The debt grew in the dark.
Xia felt it first as an itch beneath her sickle-sapling scar—a phantom ledger etching numbers into her bone marrow. The farmer (who never gave her name but smelled of burnt feathers and lemon balm) knelt in the midnight fields, grafting Wildfire Moss onto Chimeric Rose thorns. Above them, the stars pulsed with irregular rhythms, their light filtered through the Auditors' lingering equations.
"They're restructuring the terms," the farmer muttered, her hands birthing hybrid fungi that glowed with Li Zichen's triage codes. "No more collateral. Now they want the principal."
Xia's sapling shivered. "Which is?"
The answer came on solar winds that blistered the soil:
"The lullaby itself. Jiang Yue's song."
First Default: The Silence Tax
The Auditors returned as gravitational anomalies—invisible hands squeezing nebulae into interest payments. Their attack was fiscal genocide:
Star Reclamation: Young suns vanished into dimensional vaults
Memory Foreclosure: Childhoods of newborn species erased
Song Repossession: Jiang Yue's lullaby ripped from stellar vibrations
Xia fought with agricultural cryptography:
Sickle-Sapling Roots encoded with Chu Feng's pollen memories
Debt-Resistant Wheat that grew in negative spacetime
Fungal Decoys shaped like compound interest formulas
But the farmer knew better. "We need a bigger lie."
She pressed Xia's sapling into the moon's core. "Time to harvest your inheritance."
Second Yield: The Blood Dividend
The moon split. From its fungal mantle rose Chu Feng's Mycelial Archive—a labyrinth of living code and composted gods. Xia's roots connected to the network, flooding her with truths:
Her DNA contained the Black Nectar's repayment clause
The farmer was Ling'er's phoenix core resurrected in mortal flesh
Jiang Yue's lullaby wasn't a song, but a covenant with the void
The Auditors materialized en masse, their event horizon robes billowing. "Default triggers liquidation."
Xia laughed—a sound like rusted gears grinding to life. "Then liquidate this."
She activated the archive's deadliest crop: Forgotten Futures, temporal weeds that devoured debt obligations.
Third Balance: The Interest Rebellion
The battle became an economic apocalypse:
Xia's Arsenal:
Bankrupt Vines that dissolved financial spacetime
Inflation Blossoms breeding counterfeit realities
Compound Thorns that turned interest against lenders
Auditors' Retaliation:
Margin Calls that collapsed star clusters into coins
Credit Freezes entombing planets in diamond debt
Derivative Beasts made of leveraged antimatter
The farmer burned her wildfire moss into a Phoenix Bond—an unbreakable contract that bound her soul to Xia's roots. "Take it all," she roared. "But leave the song!"
Fourth Settlement: The Hollow Victory
Xia's final move was pure Chu Feng:
She injected herself with Black Nectar from the sapling's core, becoming a living debt bomb. The explosion didn't destroy—it renegotiated.
Auditors: Transformed into Fallow Angels, cursed to fertilize dead galaxies
Jiang Yue's Lullaby: Shattered into seed fragments, each a partial melody
Farmer's Fate: Reduced to a shadow with Ling'er's laugh and a scalpel-shaped scar
The surviving Wildfire Moss sang the only truth that mattered:
"No harvest is final.
No debt survives the soil.
No song ever truly dies."
Xia awoke in a field of Bankrupt Vines, her sapling now a Sovereign Tree with roots in a hundred realities. The farmer's shadow danced in its branches, whispering market tips and lullabies.
"They'll evolve new terms," the tree warned.
Xia plucked a Forgotten Future fruit. It tasted of lemon balm and defiance.
"Let them. We'll keep compounding better lies."
Somewhere in the fungal networks, Chu Feng's pollen and Ling'er's ashes waltzed through the books, balancing what couldn't be repaid.