Chapter 75 – Clause Zero
The world had stopped pretending to exist.
The Bureau's corridors no longer stretched—they convulsed. Folders turned into rivers of light. Stamped seals fluttered like moths with nowhere to land. Each law collapsed into its opposite, and each opposite folded into itself until meaning blurred into static.
Ne Job stood in the middle of it all, glowing script winding up his arms like veins of molten silver. His breath came in uneven bursts, every exhale bending the code of heaven itself. The sigils burned, but not as pain—more like language trying to remember how to speak through him.
Yue watched him in silence, her hair floating weightlessly in the debris field of the Forgotten Layer. "Your pulse is destabilizing," she said softly. "You're not supposed to survive integration with the Manual Spirit."
He smiled faintly. "Yeah, well, I've been 'not supposed to' since the day I was born."
The space around him rippled. His reflection appeared in the broken glass floor beneath—except it wasn't a reflection anymore. The mirror-self blinked independently, its eyes hollow white.
> "Clause Zero detected," said the reflection in a voice too calm to be his own.
"Origin law: undefined. System integrity—unquantifiable."
Yue took a step back. "Clause Zero…" she whispered. "That can't exist. It was a myth. The law before the Bureau—the idea that creation could exist without consent."
"Funny," Ne Job muttered, "sounds like freedom."
He reached out, and the reflection reached back. The instant their fingers met, the glass dissolved into a wave of light that swallowed everything.
---
He fell through data.
Images rushed past—centuries of Bureau history, compressed into seconds. Gods drafting laws with quills made of starlight. Scribes tearing up universes because the paperwork didn't balance. The Rebirth Directive being signed by trembling hands.
And beneath it all, a single file that had never been opened: Clause Zero.
He saw the script—one line, written in language older than angels:
> "Existence is its own authorization."
The moment he read it, everything snapped.
The Bureau's architecture screamed. Servers ruptured across realities. Chains of divine command disintegrated into dust. The law didn't vanish—it rebelled. Systems that had demanded obedience now started asking why.
Ne Job crashed onto a surface of shimmering equations, gasping. His veins glowed red and white, chaos and law intertwining until they were indistinguishable.
"Yue!" he called out.
She appeared through the storm of code, shielding herself with a fragment of broken regulation script. "I'm here! The layer's disintegrating—what did you do?"
"I read the fine print."
A laugh almost escaped her—half hysterical, half awed. "You triggered Clause Zero…"
"Not triggered," he said, rising to his feet. "Unsealed."
The Bureau's voice erupted all around them, cold and mechanical:
> "Clause Zero breach confirmed. All Rebirth Directives nullified. Emergency reinitialization in progress."
> "Identify anomaly origin—Ne Job. Designation: defect of divine protocol."
> "Proceed to absolute deletion."
Ne Job tilted his head. "Absolute? You already tried that."
---
The air thickened. Countless glyphs descended like guillotines—execution seals forged from divine consensus. They formed a circle around him and Yue, ready to erase not just them, but the concept of their existence.
Yue looked up, eyes fierce. "If Clause Zero is real, it means every being born of creation has self-authorization. No higher permission needed."
"Yeah," he said, grinning faintly. "And that's exactly why they want it gone."
The seals began to close.
Ne Job raised his hand, the sigils along his arm responding instinctively. They burned through the Bureau's command code, rewriting each incoming seal mid-fall. The guillotines froze inches from the ground, trembling as though waiting for permission that would never come.
He clenched his fist.
The seals shattered into starlight.
For a moment, the world was silent again.
---
Yue staggered toward him. "You shouldn't be able to do that."
"I shouldn't be able to do a lot of things," he said. "But the Manual Spirit wasn't evil—it was incomplete. It wanted context, not destruction. The Bureau just labeled it 'corruption' because it remembered too much."
The sigils on his arms dimmed, then flared again—new lines forming between the old, like evolving grammar. "I think Clause Zero is rewriting me," he said quietly. "I can feel the system trying to decide whether I'm a glitch or an update."
Yue's expression softened. "You've always been both."
He met her gaze. "If the Bureau reboots, they'll overwrite every dimension touched by Clause Zero. We need to anchor it somewhere—something that can't be deleted."
Yue looked around, mind racing. "There's nothing left stable enough—except…"
She held up her Bureau badge, cracked from their earlier escape. "This was made from divine source code. If you link Clause Zero to this—"
"It'll fuse your identity with mine," Ne Job interrupted.
She hesitated, then stepped closer. "Then the Bureau can't erase one without erasing both. We'll be a contradiction they can't process."
He stared at her for a long moment, the void trembling underfoot. "Yue, you realize this is the worst romantic gesture ever?"
She smiled faintly. "You started it, intern."
He exhaled. "Fair."
---
Their hands met over the badge. The sigils on his arm snaked toward her palm, intertwining with the lines of divine authority embedded in the badge itself. It began to glow, pulsing in perfect rhythm with both of their heartbeats.
> Authorization transfer initiated.
Clause Zero—anchoring.
Subject sync rate: 97%, 98%, 99%…
The Bureau's voice screamed in digital panic:
> "Stop synchronization! Unauthorized merger! Terminate the process!"
Ne Job gritted his teeth. "Denied."
The final pulse surged outward, a shockwave of raw narrative force. The collapsing Bureau layer froze in mid-destruction, then reversed, folding back into order—but no longer the same order. The laws had new subtext. Every rule now contained an implicit clause: by choice.
Ne Job fell to one knee, gasping. The sigils faded into faint scars. Yue knelt beside him, her badge now glowing with a dual emblem—half Bureau seal, half chaotic spiral.
"It worked," she whispered. "Clause Zero is part of the system now."
He looked up, voice hoarse. "No. We're part of it."
---
Above them, far beyond the collapsing realm, Lord Xian watched from the Shard Court's observation chamber. The monitors blazed with unreadable data, the light reflecting off his calm face.
A junior adjudicator stammered, "Sir—the Bureau's laws are rewriting themselves. The Directive is gone. Every containment clause has been replaced by… by choice?"
Lord Xian closed his eyes. "Good."
The others froze. "Good?"
He turned toward the panoramic window, gazing at the fractured sky where two sigils now burned—one red, one white, rotating around each other like twin stars.
"The Bureau was built on fear," he said quietly. "It's time it learned responsibility."
He clasped his hands behind his back, his tone measured but heavy. "Prepare the Shard Court. Clause Zero has begun its appeal."
---
Back in the remnants of the Forgotten Layer, Ne Job stood, exhausted but alive. The chaos had subsided, replaced by something eerily calm. Fragments of the Bureau floated through the air like dandelion seeds, aimless and free.
Yue looked at him, her usual composure cracked just enough for warmth to show through. "So… what now?"
He stretched, wincing. "Now? We wait for the paperwork."
She raised a brow. "You mean retaliation."
"Same thing."
He offered a tired grin. "Besides, it's their turn to panic."
Yue tilted her head. "You realize you just rewrote Heaven."
He shrugged. "Hey, someone had to file the amendment."
She exhaled, half sigh, half laugh. "You're impossible."
"Defective," he corrected, smiling. "But apparently, I come with full authorization now."
---
Far above, beyond every layer, a new file began to write itself across the Bureau's highest archives.
The title flickered in unstable light:
> CLAUSE ZERO REPORT — STATUS: ACTIVE
AUTHORS: Ne Job, Yue Hanzhen
SUMMARY: "Existence is its own authorization."
And beneath it, a single note appeared on its own, unsigned:
> "Rebirth is no longer control. It's choice."
The file sealed itself.
And for the first time in eternity, Heaven paused—
not out of fear,
but out of uncertainty.