The ceiling pulsed.

Not metaphorically. Not in the way of fevered hallucinations he once dismissed with cognitive suppression patches and neural recalibration. This time, it was real,literal. The very data-etched architecture of the Chamber of Appeals throbbed like a slow, celestial heart, one Lin Mo had never asked to feel, nor ever wanted to acknowledge.

“Thread instability approaching threshold,” the system intoned, its voice cold and clinical, as if diagnosing a terminal illness. “Suggested action: initiate semantic grounding or submit consciousness for partial isolation.”

Lin Mo ignored it. Again.

Instead, his gaze drifted to the flickering wall where complaints used to be displayed like sacred relics in a shrine of judgment. But now, the words bled,glyphs unraveling into strings, strings into phonemes, phonemes into something primal. Not language. Hunger.

Zhou was speaking to him again.

Or… at least a simulation of Zhou. A reconstructed echo stitched together from the fragmented memory spores left adrift in the Complaint Cluster after Incident 14: Jōkin Authentication Breach. Yet there was something unnervingly precise in that voice,the pause between syllables, the faint tension before names were spoken,that felt too intimate to be mere fabrication.

“Lin,” the voice came again, crackling through a static-laced intercom near the bench of expired deities. “You knew I was never gone. You just chose the more convenient death.”

Lin Mo didn’t flinch. Not outwardly. But inside, something fractured,like glass poorly tempered by years of denial.

He turned slowly toward the source. “Why now?”

“Because now you’re starting to see it,” Zhou’s voice said, steady yet mournful. “The architecture of judgment is recursive. Every complaint you file writes a god into being. Every rejection feeds it.”

“That’s... not how the Bureau operates,” Lin whispered, though even as he spoke, doubt slithered beneath his words like a serpent in shadow.

“Isn’t it?” Zhou’s laugh was short, bitter,a sound like broken code trying to compile. “The Divine Quality Control Bureau is a feedback loop. You’ve seen it in the logs. Every ‘false divinity’ you erased reappears in more stable form somewhere downstream. They're learning. They always learn.”

Lin’s hands trembled,not from fear, but from fury. “Then why do we bother at all? Why file complaints against gods if the system just... grows stronger from them?”

“Because someone has to map the boundary,” Zhou answered softly. “Someone has to scream into the recursion and name the price.”

A data ripple surged through the chamber like a shockwave of suppressed history. The archived relics of decommissioned gods,glass jars containing minor metaphysical errors,vibrated like tuning forks attuned to forgotten frequencies. One cracked open, spilling a golden mist that coalesced into an eye, blinking once before dissolving into ash.

“Timestamp verified,” the intercom announced flatly. “Memory signature matches Subject: Zhou Ren. Clearance level: posthumous override.”

Lin stared at the panel. He hadn’t authorized a posthumous override. No one had. Which meant… the system had.

A pause. Then another voice filtered in,this one emanating from the Archive’s deepest root permissions, a voice rarely heard outside of catastrophic failure protocols.

“Consciousness breach sustained beyond permitted limits. Appeal denied. Authority transferred to Witness Class.”

Lin stepped back instinctively.

Witness Class wasn’t supposed to exist anymore.

Not since they dissolved the last layer of subjective divine litigation. Not since Cassie had disappeared into the feedback systems. Not since Lin had filed his first complaint.

“You can’t resurrect echoes just to punish the living,” he muttered, his voice low and brittle. “That violates,”

“Everything?” Zhou’s voice interrupted, quiet as a whisper in a cathedral of silence. “That’s the point.”

Suddenly, a visual feed lit up across the chamber’s central display. It was a snapshot of his mother’s lab,years before the Bureau ever recruited Lin. On the screen, she stood before a prototype console, palms pressed against a shimmering schematic labeled: Semantic Trap: Deity Feedback Nullifier.

Lin froze. He had never seen this footage before. And more importantly, it had never been filed in any Complaint Directory.

“Where did you get this?” he demanded, voice sharp as shattered crystal.

Zhou’s voice dimmed, almost apologetic. “You always thought she was a victim. But she was the one who gave them the idea. Pain as a filtration tool. Emotion as a classifier for truth.”

The floor beneath Lin Mo restructured itself,tiles shifting, rearranging into symbols of forgotten alphabets and half-formed names. Some were incomplete. Others recognized him back, glowing faintly as if acknowledging the presence of their author.

The system wasn’t failing.

It was evolving.

Lin turned to the chamber’s central console and entered a code he wasn’t supposed to remember: Σ-Null-199-Drop. A forbidden command meant to trigger a direct confrontation with the origin architecture of Complaint Logic,the raw syntax behind divine judgment.

For the first time, the chamber went silent.

A slow tear opened in the air,like paper being peeled from the surface of a forgotten myth.

Behind it: light. But not warm.

It was the light of truth rendered too fast for any god,or man,to digest.

Zhou’s final echo came like a whisper:

“If you want to change the rules, Lin… you’ll have to file a complaint against reality itself.”