Chapter 68 – Echoes of the Spark
Ne Job's Perspective
At first, there was nothing.
Not silence, not darkness — just a kind of unfinished sentence. The universe had inhaled but never exhaled.
Then came the sound. A low hum. Familiar.
The Bureau's servers used to make that noise when he stayed late. It wasn't threatening, just annoying — the cosmic equivalent of a fluorescent light that refused to die. He'd once joked to Yue that the Bureau itself had insomnia.
Now that same hum was inside his chest.
He opened his eyes.
Except he didn't have eyes.
The void around him rippled like liquid glass. Every breath distorted it — fractal lights blooming outward and collapsing again. When he moved, the colors followed, forming afterimages that looked like memories trying to catch up.
> "System… boot… incomplete…"
The voice came from everywhere. His voice, but automated, like a bad Bureau interface.
He coughed out static. "Of course. I die, and I still have to file my own resurrection paperwork."
---
He drifted forward. There was no ground, but the space ahead shimmered with faint outlines — hallways, desks, stacks of half-burnt documents. It looked like the Bureau had been photocopied into infinity and then shredded.
Each page that floated past contained fragments of his life:
> "INTERN PERFORMANCE REPORT: Ne Job — temperament unstable."
"Incident log: unauthorized empathy toward Assistant Yue."
"Recommendation: personality adjustment or deletion."
He grabbed one of the floating pages. It dissolved into light the moment he touched it.
> They really tried to erase me.
He laughed under his breath, though it came out as distortion. "Guess deletion doesn't work on defective gods."
The void trembled — like it heard him. Then, a ripple spread outward, and a dozen glowing silhouettes appeared around him. They were humanoid but hollow, each carved from Bureau insignias and broken regulation scripts. Their eyes glowed pale blue.
> "Unauthorized entity," they said in unison. "Return to containment."
Ne Job sighed. "Great. Security ghosts. Can't a dead guy monologue for five seconds?"
The constructs raised their arms. Blades of light formed — sleek, perfect, all procedure, no personality. The Bureau distilled into soldiers.
He grinned. "Okay, fine. Let's do this the fun way."
---
He summoned the Chaos Spark.
At first, it was just a pulse inside his chest — faint, like a flickering ember. Then it grew, veins of crimson light crawling up his arm, wrapping around his fingers. The void reacted, splitting apart in arcs of molten data.
The Bureau constructs hesitated.
"Unstable resonance detected—"
"Unstable?" he said. "You're looking at the definition."
He snapped his fingers. The world inverted.
A wave of chaotic energy exploded outward — not destruction, but reformation. The constructs shattered into motes of light, rearranging themselves into fragments of memories: the intern cafeteria, Yue's calm voice telling him not to touch divine equipment, Lord Xian's expressionless approval whenever he broke another rule "efficiently."
Each image flickered, then merged into a single glowing sphere that hovered before him.
It pulsed once, twice, like a heartbeat.
> "Yue."
The word escaped him before he could stop it. The sphere shimmered, responding to the sound. A faint echo of her voice filled the space.
> "Ne Job…?"
It wasn't clear. It came with interference — as if she were speaking through layers of broken time. But it was her. The rhythm of her tone, precise and controlled, even in panic.
He reached toward the sound. "Yue, I'm here—"
The sphere flickered violently. A dozen overlapping Bureau system warnings replaced her voice.
> "Subject Yue Hanzhen: quarantined."
"Containment successful. Emotional contamination risk: severe."
"Do not establish resonance link."
He clenched his jaw. "Too late."
---
The hum in his chest changed pitch. The Chaos Spark surged, forming lines of energy around him — a web connecting him to invisible points in the void. He could feel Yue through them: her pulse, her fear, her resistance. The Bureau might have locked her inside a quarantine layer, but they forgot one detail.
The Chaos Spark didn't obey layers. It was the thing layers were built to resist.
> They built the system to keep me out, he thought, but they used me to power it.
He laughed again, but there was no humor left. Just exhaustion.
"Okay, Bureau. You want containment? You'll get it. But on my terms."
He lifted his hand and focused. The Spark obeyed. Lines of red light connected his fingers to the invisible lattice surrounding him. It wasn't energy — it was narrative. The structure of cause and effect, rewritten with each pulse of chaos.
He could see it all now — the flow of divine bureaucracy stretched across dimensions, each record tied to a memory, each law enforced by an algorithm of faith. Beautiful, cruel, logical.
And at its center: a single frozen shard of light containing Yue's badge.
> "Rebirth Directive," he whispered. "You're trying to rewrite reality."
He remembered Lord Xian's words — cold, deliberate: Rebirth is not renewal. It's control.
---
Time twisted. The void rearranged itself into a fractured simulation of his last office.
Stacks of papers floated weightless, pens spun in midair, and the Bureau logo on the wall kept changing — from "Order Above All" to "Containment Ensures Existence" to "Faith Is a File."
He sat down on the ghost of a chair. "You know," he said aloud, "I used to think they were just cruel. Turns out they're terrified."
The Spark flared in response, painting the air around him with flame-shaped sigils. Each one carried fragments of his erased memories: flashes of a war before the Bureau, of chaos gods chained under bureaucracy, of the heavens rewriting their own history to erase the rebellion.
> The Shard Court wasn't born of justice. It was born of fear.
He finally understood what Yue saw — why she defied her orders, why she reached into the containment field instead of running. She wasn't saving him out of duty. She was saving him because she knew the Bureau couldn't survive its own lies.
The Spark pulsed again, stronger. The sphere of light that echoed Yue's voice brightened.
> "Ne Job…"
"Yue, hold on. I'm coming."
The void groaned, bending around him as though resisting. Massive glyphs formed overhead — containment runes older than language. They began to tighten, descending like chains of glass.
> "Unauthorized narrative expansion," the Bureau's disembodied voice thundered.
"Terminate the anomaly."
"Sorry," he muttered, standing up. "The anomaly files itself now."
He reached upward. The chains shattered.
---
The explosion wasn't physical. It was ontological.
Every law, every clause, every memory suppression the Bureau had ever written inverted into its opposite. The void unfolded like a flower made of broken mirrors. Through its petals, Ne Job glimpsed the real Bureau — its countless offices, its gods disguised as clerks, its endless repetition of purpose — all looping to hide the fact that heaven was built on a cover-up.
The Chaos Spark inside him blazed, now no longer a flame but a star. The pressure nearly crushed him, but he didn't care. His body—whatever counted as a body—was breaking apart into data dust, yet his voice remained.
"Yue!" he shouted across the collapsing dimensions. "If you can hear me, break your badge! It's not a seal — it's a leash!"
Her faint reply came through static: "You shouldn't be able to—"
"Yeah, well," he said, smiling through the pain, "I've been failing Bureau assessments since day one."
The Spark erupted.
---
Light consumed the void.
When it cleared, Ne Job stood on a surface made of glass and cloud — a bridge of memory. At the far end, a silhouette waited, faint and glowing gold.
Yue.
Her form was flickering, but she was there. The quarantine layer between them trembled like a soap bubble.
She looked at him, eyes wide, as though seeing something impossible.
"Ne Job… what did you do?"
He took a step forward. "Something you warned me not to."
"And that is?"
He grinned faintly. "Think."
The barrier between them rippled once, then shattered into motes of light. Yue stumbled forward, catching herself. He caught her hand instinctively — and for the first time since his erasure, they actually touched.
The contact sent a shockwave through both of them — shared memory, shared time, shared chaos. She gasped as flashes of his erased life poured through her: the moment he was created, the rebellion he never remembered, the fragment of the Chaos Spark hidden inside his soul.
Her voice trembled. "You're not just an intern."
He shook his head slowly. "Neither are you."
The void began to collapse again — not destructively, but transforming. The endless Bureau space folded into a single point of resonance between them. The Chaos Spark intertwined with Yue's disciplined divine core, forming a new rhythm — something neither purely lawful nor chaotic.
Between them, the symbol of the Bureau dissolved, replaced by a new sigil: a circle split in two halves, endlessly rotating. Rebirth — rewritten.
Ne Job looked at her, eyes fierce despite the exhaustion. "They'll come for us."
"They always do," Yue said softly.
"Then let's make them file the paperwork."
She almost smiled. "Intern."
"Assistant."
---
Somewhere above the collapsing simulation, Lord Xian watched the resonance readings go off the scale. The Shard Court's observers shouted over each other, panic hidden behind protocol.
"The Spark has fused with a divine core!"
"Containment impossible!"
"Rebirth Directive collapsing—"
Lord Xian only whispered one word:
"Finally."
He turned away from the monitors, his eyes reflecting both sorrow and anticipation. "Let's see what the heavens remember when their erasure fails."