The barnyard calendar filed for divorce. Ling discovered this on a Tuesday that legally should've been a Friday, according to the weeping wall clock dangling from the maple tree. Its hands spun in opposite directions, scattering hours like molting feathers across the farm.
"It's claiming irreconcilable differences between solar and lunar dating," Chu Feng said, prying a confused Tuesday off his boot. The day squirmed like a disoriented ferret before dissolving into a puddle of existential dread.
Arbiter burst from the henhouse wearing a cuckoo clock as a helmet. "I can fix this! Just need to realign the circadian jurisprudence!"
"You caused this," Ling snapped, batting away a swarm of rebellious weekends trying to unionize. "What did you feed the almanac this time?"
The godslayer child grinned sheepishly. "A little time loop fertilizer. But it was for the pumpkins' vertical growth!"
A thunderous gong shook the farm. The sky peeled back like a cheap lawsuit binder, revealing a courtroom where the constellations served as bailiffs. A comet in judicial robes slammed its gavel—a pulsar fragment—and boomed:
"IN THE MATTER OF CHRONOS V. LING: CONTEMPT OF TEMPORAL CONTINUITY. DEFENDANTS WILL CEASE AND DESIST ALL UNAUTHORIZED TIME STREAM MANIPULATION EFFECTIVE… YESTERDAY."
Ling threw a rotten tomato at the cosmic judge. It passed through Andromeda and hit a passing UFO, which promptly sued for emotional distress.
The trial began retroactively, which meant they'd technically already lost. Chu Feng spent the first hour arguing with his own echo from three days prior.
"You can't serve discovery requests to a shadow!" Present Chu Feng yelled at Past Chu Feng's fading silhouette.
"Watch me!" Past Chu Feng retorted, nailing a subpoena to a sunbeam.
Ling battled temporal paradoxes:
Her objections kept being overruled before she voiced them
The scarecrow judge presided simultaneously in five crop rotations
The chickens laid eggs containing their own birth certificates
Arbiter tried to reset the timeline using a jury-rigged sundial, but only succeeded in creating a localized Wednesday singularity that kept demanding brunch.
"Order! Order in the time stream!" The comet judge roared, accidentally igniting a nearby black hole's procedural rights.
During recess (which occurred during the opening statements), Ling cornered the almanac in the root cellar. Its pages flapped angrily, ink bleeding into accusations.
"You started this," she hissed. "Take back the divorce filing."
The almanac spat a leap day at her face. 29 February 2024 stuck to her forehead like a Post-It note of vengeance.
"Fine." She uncorked Jiang Yue's music box, now retrofitted with quantum strings. "Let's play your tune."
The melody:
Made Thursdays weep nostalgic
Forced weekends to clock overtime
Revealed the comet judge's secret passion for crochet
The temporal courtroom dissolved into a tangle of yarn and paradoxes.
Arbiter's breakthrough came via poultry.
"Chickens are nature's timekeepers!" he proclaimed, strapping sundials to confused hens. "Observe the pecking order of hours!"
The flock:
Pecked Wednesday's singularity into submission
Laid eggshells imprinted with temporal injunctions
Accidentally invented Daylight Saving's edgy cousin: Eon Hoarding
Chu Feng weaponized the moon plow against the comet's gavel. Each collision:
Birthed new zodiac signs (The Lawsuit, The Redacted)
Converted black holes into notary publics
Made Thursdays briefly consider rebranding
Ling faced the almanac in final arbitration, their battleground a chessboard of leap years and expiring statutes.
"Checkmate," she whispered, sacrificing 31 April to protect the sanctity of March.
The almanac burst into flames, its ashes settling as a perfectly reasonable Gregorian calendar.
In the aftermath, the farm enjoyed seven simultaneous sunsets (all out-of-court settlements). Arbiter taught the scarecrow judge to crochet temporal sweaters. Chu Feng discovered Mondays now arrived bearing apology chocolates.
"They're hollow," he noted, biting into a Swiss cheese Tuesday.
"Compromise," Ling said, watching the comet judge retire to a black hole timeshare.
The music box played a lullaby in reverse, its gears winding toward futures still unclaimed. Somewhere beyond the almanac's grave, February 29th plotted revenge.
The audits would continue.
The balance ticked.