The barn doors sagged on hinges crusted with legal rust. Ling traced a finger through the fungal indictment blooming across the woodgrain—ENTROPY V. LING spelled in black mold cursive. Behind her, the moon plow's shadow stretched like a defendant in the dock, its rusted blades flecked with the iridescent decay of a thousand half-lived apologies.
"Chu Feng!" she barked, kicking a writhing compost heap that had begun reciting class-action terms through methane bubbles. "The earthworms are unionizing again."
He emerged from the root cellar wearing a hazmat suit patched with thermodynamic loopholes. "They want dental plans," he said, lobbing a jar of pickled precedent at the encroaching rot. The glass shattered, releasing brine that hissed Objection! as it ate through a subpoena-shaped mushroom. "And hazard pay for digesting our metaphors."
Arbiter materialized in a swarm of fruit flies, his suit unraveling into bacterial legalese. "I merely taught them collective bargaining basics!" A termite crawled from his collar, chewing through a liability waiver pinned to his lapel. "How was I to know they'd weaponize cellulose?"
The Rotting Trial
The courtroom stank of lost causes. Judge Thermo Lex oozed from the barn's water-damaged walls, her body a pulsing mass of black mold and Newton's cooling law equations. The jury box sprouted shelf fungi that whispered verdicts in spore-clouds.
"Defendant's willful preservation of structural integrity…" The judge's voice crackled like a dying campfire, embers of half-truths swirling in the air. "…constitutes thermodynamic harassment. Exhibit B:"
A hologram flickered—Ling at twelve years old, burying a cracked mason jar of strawberry jam behind the barn. "Unauthorized preservation of ephemeral sweetness!"
Chu Feng slammed a rusted wrench against the moon plow's frozen gears. The resulting screech shattered the projection into fireflies that spelled STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS in panicked flight patterns.
"Your honor!" Arbiter's protest emerged as a mushroom cap from his left ear. "The plaintiff fails to acknowledge defendant's good-faith decomposition efforts!"
He gestured to the scarecrow judge—now a sentient colony of silverfish and legal footnotes—munching through a stack of moldy injunctions.
The Defense's Last Stand
Ling crouched in the root cellar's perpetual twilight, her breath fogging as she pried up floorboards warped by decades of contested moisture rights. The USB drive pulsed beneath the soil like a buried heartbeat, its casing etched with Jiang Yue's final commandment: BREAK THE CYCLE.
When she resurfaced, the courtroom was eating itself.
"You think yourself clever?" Thermo Lex's mold-mouth dripped contempt. "Your grandmother tried similar—"
The drive clicked home.
The Unraveling
The barn dissolved into fractal memories:
1932: Jiang Yue bribing locusts with sugar cubes to spare the north forty.
2001: Teenage Ling scrubbing pesticide warnings off the moon plow's manual.
Last Tuesday: Chu Feng whispering apologies to rust as he oiled the tractor's joints.
The scarecrow judge belched a cloud of termite confetti. "Irrelevant!"
"Relevant as hell." Ling threw the drive into the compost heap. "You want decay? Let's rot properly."
The pile erupted.
The Settlement
Dawn found the farmstead transformed:
The pumpkin patch now hosted a fungal UN summit
Chu Feng's shadow tilled rust into abstract art
The moon plow sang sea shanties to slow its corrosion
Ling found Arbiter teaching earthworms to unionize the neighbor's field. "They're demanding dental plans," he said, grinning through a beard of activist moss.
"Of course they are." She tossed him the scarecrow's severed burlap hand—still signing pardons. "Next crisis?"
He nodded west where storm clouds shaped like class-action forms gathered. "The rain's suing for emotional erosion again."
The Fractured Horizon
As twilight bled across the rotting barn, Ling knelt by the compost heap's new shrine—a mason jar filled with fireflies and the USB's remains. Chu Feng's shadow stretched long beside her, its edges blurred by encroaching rust.
"Think Jiang Yue planned this?" he asked, prying a subpoena from between the jar's teeth.
Ling watched a bioluminescent termite spell APOLOGY across the moon plow's blade. "She planned for us to fight."
The first drops of litigious rain began tattooing OMNIVERSA V. LING across the mud. Somewhere beyond the property line, February 30th's laughter echoed through a thunderhead shaped like a gavel.
The music box played on—its melody now syncopated with the arrhythmic drip of contested rainwater and the barn's last standing post groaning its final dissent into the wind.