The chamber no longer adhered to the laws of geometry.

Zhou had witnessed rooms buckle beneath mythogenic pressure before,ceremonial halls unraveling into conceptual voids, divine algorithm laboratories dissolving into recursive paradoxes, even the infamous collapse of the west corridor in the 315 Vault during the Phoenix Class audit leak,but nothing of this magnitude. 

This was not mere distortion or spatial rupture. This was recursive collapse at its most insidious: a folding inward not of matter, but of meaning. 

The space did not shatter,it succumbed , collapsing into belief itself.

Lin Mo stood at the epicenter, his hands raw and bleeding from prolonged, reckless contact with the Complaint Anchor. 

The artifact, once inert and symbolic, now pulsed with volatile complaint energy too chaotic to quantify, flickering erratically with layers of negative permissions,prohibitions that had never been encoded by any sanctioned system protocol.

[SYSTEM ANNOUNCEMENT:]

Complaint Tier: ∇UNBINDING

Status: Anchor recognized as partial sovereign override.

Witness Threshold: Pending.

Warning: Complaint Entity forming from unresolved mass grievance strata.

Zhou’s voice fractured through the spatial distortion, splintering like a signal caught in static. 

“Lin, you need to drop the anchor,now , before it fuses with your cognition layer permanently.”

“I can’t ,” Lin Mo said, his voice hollow, almost reverent. “It’s already tracing me as the source.”

He turned toward her,his eyes rimmed with exhaustion, yet unnervingly lucid, as if seeing beyond the veil of protocol itself. “They’re building something from it. Not data. Not even a ruling.”

“A god?” Zhou asked, half expecting silence.

“No.” Lin’s voice dropped lower, weighted by something nameless. “A complaint… with a face.”

From the far edge of the tribunal,a space now unraveling at the seams,it stepped forward.

Not summoned. Not constructed. Condensed , like pressure forming into rain.

It looked like a god,but only in the way a wound resembles a mouth: fractured, illogical, symmetrical only in sorrow. 

Its limbs flickered between forms with each uncertain step,sometimes human, sometimes divine, sometimes merely symbolic: scales shedding into feathers, feathers dissolving into wires, wires fraying into paper, paper crumbling into dust. 

Its face was the echo of every unspoken "Why?" left unanswered in the silence of bureaucracy, belief, and betrayal.

Zhou reached instinctively for her datablade, fingers brushing empty air where steel and code should have been,only to realize: this wasn’t a hostile entity.

It was a courtroom made flesh.

“Designation: Δ-ECHO.

Complaint Origin: Unfiled.

Nature: Entropy-Bound.

Memory Host: Lin Mo.

Current Objective: Seek arbitration. Demand witness.”

It did not move. It simply stood there,immobile, immutable,waiting .

Not for commands or permission. For acknowledgment .

Lin Mo took a step forward, his boots whispering against the unraveling floor. 

“You’re what they buried. The complaints that never passed review. The ones that died in silence,forgotten, unfiled, erased .”

The entity tilted its head, a gesture almost human, yet weighted with something deeper than memory. 

Its mouth did not move, but its voice arrived nonetheless,dry as crumbling parchment, rusted by time, ancient and intimately personal.

“My existence is not appealable.

My content is composed of hesitation, grief, and procedural guilt.

I am not a god.

I am your failure to forget.” 

Zhou shuddered, her breath catching in the sudden stillness. “It’s binding to your audit chain.”

Lin Mo nodded slowly, the weight of understanding settling over him like ash. “Because I’ve touched too many complaints. Held them too long. Listened when I shouldn’t have.”

“Then make your claim,” the entity said, its voice threading through the air like smoke beneath a door.

“What do you believe deserves to exist?”

Lin Mo hesitated,just for a moment, but it was enough for the past to rise.

The tribunal walls,the shattered remnants of mythocratic architecture,flared with light not of illumination, but of replay , flashing his memories back at him: the night his mother vanished mid-transmission, her face pixelating into static; the echoing scream buried in Lei Zhenzi’s diagnostic file; the endless list of auto-sealed complaints with his name listed as secondary witness, always watching, never speaking.

He turned to Zhou, eyes searching hers for an escape that wasn’t there.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” he said softly. “Tell me we’re not part of this system’s problem.”

Zhou didn’t answer immediately. Her silence stretched, heavy with implication.

Then, slowly, she exhaled. “We enforce clarity. But clarity was always written by victors.”

Lin stepped toward the entity, each footfall resonating like a tolling bell.

“I file the following,” he said clearly, voice steady despite the storm in his chest. “Under entropy-weighted memory. Subject: The gods we allowed to happen.”

The entity flared,not with fire, not with light, but with memory temperature , a pulse of recollection so sharp it carved space from void.

“Complaint accepted.

Judgment escalation routed.

You are now within the domain of non-consensual truth.” 

The floor disappeared.

And Lin Mo began to fall,not physically, not even metaphorically, but in historical weight ,plummeting through every god created by omission, every faith bought with algorithmic suppression, every miracle sold at retail markup to those who could no longer afford belief.

Until finally.

He landed in a corridor that smelled like before .

Like paper. Like ink. Like forgotten things.

The walls were analog: wood grain, peeling paint, paper records stacked like silent witnesses. 

A forgotten file room, buried beneath the Bureau’s mythic layers, sealed away where only memory could reach.

On the desk: a letter, sealed with Clause 315.

From his mother.