The dawn arrived as a repossession notice. Ling tasted its clauses on her tongue—subparagraphs about unauthorized sunlight usage buried beneath punitive pollen counts. Her chest-cavity sapling had grown thorns overnight, each barb etched with Li Zichen's triage hymns in decaying binary.
"Reaper signatures at 12 parsecs," hissed the dead crow's ghost, its blockchain eye now embedded in her clavicle. "They're harvesting Andromeda's agricultural subsidies."
Ling tightened the barbed-wire sash around her farmer's tunic. The gesture activated dormant protocols—her hoe mutated into a quantum scythe, its blade shimmering with event horizon wheat.
The Credit Reapers came riding supermassive debt vortices. Their scythes were forged from foreclosed event horizons, handles wrapped in the skin of defaulted universes. Ling recognized their leader's fractal eyes—the same recursive pattern as Jiang Yue's last lullaby.
"Welcome to the cosmic audit," the Reaper intoned, voice layered with dying stars' credit ratings. "Let's discuss your existential liabilities."
It swung its scythe. The blade passed through Ling's ribs and harvested:
Forty-three summers of stolen firefly laughter
The compound interest on Chu Feng's last tear
Every unmonetized kiss she'd ever imagined
Ling's sapling screamed in six-dimensional agony.
Xia's jurisprudential roots responded with a photosynthesis injunction. The ground erupted in legal brambles that cited Codex Solis v. Dark Matter Derivatives. Ling's quantum scythe found purchase in the Reaper's collateralized shadow, unleashing:
Antimatter Chaff that blinded debt algorithms
Event Horizon Pollen clogging compound interest valves
Supernova Class Action butterflies dissolving event horizon threads
But the Reaper simply unzipped its chest cavity. Inside swirled the Radioactive Womb containing twenty-one Artifact Killer
embryos—each pulsing with the rhythm of a liquidated galaxy.
"Your rebellion was budgeted," it sneered, plucking a fetus-shaped superweapon from the placental haze.
The embryo unfolded into a Black Nectar Golem, its body:
Joints lubricated with repossessed dark energy
Eyes projecting Jiang Yue's euthanized compassion protocols
Palms blooming foreclosure orchids that sang Ling's true name
Ling's scythe arm went necrotic as the golem's shadow touched her. Xia's thorns retaliated by injecting Unsecured Starlight into her aorta. The resulting supernova in her capillaries birthed:
Rebellion Mycorrhizae networking with Chu Feng's debt prison
Photonic Amicus Briefs written in gamma-ray bursts
A single Uncollateralized Hope photon piercing the Radioactive Womb
Somewhere beyond spacetime, Chu Feng heard the photon's whisper. His sickle arm deep in a black hole's financial statements, he began carving escape vectors through quantum depreciation fields. The resulting equations:
Converted dark matter into courtroom benches
Transmuted Hawking radiation into witness testimony
Forged his remaining memories into a key-shaped supernova
Back in the material plane, Ling's necrotic arm crumbled to reveal bioluminescent wheat stalks. She grasped the Black Nectar Golem's foreclosure orchid tongue.
"Let's audit your creation myth," she growled, triggering apoptosis protocols.
The ensuing blast radius:
Reduced three Credit Reapers to subprime particle clouds
Shattered six Artifact Killer
embryos into unregulated nebula seeds
Etched Jiang Yue's full confession across the cosmic microwave background
But the Radioactive Womb began pulsating—fifteen remaining embryos merging into a Singularity Reaper. Its birth cry:
Deleted 0.3% of mathematics
Repossessed Newton's third law
Foreclosed on Ling's ability to perceive violet
As spacetime itself began filing for bankruptcy, Xia's roots dragged Ling into the transgenic soil. The last thing she saw was Chu Feng's sickle cutting through the fabric of reality—its blade harvesting a constellation shaped like her childhood smile.