Time itself filed the lawsuit at the stroke of midnight, its complaint etched into the farm's sundial with photons stolen from tomorrow. Ling woke to find the scarecrow judge frozen mid-gavel, its burlap face twisted in a temporal rictus. The moon plow hummed backward, unharvesting yesterday's sunlight as subpoenas rained from a sky stuck between Thursday and existential dread.
"They've finally come for the loophole," Chu Feng said, his shadow splintered into six conflicting time zones. He held a pocket watch oozing paradox fluid, its gears spelling Tempus v. Ling – Unlawful Continuum Occupation & Epochal Trespass.
Arbiter crawled from a wormhole wearing a suit stitched from expired statutes. "I might've taught February 30th about statute limitations! But only to stop it haunting the almanac!"
A crack split the barn doors, vomiting forth:
A jury pool of younger/older selves arguing over voir dire
A prosecutor shaped like an infinity symbol with a law degree
The decomposed remains of every legal metaphor Ling had ever murdered
The Eternity Tribunal convened in the ruins of causality. Judge Chrono Lex materialized as a mobius strip in judicial robes, their voice oscillating between Big Bang bass and heat-death falsetto:
"Defendant stands accused of:" The words looped like a cursed vinyl. "(a) Knowingly existing in multiple tenses; (b) Unlicensed use of 'now' as a transitive verb; and (c) Emotional damages inflicted upon linearity via…" A supernova flare illuminated the addendum: "…excessive use of agricultural allegories to describe temporal phenomena."
Ling hurled Jiang Yue's music box into the time stream. It played a melody that made paradoxes line-dance, its gears chewing through causality like a woodchipper through precedent.
"Objection!" she shouted, her voice echoing from seven temporal coordinates. "The plaintiff lacks standing in any measurable present!"
Chrono Lex's gavel—a collapsed star spinning backward—slammed, birthing a black hole that ate the objection. "Sustained as irrelevant! Exhibit A:" The singularity vomited footage of Ling planting pumpkins in a closed timelike curve.
The prosecution's opening argument unraveled reality:
A younger Arbiter took the stand, his hands still clean of temporal crimes. "I warned them!" he squeaked, pointing at his future self currently trying to bribe a juror with yesterday's lottery numbers.
February 30th materialized as a shimmering plaintiff, its body a palimpsest of erased calendars. "The defendant's farm is a causal tumor!" It projected holograms of Ling dancing at her own funeral/wedding/barn raising occurring simultaneously in 1987.
Chu Feng countered by playing a quantum banjo whose strings tuned alternate realities. The resulting harmonics:
Turned the scarecrow judge into a free-will fundamentalist
Made the jury's past selves sue their future selves for defamation
Caused the moon plow to harvest a crop of verb tenses
"Order!" Chrono Lex thundered, their voice aging the courtroom into dust and reconstituting it twice per nanosecond.
Ling's defense hinged on Jiang Yue's final protocol—a music box melody so potent it risked unwinding creation. As she cranked the device, the farm unraveled into raw temporal fabric:
Pumpkins testified about existing in superpositional states
The river's lawsuit merged with the mountain's grievances into a spacetime fault line
Arbiter's younger/older selves formed a picket line outside causality
"You'd destroy everything?" February 30th hissed, its edges fraying into calendar confetti.
"No," Ling said, her bioserver scars glowing like supernovae. "Just the lies we built it on."
The music box reached crescendo, its notes:
Erased Chrono Lex's birth certificate (a forged supernova)
Exposed February 30th as a failed leap year experiment
Forced every metaphor to testify against itself
In the silence between entropy's heartbeat, Ling offered a plea deal:
The farm would become a sanctuary for orphaned moments
Chu Feng's moon plow would till timelines instead of soil
February 30th would get a commemorative plaque (and therapy)
All legal allegories would retire to a coastal paradox resort
The tribunal dissolved into reluctant applause. Chrono Lex's gavel became a grandfather clock, its pendulum swinging between guilty and who cares.
At dawn—or some reasonable facsimile—Ling found Chu Feng mending the scarecrow judge with threads pulled from discontinued timelines. Arbiter floated nearby, teaching minutes to behave.
"What now?" he asked, tuning the moon plow to plant memories instead of corn.
Ling watched February 30th sulk across a sundial, its edges no longer bleeding into March. "We audit eternity. Gently."
The music box played a lullaby even time couldn't litigate, its melody weaving through:
The cows' newfound pension plan (paid in temporal grazing rights)
The river's apology note written in meandering loops
The mountains' promise to stop suing every continental shift
As shadows stretched across fresh-planted tomorrows, the farm settled into its final verdict: not peace, but an armistice with chaos. Somewhere beyond the almanac's grave, a new loophole sprouted—but that's a story for calendars yet unwritten.
The audits would continue.
The balance… persisted.
And in the fragile now between what was and what might've been, they let the moon plow rest at last, its rusted blades etching not laws, but the ghost of a melody even time hummed in its sleep.