📘 Chapter 58 – After the Flash
Silence was the first thing Yue felt.
Not peace — silence. The kind that hums too loudly, as if the world itself were holding its breath.
Her eyes opened to a ceiling that wasn't a ceiling anymore — fragments of Bureau sigils hanging midair like frozen glass. Each rune pulsed weakly, glitching between meanings: File, Erase, Remember, Error.
Yue sat up slowly. The air was cold, metallic, filled with the smell of ozone and paper dust. Pages floated everywhere — reports, memos, half-burned clearance forms drifting in zero gravity. Every few seconds, one would catch fire spontaneously, vanish, then reappear folded neatly on the floor.
Her head throbbed. A faint ache pulsed behind her temple where the audit seal used to be. She reached up instinctively — and froze.
The Bureau's identification crest on her wrist was gone.
"…they really tried to wipe us," she whispered.
The words echoed unnaturally long, as if the room itself were trying to remember what "speech" was.
Then, a groan.
From somewhere near a collapsed desk, a hand twitched. A familiar hand — smudged with ink, clutching a half-melted clipboard like it was a lifeline.
"...Ne Job?"
The intern's muffled voice drifted up from beneath a pile of shattered filing cabinets.
"...Yue-senpai… are we fired yet?"
Yue blinked, then laughed once — too loudly, too shakily. "Not yet. But possibly deleted."
She crawled over, pushing aside debris. Ne Job lay there, hair sticking up like burnt feathers, eyes half-open and unfocused. A scorch mark ran across his uniform, but his badge — the only thing glowing faintly — pulsed with erratic light.
Yue helped him sit up. The moment her hand touched his shoulder, her vision split.
For an instant, the room inverted — light became dark, dark became blinding. The Bureau around them flickered, revealing overlapping realities:
One pristine and orderly — polished marble floors, angelic clerks stamping files.
The other… an endless storm of symbols collapsing inward, like Heaven's codebase was eating itself alive.
She gasped and pulled her hand back. The vision snapped away.
Ne Job blinked. "You okay? You just glitched like one of the accounting angels."
Yue steadied her breathing. "You're radiating unstable resonance," she said quietly. "It's like your spiritual code is rewriting the Bureau's perception layers."
Ne Job tilted his head. "So… I'm like a virus?"
"Worse," Yue muttered. "You're running an update."
He grinned weakly. "Cool."
She sighed — the exasperation felt good, almost normal. But then she looked around again, and the illusion of normalcy fell apart.
Every wall shimmered like broken glass. The Bureau's familiar corridors were folding in on themselves, reconfiguring as if a cosmic administrator had hit refresh. Signs that once read "Personnel Wing" now flickered between "Memory Disposal" and "Under Reconstruction by Order of the Court."
A faint voice echoed through the distortion — mechanical, calm, and inhumanly polite:
> "Directive 404 in progress. Unauthorized memory clusters detected. Purge commencing."
Yue's blood ran cold. "That's… the Shard Court's voice protocol."
Ne Job tilted his head. "They sound friendly."
"They're not." She grabbed his wrist. "We have to move. If the directive completes, it'll rewrite this entire floor into blank protocol space. We'll cease to—"
"—exist?" he finished.
She hesitated. "…More like… be filed as a concept."
Ne Job looked down at his faintly glowing hands. "Could be worse. At least I'd finally have job security."
Yue gave him a look sharp enough to cut divine paperwork. "Not funny."
"Little funny," he mumbled.
They moved through the debris-strewn hallways, passing half-erased clerks frozen mid-motion — staff spirits whose audit scripts had failed mid-cycle. Some looked peaceful, others terrified, as if realizing their identities were being deleted line by line.
Yue clenched her fists. "They're wiping the entire Bureau's memory chain. All records of us, of Lord Xian… everything."
"Then why are we still here?" Ne Job asked quietly.
Yue stopped walking. That was the question.
She turned to face him — and froze.
There, in his reflection on the mirrored floor, his aura was visible for just a moment: gold mixed with deep crimson, flickering like a living fracture. The same hue the old records described — the Chaos Spark.
Her breath caught.
Ne Job looked confused. "What? Do I have something on my face?"
"No," Yue said slowly. "Something in you."
The air around them shuddered. The corridor bent, folding into itself again, symbols flashing violently: CONTAINMENT BREACH. ACCESS DENIED.
Yue grabbed his hand. "Run!"
But as they sprinted, the world behind them unraveled — the floor peeling away into infinite reflections, the Bureau collapsing like a building made of memory.
Through it all, Ne Job laughed breathlessly. "You ever feel like we're stuck in an unpaid overtime dream?"
"Shut up and keep running!"
Above them, a massive glyph began forming — a seal descending from the heavens, its edges lined with divine script. The Shard Court's containment order.
Yue's pulse pounded. "They found us—"
And then everything went white again.
For a moment, Yue thought she'd been erased. But through the static, she heard Ne Job's voice — faint, almost echoing from another dimension:
> "Don't worry, Yue-senpai… if they delete me, I'll just reapply."
Then silence swallowed everything.