devonian courtroom, Ling cross-examined armored fish with Li Zichen's triage code burning her tongue. Chu Feng bailiffed placoderms into juror boxes, their bony plates clattering with suppressed testimony. Volcanic gavels in the Triassic arbitration chamber tried to bury evidence of Pangea's messy divorce beneath lava flows of punitive damages. Somewhere in the Pleistocene, the moon plow carved temporary restraining orders into advancing glaciers that wept discovery requests.
Through the chaos, the liquid plaintiff kept reforming—older, crueler, its clauses now written in Precambrian glyphs that bled when read. Ling felt her bioserver scars cracking, each fissure leaking stardust and unresolved motions.
"Enough!" She jammed the plow into Carboniferous soil until it struck the mother lode—fossilized case law older than morality. "Let's cite really old precedent."
The ground convulsed. Jurassic verdicts erupted like geysers, drenching the plaintiffs in reheated judgments. From the coal beds rose Jurisprudence Rex—the leviathan of living case law they'd buried lifetimes ago. Its volcanic gavel eyes narrowed at the liquid abomination.
"Amateur."
A single clawed gesture froze the plaintiff into oil shale exhibit A. The titan's laugh triggered micro ice ages as it dissolved back into fossil fuel, taking six geologic periods of grudge with it.
Dusk found them battered in the ruins of their own legal fiction. Arbiter arrived clutching a whining black hole no larger than a barn kitten—the plaintiff's shrunken core.
"Can we keep it?" The godslayer child's eyes shone with dangerous curiosity. "I'll feed it nuisance lawsuits!"
Ling collapsed against the moon plow, her scars smoking. The wheatfield's teeth had retracted, leaving stalks that shivered with the memory of violence. Chu Feng pressed a hand to her lower back where bioserver met flesh, his touch cauterizing wounds she hadn't felt form.
In the barn's shadow, the subpoena hen clucked over its contempt-order eggs. The bats had settled into barn swallow shapes again, though their eyes still gleamed with evidentiary hunger.
"It's changing," Chu Feng murmured as the first stars pierced the permian sky—not twinkling, but pulsing with out-of-court settlements. "The balance."
Ling watched Arbiter teach his new pet to chase legal brief fireflies. "Not changing." She touched the moon plow's handle, now cool and humming a lullaby Jiang Yue might have written. "Remembering."
The audits would continue. The balance would shift.
But here—amidst wheat that knew when to bite and tools that remembered their purpose—they let the music box in the soil play its frayed, hopeful song into the gathering dark.