Ne Job: The Intern from Hell — Chapter 76: "The Shard Rewrites"
The world didn't collapse—it rewrote itself.
At first it was just light, washing over the Bureau's broken halls like spilled ink reversing time. The ceiling reformed, scrolls lifted from ash, and sigils redrew themselves midair with a sound like whispered breath. Every desk, every door, every divine glyph that had been shattered during the Clause Zero event returned—but not as they were.
They came back different.
Ne Job blinked, still half-dazed, standing where the Central Archive once burned. Around him, clerks and minor gods reappeared in a cascade of paper and light, their memories intact but their surroundings… rearranged. Whole corridors shifted angles. Departments merged. Names changed on placards. "Division of Lesser Miracles" became "Division of Contingency Constructs." "Heavenly Delivery Office" became "Resonance Logistics."
> "Oh… oh crap," Ne Job whispered, rubbing his temples. "Did we just—patch the universe?"
Assistant Yue's hand caught his shoulder before he stumbled. Her expression was unreadable, caught between disbelief and exhaustion. The sigil lines on her robes still glowed faintly with residual Shard energy, evidence that she'd touched something beyond divine jurisdiction.
> "No," she said softly. "Not a patch. A rollback. The Bureau rewound itself—but kept the memory of what happened."
A ripple passed through the air like a sigh, and Lord Bureaucrat Xian's voice echoed from every direction, calm but heavy.
> "All departments, remain where you are. This is a controlled restoration. Reality integrity—stabilizing at sixty-two percent."
His tone was the same as always—measured, precise—but there was something else beneath it now. A fatigue Yue had never heard before.
Ne Job turned slowly. Through the fractured corridor, he could see the central clock tower outside—its once-ivory stone now streaked with luminous veins, like the world's script bleeding through its surface.
> "Clause Zero…" he murmured. "We actually triggered it."
Yue nodded. "And it listened."
The Clause Zero Directive—something the Bureau itself wasn't meant to invoke—was the ultimate failsafe written into the Heaven Administration's root code. It could rewrite causal history to prevent systemic collapse, but only once. Only if the "Shard of Continuity" recognized a legitimate administrative paradox.
And that paradox… had been them.
---
When the restoration reached its limit, time froze for three seconds. The light stopped moving. Papers hung in midair. Then, as if released by a breath, the world resumed.
But the silence that followed wasn't peace.
From deep within the Bureau's sublevels came a resonant thrum. A low, bass vibration that carried through the floors. The kind of sound only an unstable divine mechanism could make.
> "That's the Shard Court's signature," Yue said sharply. "It's bleeding into the administrative field!"
> "You mean—" Ne Job started.
> "They're rewriting, too."
---
Scene II – The Court That Shouldn't Exist
They reached the Court Chamber in minutes. Or maybe hours—the Bureau's halls refused to stay linear. Steps folded back on themselves; elevators descended sideways. When they finally emerged, the Court was already in session.
Except it wasn't.
The Shard Court Judge floated above the dais, robes dissolving into transparent glyphs. Around him, fragments of the forgotten case files orbited like broken halos. The entire chamber was flooded with refracted light—the same mirror hue from the Shard itself.
> "Intern Ne Job," the Judge's voice carried, smooth as mercury. "Assistant Yue. You stand within a temporal annex of the restored Bureau. Clause Zero has executed successfully, but with… unforeseen recursion."
> "Recursion?" Yue repeated.
> "The Shard has begun self-reference."
"In lay terms," the Judge continued, eyes flickering like distant stars, "the directive now queries its own existence. Every time it tries to stabilize reality, it rechecks whether it should have existed in the first place."
Ne Job squinted. "So the world's having an existential crisis?"
> "Precisely."
He slumped. "Awesome. Totally our fault, right?"
> "Partially," said the Judge, with faint amusement. "Though the Bureau's inefficiency was… a contributing factor."
The Judge gestured toward the floor, where new sigils burned into existence. They weren't Bureau glyphs—they pulsed with the same chaotic pattern Ne Job had seen during the explosion, the one inside his own resonance mark.
> "Intern Ne Job," the Judge intoned. "Your spirit signature has been indexed into the Shard as a stabilizer. You are now a variable in the Directive's code."
Ne Job froze. "A… variable?"
> "Meaning?" Yue asked quickly.
> "Meaning," said the Judge, "that if the Shard chooses to correct itself, it may overwrite him."
---
Scene III – The Directive's Ghost
Later, in the restored courtyard, Yue and Ne Job stood beneath the false sky. It was almost serene again—the kind of calm that felt borrowed. Paper cranes drifted across the air, carrying memos from other departments about "Restoration Compliance" and "Temporal Sync Mismatches." The Bureau was pretending everything was fine.
But above, the sky was cracked.
Tiny, thin fractures like glass veins pulsed through the clouds—each one reflecting a memory of what should have been erased. Yue saw versions of herself moving within them. A thousand iterations of the same moment, all slightly different.
> "Clause Zero didn't fix us," she said quietly. "It duplicated us."
Ne Job frowned. "Wait—like backups?"
> "Like ghosts," she replied. "The Directive's copies of us are walking the alternate timelines it tried to erase. If one of them finds a way back…"
He finished her sentence. "We'll have more than one Bureau."
The air shimmered again. A faint voice echoed between the cracks.
Soft, distant—like a recording replayed through eternity.
> "Hello…? Can anyone hear me?"
Yue's eyes widened. It was her voice. But not hers.
> "That's the version of me from the destroyed timeline," she whispered. "She's trapped in the recursion loop."
Ne Job's fists clenched. "Then we get her out."
> "We can't. The Directive's reality walls—"
> "Then I'll break them," he said simply. "You said I'm a variable now, right? Maybe I can glitch it."
Yue turned to him sharply. "You'll destabilize the rollback—"
> "And?" His grin flickered, reckless and tired. "It already broke once. Maybe this time it needs a bug to run."
For a moment, Yue saw it—the same impossible spark that had carried him through the bureaucratic labyrinth, through gods and disasters alike. Chaos, yes—but chaos with purpose.
> "You're impossible," she muttered.
> "Yeah," Ne Job said, cracking his knuckles. "But maybe that's what the Bureau needs."
---
Scene IV – Rewrite
They returned to the Central Nexus, where the Bureau's master script was stored—a literal tower of scrolls that reached beyond sight. At its heart burned the Shard of Continuity, now fractured into dozens of mirrored fragments floating in suspension.
Each fragment reflected a timeline.
Each one whispered.
> Do you approve this directive? Do you approve this directive? Do you approve this directive…
Ne Job approached the shards, his reflection multiplying infinitely.
> "Hey," he whispered. "If you're part of me now… listen."
He pressed his palm against the nearest shard. The glyphs reacted instantly, spreading light through his veins, tracing along his wrist up to the scar the Chaos Spark had left long ago.
> "You're not broken," he said softly. "You're just… tired of fixing the same thing."
The hum changed. The question loop faltered.
> "So let's make a new rule," Ne Job murmured. "If the Bureau keeps collapsing—then stop resetting it. Let it evolve. Let the mess stand."
The shard pulsed, and suddenly the air around him distorted.
A thousand alternate Bureaus—burning, rising, colliding—flashed through the void. Every iteration ended the same way: bureaucratic perfection collapsing under its own weight.
But this time, something different appeared.
A file folder, glowing gold, stamped with a new seal:
Directive Zero – Adaptive Chaos Protocol.
Yue's eyes widened. "You just… rewrote the law."
> "Nah," Ne Job said, turning with a small grin. "I just told it to chill."
The Shard's hum deepened, then resonated upward. The fractures in the sky began to merge, the duplicate timelines fading one by one. The recursion loop untangled itself, and the alternate Yues—the ghost voices—softly faded, whispering thanks.
---
Scene V – Aftermath
Hours—or centuries—later, the Bureau stabilized.
The memos came back online. The divine clock resumed. The Shard dimmed to a calm, steady glow.
In the corridor, Yue leaned against a railing, watching Ne Job nap on a stack of unfinished reports. He snored faintly, hair a mess, still in the same torn robes he'd been wearing since the explosion.
Lord Xian approached quietly, his usually immaculate presence slightly frayed. He stopped beside Yue, hands behind his back.
> "He did it, didn't he?" Xian said.
> "He didn't fix it," Yue replied. "He let it change."
> "And the Bureau survives," Xian murmured. "But differently."
She nodded. "The directives now include an adaptive clause. Systems will evolve naturally instead of resetting."
Xian gave a small, almost imperceptible smile. "Perhaps Heaven needed an intern after all."
Yue glanced at Ne Job, a faint warmth in her voice.
> "He's still terrible at paperwork."
> "Yes," Xian said. "But quite good at rewriting fate."
---
Epilogue – The New Directive
In the depths of the Bureau, the Shard of Continuity pulsed quietly.
Its light rippled once, then projected a single new entry into the air:
> CLAUSE ZERO REVISED
"The system shall no longer seek perfection.
Instead, it shall embrace adaptive error as divine truth."
And somewhere in his sleep, Ne Job smiled.