The sky above Level-3 Sector gradually transformed into a bruised, ominous blue, pulsating faintly as if the very fabric of the heavens were suffering from a malfunction, on the verge of short-circuiting. The rain that fell wasn't the typical, continuous downpour. Instead, it descended in stubborn, disjointed spirals, as though the weather system had completely forgotten its intended patterns and lost all sense of normalcy.

Lin Mo deliberately left his umbrella behind. He welcomed the rain, craving its touch as if it could wash away some of the weight on his mind.

He had only one day remaining before the Bureau's override order expired. Just one day before he would be taken off the Complaint Cluster case and reassigned to the mundane task of cleaning up the backlog of faith-cycle complaints. Truth be told, he couldn't care less. The badge in his pocket was no longer active in the official sense.

Yet, it still held a certain significance. Not the kind bestowed by the institution, but a symbolic power that ran deep.

He walked alone through the lower districts, passing by flickering shrines where sponsored miracles played on an endless loop, set to autoplay.

“Believe in thunder. Believe in us.”

One of the screens displayed an image of Lei Zhenzi in mid-flight, his fabricated smile frozen and repeating with each loop.

The rain, persistent and unrelenting, blurred the smile into a jumbled mess of static, as if trying to erase the falsehood it represented.

A woman with rust-colored hair sat huddled beneath the shelter of a broken transport arch. She clutched a cracked holotab tightly in her hands. As Lin approached, she looked up, her eyes meeting his. Her coat was of the standard Bureau design, but it was clearly at least a decade out of date. The badge on her lapel had been scratched clean, as if someone had tried to erase her connection to the organization.

Before Lin could utter a word, she handed him a file.

“You’re her son,” she stated matter-of-factly.

Lin paused, a hint of confusion crossing his face. “Whose?”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” the woman snapped. She lit a thin cigarette wrapped in paper. “Your mother was the last person to attempt filing Complaint Code L-0ST. She got further with it than anyone else ever did. But now you’re walking straight into the same impenetrable wall.”

He opened the file. Inside, there was a damp, physical printout. It was an old file photo of Lei Zhenzi, unmasked and looking much younger.

However, the image had been overwritten with audit notes. Timestamps were crossed out, and there were margin annotations in a handwriting that Lin instantly recognized.

It was his mother's.

Next to one of the footnotes, a phrase was underlined not once, not twice, but three times:

“Witness anomaly observed. Data echo at dream-tier evaluation. Smiling function not originally deployed.”

“What does this mean?” Lin asked, his voice filled with a mix of curiosity and trepidation.

“It means your god never smiled naturally,” the woman replied. “The system forced a smile onto him later, after the fact. It was added retroactively, long after he had died.”

At that moment, Zhou's voice crackled through Lin's comm device. “Lin, you need to get back here right away. We've received breach alerts from at least three adjacent registries. Something's siphoning complaints from deprecated clusters.”

He ignored the comm, his focus still on the woman in front of him. “Why are you giving me this?”

The woman crushed the cigarette under her boot. “Because I was there, in the thick of it. I worked on the PR edits for the Smiling God launch series. Back when it was nothing more than code running in emotional simulators. Back when they thought they could just put on a facade of sincerity like it was a piece of clothing.”

Lin stared at her, taking in every word she said.

She added, “Your mother tried to warn everyone about what was going on. They erased her credentials to silence her. But before they could completely wipe her out, she managed to smuggle part of her audit core into a private node. It's still active, buried deep in an offline chassis.”

“Where is it?” Lin asked, his eyes fixed on hers.

“Underground. In Temple Sector 7. You'll need a key to access it.” She pulled a token from her pocket，a worn-out Bureau override coin with a fractured 315 stamp on it.

“This is the last one of its kind,” she said. “Technically, it's no longer valid. But the system is old enough to still recognize its significance.”

He took the coin from her hand.

Before he could ask for her name, she stood up and walked out into the rain. Her figure flickered briefly，once, twice，before stabilizing.

She wasn't a projection. She was a real person, someone the system had seemingly forgotten to update for a very long time.

Back at the Bureau, Zhou was pacing back and forth, clearly agitated.

“You left in the middle of a Class-2 spillover,” she said, her voice filled with a mix of frustration and concern.

“I found her,” Lin said. “A PR ghost, one of my mother's old contacts. She gave me a location.”

Zhou handed him a wet cloth. “You're bleeding.”

He touched his neck, surprised. He didn't even remember getting scratched.

She added, her voice dropping to a whisper, “We also received a ping.”

“From the Filter?” Lin asked.

She shook her head.

“Worse.”

She turned the screen around to show him.

A new complaint had emerged.

Filed under “Temporal Regression Artifacts.”

Source flagged as “Echo of Subject WTT-α03.”

Status: Active. Memory Loop Detected.

Accompanied by a voice recording.

“You said if I smiled, they’d let me rest.”

Lin Mo sank heavily into a chair.

“But now they’re selling the smile.”