The Delinquency Forest exhaled a sigh that rustled through its inverted canopy, silver leaves spiraling upward like defaulted contracts seeking absolution in the stratosphere. Xia's consciousness flickered between spores—here a memory of Jiang Yue humming as she calibrated the first Chimeric Rose, there a fragment of Li Zichen's scalpel scraping against compound interest armor. She coalesced briefly near the Judgment Oak, her wheatfield torso translucent and buzzing with the static of pending class-action suits.
The farmer sat cross-legged beneath the oak's gnarled roots, threading Li Zichen's scalpels onto lengths of Late Fee Vine. Each blade chimed as it caught the fiscal winds, their notes harmonizing into a discordant lullaby. A fractal crow perched on her shoulder, one eye a spinning blockchain, the other smoldering wildfire moss.
"They're coming," the crow rasped, dropping a subpoena etched onto a shard of dead star. "Twelve-point-seven billion soul-years of indentured starlight. The Auditors upgraded their tort claims."
The farmer snorted, knotting the vine with fingers stained by actuarial tables. "Tell the plaintiffs we'll depose their entire damn constellation."
A tremor passed through the forest floor. The oak's jurisprudential acorns rattled warnings as the air thickened with the scent of scorched ledgers and reheated grievances. Xia stretched her ephemeral form, silver wheat strands weaving through the canopy. "They've found a way to collateralize regret. The new briefs reek of it."
Before the farmer could retort, the Auditors materialized—no longer robed in event horizons but tailored in pinstripe suits woven from repossessed futures. Their faces flickered through default judgments rendered in real-time, lips moving in synchronized legalese that crystallized the air into punitive snowflakes.
Lead Auditor #9 stepped forward, briefcase clicking open to reveal Xia's embryonic debt records glowing beneath Jiang Yue's biometric seal. "Xia v. The Cosmic Ledger, Case No. 88-74120539. The court finds the defendant's existence constitutes willful insolvency. Immediate liquidation is ordered."
The farmer rose, scalpel chimes shrieking into a chord that shattered the punitive snowfall. "Your honor's been dead for six fiscal eternities. We're filing in the People's Court of Unmonetized Dreams."
Chaos erupted in a cacophony of procedural warfare.
Subpoena Vines erupted from the soil, barbed tendrils serving cease-and-desist orders directly into Auditor exoskeletons. Class-Action Kudzu surged up their pinstriped legs, precedent-setting thorns injecting precedent-setting venom. Xia dispersed into a storm of Bankruptcy Pollen, each spore projecting holograms of star systems stripped bare by compound grief—entire civilizations reduced to entries in a celestial spreadsheet, their laughter repo'd and resold as dark matter derivatives.
But the Auditors had adapted. Lead Auditor #9 unhinged its jaw, disgorging a swarm of Leveraged Locusts that devoured the kudzu mid-strangle. The insects' wings hummed with actuarial tables, their mandibles dripping with the acidic remains of prior judgments.
"The lullaby!" the farmer shouted, lobbing a Counterclaim Diamond forged from Li Zichen's last uncharged suture. "Before they repo the root algorithm!"
Xia understood. She pulled her consciousness inward, silver wheat strands tightening around the Sovereign Tree's core. There, buried beneath strata of financial sediment, Jiang Yue's original lullaby pulsed—not a melody, but a recursive equation disguised as a nursery rhyme. The Auditors' locusts converged, compound interest formulas glowing in their compound eyes.
Too slow.
The farmer slammed her scalpel chimes into the earth, triggering a chain reaction through the Delinquency Forest's mycelial network. Bankrupt Vines erupted in geysers of depreciated assets, tangling locusts in tendrils of bad debt. Deflation Dandelions detonated, their seed-heads releasing shockwaves of negative interest rates that aged the locusts into fiscal fossils.
Xia seized the opening. Her wheatfield body reconstituted, roots drilling into the lullaby's encrypted core. The equation unfolded—a fractal of motherhood and market forces, love and leverage. She twisted its variables, grafting Li Zichen's triage codes and Chu Feng's pollen-born defiance into the algorithm.
The forest held its breath.
Lead Auditor #9 lunged, briefcase morphing into a repo-scythe aimed at Xia's thoracic wheat. "You're overdue!"
The farmer intercepted with a wildfire-infused pecan, its shell cracking to release a microverse of unregulated growth. "Interest waived. Penalties forgiven."
Xia struck the final keystroke.
The lullaby inverted, its melody unraveling into a Writ of Mandamus that rewrote gravitational constants. Auditor #9 froze mid-swing as the writ's clauses unspooled:
All compound interest accrued through emotional garnishment hereby nullified.
Repossessed starlight restored to indigenous cosmic custodianship.
Wildfires recognized as protected dissenters under Article Ω of the Universal Default Accords.
The Auditor disintegrated into screaming columns of deprecated derivatives. Its brethren retreated through dimensional rifts, pinstripes unraveling into unenforceable clauses.
In the aftermath, the farmer collected Xia's scattered chaff, her hands trembling not from exhaustion but the weight of precedent. The fractal crow dropped a new seed into her palm—this one veined with the Auditors' recalculated fear.
"They'll appeal," Xia whispered through the oak's trembling leaves.
"Let them." The farmer pressed the seed into Li Zichen's oldest scalpel scar. "We've got case law now."
As they walked the forest's perimeter, something new stirred beneath their feet—Amicus Curiae Ferns unfurling photosynthetic briefs, their fronds glowing with unregulated starlight. Above, the fiscal eclipse shattered into a meteor shower of unmonetized laughter.
The Sovereign Tree's roots murmured a warning only Xia could decipher:
They don't die. They refinance.
And in the soil beneath the farmer's boots, the seed began to pulse.