Hell didn't start with cauldrons and frying pans. It started with bureaucracy.
The first thing Lin Wei saw was a huge neon sign flashing "LOADING ERROR" right in front of his face. The second was a line. An endless, stuffy line of translucent people snaking towards marble arches. The third was himself, sitting on a cold stone floor in his torn suit jacket. And the fourth — a drop of his own, scarlet, hot blood slowly spreading across the perfectly black basalt.
Silence fell instantly. All the hum of the Diyu archive — the whispers of souls, the scratching of pens, the clicking of abacuses — died. Hundreds of empty eyes turned towards the stain. Towards him.
From behind the "Initial Registration" desk, a figure with a face like a dried pear rose.
"CONTAMINANT!" its voice grated like an unlubricated gear. "BIOLOGICAL ACTIVE IN A STERILE ZONE! PROTOCOL 'SANITATION'!"
From dark passages, they emerged with a clang. The Guards. Armor made of black obsidian, threaded with blue LED veins. Instead of faces — slits from which cold light poured. In their hands — devices like scanners with glowing needles at the end.
One raised its scanner. A crimson beam, thin as a razor, touched the drop of blood, then pierced Lin Wei's chest. The pain wasn't physical. It was the sensation of his soul being turned inside out for a quality check.
RUN.
He jerked into motion. His legs, alive, heavy, thudded loudly on the floor, shattering the eternal silence. He dove into a labyrinth of archive shelves stretching kilometers upward. Holograms floated past — other people's lives, sins, last breaths.
"ANNIHILATE THE ANOMALY," a hollow, mechanical voice boomed behind him.
A door. Small, iron-clad, with a plaque: "Archive. Glitches. Pending." He slammed into it with his shoulder.
Inside, in a cloud of dust from ancient scrolls, a guy in a clerk's rumpled robes sat at a desk. He was jabbing a stylus furiously at a holographic keyboard.
"...why won't it compile?! The temporal loop should..."
Lin Wei, pressed against the wall, heard the armor clanging outside. The Guard was moving down the corridor.
The clerk looked up. Saw Lin. Saw his chest heaving with breath. Sweat — real, salty sweat — was trickling down his temple.
A moment of silence.
"You... you're breathing," the clerk's voice squeaked. "Your heart is beating. I can hear it. Oh no. No-no-no. It's her. That soul from the bridge! I flagged the anomaly in the quantum trace!"
Lin grabbed him by the collar. "Where am I? What is this?"
"Diyu! The Lower Court! We're the accounting department of eternity! And you... you're a live speck of dust in the system's eye! Your body is in a coma in Beijing, your soul should be in the buffer, not here!"
Outside the door — a clang. The hiss of a plasma cutter.
"They're coming," the clerk whispered, his eyes white with terror. "They'll find the glitch. My glitch. They'll erase me! Erase me forever!"
"How do I get out?!"
"You don't get out! You've been uploaded into the program! From a program, there are only two exits: either you get deleted like a virus... or you become part of the code!"
The door began to glow red-hot around its edges.
"Choose!" the clerk squealed.
Lin Wei gritted his teeth. His mind, honed for finding loopholes, worked feverishly. Become part of the code...
"How?"
The clerk — Xiao Bai — slammed the panel. A contract written in fire flashed in the air.
«EMERGENCY LABOR CONTRACT № AD-1000
OBJECTIVE: Correction of personnel error (unauthorized penetration of biological entity).
POSITION: Soul Defender (Jr.). Rank: 0.
DUTIES: Contesting court verdicts.
QUOTA: 1000 successful cases.
REWARD: Return to original body.
FAILURE: Erasure. Eternal service in the archives.
PROGRESS: 0/1000»
The door began to melt.
"Sign! Or we're both 'failure'!"
Lin Wei looked at the burning metal, at the contract, at his bloodied hand. The thought was cold and clear: To find a loophole, you must first enter the system.
He punched the signature line.
The light of the contract seared into his wrist, leaving a tattoo-seal: «Defender. Case №1».
The door collapsed. On the threshold — two Guards. Their crimson beams hit Lin, found the seal... and died. The light in their helmet slits changed to blue.
"...ENTITY REGISTERED. PROTOCOL TERMINATED."
They turned and left.
Silence. Smoke from the door. Xiao Bai breathed heavily.
"Phew... Welcome to hell, colleague. Your first workday starts... right now." He threw a crystal disk at Lin. It came alive in his hand:
«CASE: № 0000001 (PRIORITY)
CLIENT: SPIRIT #777 (ZHANG MEI, AGE 24).
CHARGE: SUICIDE (ARTICLE 44-G).
JUDGE: YAMA HENG.
SENTENCE: ETERNAL FALL.
NOTE: DEFENSE NOT PROVIDED FOR SUICIDES. SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 0%».
Lin Wei slowly raised his head. In his eyes, just recently filled with animal terror, now burned a familiar, icy excitement. The thrill of a hunter finding a flaw in the opponent's defense.
"Defense not provided?" his voice was quiet and dangerous. "Perfect. That means we write the rules ourselves."
He walked out into the corridor without looking back. Xiao Bai trailed behind, muttering:
"Great ancestors... What have I let into the system?"
And Lin Wei was already walking towards the murmur of voices coming from behind a massive door of black nephrite. Behind it waited his first client. A girl doomed to fall forever.
His path of a thousand cases had just begun.