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Ne Job: The Intern from Hell — Chapter 85: "Case File 002: The Cemetery Backlog"
The cemetery looked more like a municipal office than a place for quiet grief.
Rows of headstones doubled as queue markers. Lanterns flickered with sticky notes. A battered noticeboard read in looping ink: "WAIT TIMES SUBJECT TO ETERNAL DELAYS — PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER." Paper forms fluttered in the wind like reluctant crows, and somewhere beyond the yew trees a spectral pigeon argued with an undertaker about overtime.
Ne Job and Yue stepped between chipped columns and filigreed gates, carrying their official seals, clipboards, and the exact amount of professional dread a mortal office visit required.
"Why is there a kiosk?" Ne Job asked, pointing at a wooden stand where a ghostly attendant dispensed numbered tokens. The tokens chimed when you walked away, as if ashamed.
"Process," Yue said. "Dead people waiting for reincarnation are processed here. The backlog started when the Shard Recall scrambled the scheduling indexes. Now the registration loop repeats for anyone without a timestamp."
They joined the line. It was politely long. Spirits sat on park benches, some with polite expressions, some with this-week's grievances, some with mid-century hairdos that refused to move on. There was a woman knitting a scarf of small regrets. A man in a soldier's uniform rehearsed apologies. Children played marbles made of memory.
Ne Job nudged Yue. "They seem, I don't know — well-mannered."
"Because bureaucracy keeps even the dead polite," she said softly. "They were told how to be posthumous."
As they moved forward, a voice piped from the kiosk:
> "Now serving: 3,701."
"Estimated wait time: indefinite optimism."
An older spirit, wrapped in funeral shawls like a timid flag, looked up. He held a small cardboard box labeled in faded ink: "Personal Effects — Pending."
"Excuse me," he said, addressing Yue with an efficiency that suggested this wasn't his first afterlife. "Do you have a reinstatement form for clerical release? I was folded into File 172 during the Audit of Forgotten Duties and never had my exit interview."
Yue glanced at him, the corners of her mouth tightening. "We're here to clear the backlog. Have your identification token?"
He fumbled in his shawl and produced a faded staff token, stamped with the Bureau's old spiral. The ink feathered like memory.
Ne Job crouched, fascinated. "You look like you knew how to work a helluva punch clock."
The spirit managed a frail chuckle. "We all did what we could. Some of us were files once. Some of us were clerks. Some were just stamped 'miscellaneous.'"
The kiosk chimed again. The little number in Ne Job's hand buzzed — they were next.
They moved past a row where a group of spirits were filing complaints about "posthumous redaction of praise." An angry clerk pointed at a ledger: "My eulogy was changed to 'serviceable'!" Another was petitioning to retain the scent of his favorite pipe.
At the front, a woman in a high collar sat behind a table, her eyes like cataloged inkwells. Above her, a brass bell read: Registrar, Cemetery Branch — BY APPOINTMENT.
"Assistant Yue?" she said without up or down. "You have an official seal?"
Yue produced the seal, nerves smoothed into official calm. "We're here to audit and process the backlog. We have authority per Directive Continuation — Earth Branch."
The registrar studied the seal, then tapped its own ledger. Her fingers were thin and precise. "Very well. We'll begin with case files in chronological order. Please approach the intake altar and present the soul's last known record."
The altar was a small lectern with a lamp that hummed tiredly. A spirit floated forward, young and bewildered, clutching an envelope labeled "Birthday — 1989." Tears spilled out as polaroids, which then politely asked for receipts.
Yue worked methodically. Her brush moved across forms; seals unfurled; words that had been stuck in limbo found sentences. Each completed form released a soft bell-tone, and a spirit would exhale into a new trajectory — a flash of colorful mist and then a polite wave as if leaving a waiting room. It was, in its own bureaucratic way, a ceremony.
Ne Job watched, leaning on the altar, his eyes caught on the patterns of paperwork like a detective reading handwriting. The Chaos Spark in him thrummed, restless in a place full of paused life.
It hummed louder when they reached a shadowed corner of the cemetery where rows of tickets had stacked themselves into hills like small graves. The spirits there were different: older, quieter, their faces like retired stamps. Most were absent-mindedly rewriting the margins of their palm-lines.
One of them — an elderly man with the kind of face that had been folded by too many forms — looked directly at Ne Job. His gaze was sharp and reminded Ne Job of a ledger opened unexpectedly.
"You," the spirit said, each syllable sanded by years. "You again."
Ne Job blinked. "Pardon?"
"You were a file once," the spirit said. "A page that did not want to be erased."
The Chaos Spark surged beneath Ne Job's skin. His smile dropped like a loose page. "You remember me?"
"Of course," the spirit said. "We remember all erasures. When the Shard struck me out, I watched the copy of you burn." He tapped his chest where, for a moment, ink shimmered. "It left a hole that smelled like paper and thunder."
Yue stiffened. "You… saw him deleted?" she asked quietly. Her voice was as cool as paperwork, but it trembled on the edges.
The old spirit nodded. "I was a ledger clerk in the Archive Below. They came with flaring seals and polite faces. They read you the deletion script like a sonnet." He gave a little laugh that sounded like a canceled stamp. "You screamed in footnotes."
Ne Job swallowed, a memory like static assembling in his mind. He'd seen flashes — a hallway of pale ink, Lord Xian's steady voice, the officials stamping his file "termination." He'd woken after, hollowed of certain things and oddly full of others. The Spark's history had always felt like a rumor he'd only half believed.
The spirit reached forward, and his hand passed through Ne Job's sleeve like a cool draft across ledger paper. "You were important. Not because you were a god, but because you kept the sentence alive. They feared sentences that won't end."
Ne Job found his voice, thin. "Why tell me now? Why after all this time?"
The spirit's smile folded like a well-creased file. "Because we waited. We waited to be processed. And while we waited we remembered. When the Rewrite came and the Bureau dreamed, we saw you again. Some of us kept you in margins." He tapped his temple. "You left residue. We kept it."
A breeze—improbably official—stirred through the cemetery. The lanterns flickered, and the kiosk chimed, serving numbers that nobody needed.
Yue lowered her clipboard. The official poise that hid years of training and repression cracked—not because she was losing control, but because dates and stamps and policies had faces now. "This matters," she said quietly. "You were erased to make the Bureau 'clean,' but you weren't gone. People remember."
The old spirit nodded, eyes bright with the dust of old ink. "Remembering is dangerous. It undoes tidy narratives. It insists on names."
Ne Job felt something like laughter and sorrow braided into a single motion. He knelt to the spirit's level and took the old man's ghostly hand between his own. The Spark tickled like a pen underlined in red.
"I'm still here," he said simply.
The spirit's hand tightened for the barest second — an old clerk's small approval. "Good. Because there's a file at the center. A file that keeps asking for you. It's been waiting for the one who writes it."
"A file?" Ne Job echoed. He could feel electricity in his palms, the taste of ink. "What file?"
The old spirit glanced toward the heart of the cemetery, where a mausoleum stood with a cracked seal above its door. The seal had once been the Bureau's spiral; now it looked like the page edge of some very old book.
"That file belonged to the first archivists," the spirit whispered. "When the Shard hardened the Rewrite, they tucked something there — a ledger of original memory. It hums with your name now. It calls to what remembers you."
Ne Job's heart stuttered like a faulty stapler. "So—"
"So," the spirit said, voice steady as a filing cabinet being closed, "they want you to read it. If the Bureau rebuilt itself by paper and dream, then perhaps the truth lives at the heart, folded in like a bookmark. Go. Read what they hid."
Yue's mouth was a thin line. She straightened, sealing forms with a movement that was more prayer than procedure. "We'll log the encounter as emotional testimony," she said, but her voice had a steel edge. "And we'll take the file."
The registrar at the kiosk—who had been watching from a distance with the blank neutrality of someone who'd seen centuries of footnotes—ticked the ledger. "Processing: Case File 002. Priority reassigned to Branch 01. Retrieval authorized." Her bell chimed in a note that sounded like a seal being broken.
Ne Job looked at the mausoleum, at the spiral seal cracked down the middle. The Spark inside him hummed like a pen uncapped.
"Let's go read a book that wrote me," he said.
They walked toward the mausoleum, past queues that whispered their names like signatures. Spirits paused to watch, as if office gossip had become sacred. A child spirit waved a marble of memory, shouting, "Tell us a story about when paperwork had teeth!"
Ne Job laughed, a small bright sound that made even the paper lanterns ripen. Yue's hand found his sleeve, grounding him in policy and purpose.
At the mausoleum door, the cracked spiral glowed faintly, as if it had been waiting for ink to return. Ne Job put his palm against it. The script rose into the air, letters like moths. He heard, for the first time without static, the whisper of the archive:
> Here lies what they tried to forget. Here is the paragraph before they redacted it.
He took a breath. The Spark leaned forward like a curious clerk. He pushed the door.
Beyond it, the air smelled like old paper, like thunder rewritten. Pages flipped themselves in slow arcs, waiting to be read.
One file lay on a lectern at the center, bound in leather that had never met a bolt. On the cover, in small neat script, was one word: NEJOB.
Ne Job swallowed. His name felt both strange and unbearably familiar, like a footnote he'd read a hundred times and suddenly realized was about him.
He opened it.
The pages were filled with lines — not the dry official record he had expected, but fragments: memories that stitched into each other, reasons that refused to be neat. There were entries from clerks, scrawled apologies, an unexplained signature from Lord Xian, and then—right in the center—a faded paragraph marked with the archivists' seal:
> Deleted: unauthorized. Reason: contamination of narrative. Note: presence of Chaos Spark observed. Recommendation: purge to maintain metrics of order.
Under it, someone had scribbled, in a different hand, shaky and human:
> But it screamed. It asked questions. It was only ever an intern. We were afraid. We are ashamed.
Ne Job read the words aloud, voice small. Yue watched him with a gravity that no contract could have taught.
The old spirit at his elbow nodded, satisfied. "They filed the wrong thing in the wrong way. They stamped over the heart."
Ne Job closed the ledger slowly, feeling the weight of a thousand missing commas settle in his chest. "They were afraid of stories," he said.
"Fear archives," the spirit corrected. "But stories build houses."
He folded the ledger under his arm. The spiral seal on the mausoleum pulsed, then steadied. In the yard, a ticket number chimed as if a distant bell had finally been answered.
As they walked back through the queues, the air seemed less like waiting and more like potential. Spirits rose when their forms were signed, not vanished but redirected. The kiosk's tokens hummed a little more cheerfully.
Ne Job looked at the old spirit. "Will you… be okay?"
The man smiled, softer than a signature. "File closed. I'll sleep now." He turned toward the light and drifted, leaving the cardboard box of personal effects behind like a small altar.
Yue watched him go, then tucked the ledger safely into her satchel. "We bring this back to Branch 01," she said. "We catalogue, we protect, and we put their names where they belong."
Ne Job nodded, the Spark in him settling into a patient glow. "And then we make sure no one gets redacted for convenience again."
A dozen small voices — spirits, clerks, marginal notes — replied to them as one: "Please."
Above the cemetery, the kiosk chimed a number. The display blinked: Now Serving: 3,702. Estimated wait time: hopeful.
Ne Job grinned. "That's progress."
Yue allowed herself the smallest smile. "That's paperwork finally knowing it matters."
They stepped out of the cemetery, ledger in hand and a backlog less heavy than it had been. Somewhere in the archives below, pages rearranged themselves like breath. In Branch 01, the printer hummed in a calmer key.
At the center of the ledger, between forgettings and apologies, a single line glowed faintly—new ink that had not been there before:
> Authorized by: Yue Hanzhen, Ne Job — Witnesses: The Forgotten.
Ne Job felt the Spark in his chest answer, not as a flare but as a pen touching paper.
He folded his hands around the ledger and, for the first time in many cycles, felt seen.