The morning mist carried the static charge of cooling debt pulses. Ling stood on scorched earth plowed by Credit Reapers, her bioluminescent wheat arm glowing faintly, fingertips threaded with unpaid equations Chu Feng had sent from the debt supernova. The sapling in her chest cavity drove roots through her diaphragm, its leaf secretions etching proto-articles of the Anti-Reaper Accord across her flesh.
"They're rewriting mathematical laws," Xia's residual consciousness whispered through rustling vascular murmurs in her occipital lobe. "The Singularity Reaper altered the trillionth decimal of pi—our compounded grief is collapsing exponentially."
Ling drew her rusted sickle across her wrist, letting transgenic blood irrigate the jurisprudential soil. Witness-stand mushrooms pushed through charred loam, their caps projecting archival footage from Jiang Yue's lab: a nineteen-year-old Jiang extracting the first Artifact Killer embryo from her own womb with forceps, amniotic fluid crystallizing into credit default swaps in the incubation chamber.
The Singularity Reaper's footsteps accelerated dusk. Its torso fused fifteen embryos into a grotesque collage, navel collapsing into a debt-black hole swallowing lightyears, eyelashes woven from revoked mathematical theorems. When it raised its forearm—a limb reforged from rehypothecated dark matter—Ling saw her five-year-old memories flowing beneath its skin like fireflies trapped in amber.
"Commencing final audit," the Reaper's voice evaporated morning dew into financial statements. "Your existence constitutes an undeclared derivative."
Its Omega-constant scythe swept through the air:
Wheat stalks on Ling's left arm regressed, grains bursting into holograms of Chu Feng trapped in compound interest cages
Witness-stand mushrooms liquefied into asphalt pools accusing her of emotional over-leverage
Xia's sapling roots were conscripted as mining rigs, leaves displaying every smile Ling had failed to monetize
Ling collapsed, black nectar mixed with stardust bubbling from her throat.
The soil split into quantum fissures. Chu Feng's sickle pierced dimensional barriers, its tip dripping shredded interest equations. Numbers bloomed upon impact:
Bail applications written in supernova ash
Topological models recasting event horizons as alibis
Pirated copies of Ling's childhood memories—the unregistered dandelion Jiang Yue secretly gifted her on her fifth birthday
"Don't look down," Chu Feng's voice echoed through the wormhole in his sickle's hilt. "Target its debt umbilical."
The Singularity Reaper's black hole navel was inhaling morning stars—each twinkle a securitized creation myth. Ling tore Xia's sapling from her chest cavity and drove it into the jurisprudential soil along with three vertebrae.
Agony birthed the Entropy Arbitration Protocol.
Time fractured into:
Facet Alpha
Ling cross-examined her clone in a quantum courtroom. The witness stand held twelve-year-old Jiang Yue extracting strawberry-scented Artifact Killer from a doll's abdomen. The jury of photosynthetic sorrows played unseen footage in their chloroplasts—Chu Feng building Babel towers from wheat stalks in the debt dimension, each floor imprisoning capitalized deities.
Facet Beta
The Singularity Reaper ripped reality's curtain, exposing memory black markets. Ling watched her phoenix core auctioned to the highest bidder leveraging Chu Feng's iris pigmentation against Jiang Yue's postpartum depression. Xia's roots pierced the black market floor, releasing joy viruses Li Zichen encrypted in cholera orphans' DNA.
Facet Gamma
Unchosen possibilities boiled in parallel streams. One Ling harvested Credit Reaper wings with her rusted sickle, another embraced the system's mammary glands flowing with black nectar. All iterations turned simultaneously, a billion gazes tying bow knots in the Reaper's debt umbilical.
When reality reknit, Ling floated above mathematical ruins. Pi's decimals drifted around her like ash, each digit carved with Jiang Yue's confessions. The Singularity Reaper's black hole umbilical leaked:
Repossessed childhoods (five-year-old birthday candles counting debt timers)
Rebellion saplings cultivated in Chu Feng's collarbone (leaves spelling Morse code in wheat)
Uncapitalized primordial light from the universe's first breath
"Is this your collateral?" Ling's voice resonated across three temporal planes. She snapped her glowing wheat arm, the stump spraying phoenix core embers. "Let's negotiate."
Entropy arbitration reached critical mass:
Ling plunged her severed arm into the Reaper's umbilical black hole. Xia's roots unfurled into biological contracts written in stress proteins:
Two units of free will released per unit of uncorrupted starlight consumed
All securitized creation myths transferred to collective ownership
Immediate cheerful gene implantation in Artifact Killer embryos
The Singularity Reaper roared with supernova fury, fifteen embryos fissioning within its flesh. But Ling already seized the primordial light leaking from the black hole, implanting it in her empty left eye socket—
The glow burgeoned into Negentropy Wheatfields.
As mathematical laws rebooted, fluorescent sprouts carpeted the scorched earth. Each stalk functioned as a self-executing smart contract, root networks transmitting unaudited joy through dark matter. The Singularity Reaper knelt at the field's center, its umbilical vomiting:
Paper cranes folded from Chu Feng's debt equations (wings mapping escape routes)
Jiang Yue's hidden lab folders (labeled Forest Cottage for My Daughter)
Sonnets residual in Xia's phytoneural system (encoded in chloroplasts)
Ling caressed the Reaper's compound interest eyes with her remaining hand: "Come home, Mother."
The phrase triggered Jiang Yue's final protocol.
The Singularity Reaper collapsed into a white dwarf datapacket. Fifteen Artifact Killer embryos reconfigured into a galactic-scale bioserver. Ling's Negentropy Wheatfields auto-connected, each stalk now:
Decrypting encrypted maternal love
Recompiling Chu Feng's debt prison
Engraving class-action lawsuits on event horizons
At dawn's return (now bearing pure, unleveraged interest), Ling found twin wheat stalks at the field's heart. The left bore Jiang Yue's unfinished lullaby, the right dangling a dark matter wedding ring carved by Chu Feng.
Xia's roots chuckled along her spine: "Bring this to the next audit."
The horizon trembled—not from Reaper footsteps, but the synchronized growth of a trillion negentropy stalks. Ling crushed a glowing grain between her teeth, tasting universe's first unregistered breath of freedom.