The sunflowers turned their faces away at dawn, their golden petals clattering like juror badges in a stiff breeze. Ling found the first indictment etched into a pumpkin's ribbed flesh—HELIOS V. LING carved by a vengeful sunbeam, the letters blistering with photosynthetic malice. By the time she reached the barn, the hayloft had become a greenhouse courtroom, its walls woven from thorned ivy legal codes and jury benches sprouting carnivorous orchids that snapped at passing lies.
"Chu Feng!" she shouted over the roar of photosynthesizing grievances. A cornstalk lashed out, its leaves slapping a restraining order across her chest. "The chloroplasts are unionizing!"
He emerged from a thicket of litigious kudzu, his overalls patched with light-reactive amendments. "They want overtime pay for night shifts," he said, ducking as a walnut shell containing an eviction notice ricocheted off the water tower. His shadow—still tangled in last week's thermodynamic parole—flickered between pruning shears and a white flag. "And hazard duty for surviving your metaphors."
Arbiter materialized inside a bioluminescent aphid colony, his suit unraveling into chloroplast subpoenas. "I merely taught them collective bargaining basics!" A ladybug crawled from his sleeve, its spots blinking Objection! in Morse code. "How was I to know they'd weaponize chlorophyll?"
The Greenhouse Tribunal
The courtroom reeked of ambition and Miracle-Gro. Judge Photosyn Lex presided from a dais of intertwined poison ivy and barbed wire, her body a pulsating mass of solar panels and contempt charges. The jury box overflowed with militant dandelions, their seed heads loaded with punitive pollen.
"Defendant's unauthorized use of solar energy…" The judge's voice crackled like a dying fluorescent bulb, photons arranging themselves into indictment bullet points. "…constitutes photosynthetic larceny. Exhibit C:"
A hologram bloomed—Ling at sixteen, whispering promises to wilted zucchinis. "Emotional manipulation of non-sentient produce!"
Chu Feng slammed a bag of fertilizer against the barn wall. The explosion of nitrogen-rich confetti morphed into HABEAS CORPUSCLE banners that fluttered in the synthetic breeze.
"Your honor!" Arbiter's protest sprouted from a suddenly sentient patch of crabgrass. "The plaintiff ignores decades of agricultural symbiosis!"
He gestured to the scarecrow judge—now a sentient tumbleweed of legal precedents—rolling through the courtroom collecting perjury spores.
The Defense's Chlorophyll Gambit
Ling crouched in the corpse of Jiang Yue's old greenhouse, the glass panes cracked into a spiderweb of contested property lines. Beneath a mound of heirloom guilt, the USB drive pulsed like a buried lightning bug.
When she resurfaced, the courtroom was digesting its own objections.
"You think sunlight belongs to anyone?" Photosyn Lex's leaves curled into prosecutor smirks. "Your grandmother—"
The drive clicked home.
The Unfurling
The greenhouse erupted into ancestral chlorophyll:
1948: Jiang Yue bribing locusts with moonshine to spare the south forty.
1999: Teenage Ling scrubbing herbicide lies off the moon plow's manifest.
Yesterday: Chu Feng apologizing to snapped beanstalks while stitching their wounds with fishing line.
The scarecrow judge belched a cloud of pardoned weed seeds. "Irrelevant!"
"Relevant as photosynthesis." Ling threw the drive into the compost reactor. "You want light? Let's grow properly."
The chamber exploded in verdant rage.
The Settlement
Dawn found the farm reborn in contested green:
The pumpkin patch hosted a dandelion constitutional convention
Chu Feng's shadow photosynthesized apology bouquets
The moon plow hummed lullabies to unsettled earthworms
Ling found Arbiter teaching aphids to unionize the neighbor's rosebushes. "They're demanding hazard pay for aphid rodeos," he said, grinning through a beard of activist pollen.
"Naturally." She tossed him the scarecrow's severed burlap tongue—still reciting amendments. "Next crisis?"
He nodded east where storm clouds shaped like class-action briefs brewed. "The thunderstorms are countersuing for emotional drainage."
The Chlorophyll Twilight
As dusk stained the jury-box orchids blood-red, Ling knelt by Jiang Yue's resurrected herb garden. Chu Feng's shadow stretched long beside her, its edges blurred by rogue photosynthesis.
"Think she knew it'd come to this?" he asked, plucking a subpoena from between the rosemary's teeth.
Ling watched a bioluminescent worm spell TRUCE across the moon plow's rusted blade. "She knew we'd fight dirty."
The first drops of litigious dew began tattooing SOL INVICTUS V. LING across the soybean leaves. Somewhere beyond the property line, February 30th's laughter crackled through a thunderhead shaped like a gavel.
The music box played on—its melody now harmonizing with the arrhythmic click of expanding tree rings and the barn's last standing beam groaning its dissent into the wind.