The spy received the order and understood the moment had come.
"Drain the divine power, force him to default, take over the world..."
He muttered the plan the Creditor had given him.
It sounded enormous when he said it.
What he had to do was very small.
——
[Transfer Request: World Divine Power Reserve]
[Handled by: Self]
[Single-transaction authority: Sufficient]
[Total authority: Insufficient]
All of the world's unspent divine power reserves were in that one box. The next period's compute purchases and interest both had to come out of it.
He didn't have the authority to move the entire reserve at once, so he split it into many small sums, sent each through different accounts, and filled in different settlement batch numbers. Every one of them fell within the handling permissions he had acquired over more than a thousand years, and in the end all of them were hung in pending-settlement accounts, scheduled after interest day.
The system totaled transfers that belonged to the same case. But he had filled in one matter as many unrelated cases. Every region already had huge amounts pending settlement, and having the same destination wasn't enough on its own to count them all as illegal.
Every step passed the formal checks.
But under those batch numbers, none of the settlement items he had declared existed.
He had been hidden here for more than a thousand years. The internal roads had long been paved. All that was missing was today's order.
——
When he arrived, Shanjue and Qianhui hadn't been born yet.
The thing in his sleeve was just as old.
Wanquan could see him.
He had seen him since the first day he set foot in this world.
But he couldn't call his name.
That artifact didn't block the eyes. It blocked the pen.
——
He pressed down.
——
To move that box of reserves, he first had to open a writable channel.
While the channel was open, the artifact couldn't protect him. If he were appointed during that window, the records could be decrypted by the holder himself. The artifact would let it through, because the one acting was still the person it recognized.
Half a second.
That half second was what Wanquan had waited more than a thousand years for.
——
Not a single star was missing from the sky.
Not a single stretch of sea was missing either.
The compute already purchased and in use was still holding the world up. What had been taken was the resources meant to replenish it next.
Wanquan knew which box first.
Qianhui knew how much first.
——
Qianhui froze that batch of transfers first. The divine power had already left the reserve account and was stuck in accounts midway.
Then she opened her ledger and pulled up all the handling records and permission records at once, tracing every transfer along its path.
Every transaction had a handler, and every amount fell within its own authorization. The books balanced, yet the reserve had been emptied out entirely.
Qianhui didn't redo the arithmetic. She traced those batch numbers back one by one and found the same settlement source document, renumbered and split up for reuse again and again.
She had worked out how the path ran. But to reverse an entire chain of transfers that had already passed authorization, someone first had to rule that those transactions, under different names, were in fact one and the same unauthorized act. That ruling wasn't within her allocation authority.
——
Qianhui set the money trail and the source document side by side and brought them to Shanjue.
"He split one matter into separate cases. This is the original source document. These are the batch numbers he altered."
Shanjue looked at the records.
"Each transaction passing doesn't make the whole chain legal."
——
Shanjue opened the code between the two of them and turned to the third round of revisions he had led. He pulled Qianhui's chain of transfer records right next to the article.
——
"We have to look at what these transfers did, taken together."
Qianhui looked at the date beside the article.
"Added in the fiftieth year?"
"Patched in during the third round of revisions. You can't split one unauthorized act into pieces and then treat it as if nothing unauthorized happened."
He connected the source document in front of all the batch numbers.
"The system checks what he declared. What we've just made clear is what he actually did."
He pointed to the start of the chain of transfers, and the whole record, along with every transfer after it, was framed together. Shanjue didn't delete them one by one. He ruled on the whole act directly.
——
[Ruling: This chain of transfers is void from the outset]
[Effect: Retroactive to every step]
——
The divine power had been stopped by Qianhui in the fourth account, waiting to settle.
When the ruling came down, the whole chain lost effect, and the figure went back to the reserve account.
——
Qianhui looked at the number that had stopped.
"Does this count as getting it back?"
"No."
"Then what does it count as?"
"As it never having left."
——
Meanwhile, back to the half second when the channel had just opened.
The spy's finger suddenly froze in midair.
An absurd thought forced its way into his mind: he had to immediately file away every communication record he had kept until now.
Every surveillance device. Every routine report. And the order to act he had received for the first time today.
——
The urge was so strong that he turned and began organizing the evidence of his own crimes. All the past reports that recorded nothing but routine duties were now tied to the same recipient and the same order.
He tried to stop.
His hands didn't stop.
For a thousand years, this was exactly how he had filed things——numbered, cross-indexed, dated.
Now the same pair of hands, with the same care, was taking himself apart.
"What am I doing?"
He asked himself.
His hands went on decrypting the deepest files.
The last thing he put into the jade box was the artifact from his sleeve.
He put it in exactly the same way as every secret report before it.
He didn't even feel it was any more important.
He carried the jade box, full of evidence, toward the doors of the temple.
Only when he reached the doorway did he realize what he was doing.
——
Wanquan was standing outside the door.
He had been standing there all along.
——
It turned out that in the half second when the channel lost its protection, Wanquan had appointed him Special Envoy for the Eradication of the Creditor's Forces.
The appointment had only one task: to hand the original secret reports, the communication records, and the artifact used for hiding, all together, into Wanquan's hands.
The new duty overrode the old one.
The channel closed, and the artifact protected him again.
But it blocked the pen, not words already written.
He clearly wanted to resist, yet his body still acted according to the new duty.
——
"My lord, all the evidence you requested is here."
Wanquan took the jade box.
He glanced at the artifact inside.
"I've been looking at this for more than a thousand years."
——
"You..." the spy choked, trying to break free of the control.
"Did you think my father would dare push such bold reforms without being sure?"
"Because he knows very well——as long as I'm here, no one can truly disrupt the order of this world."
——
The Court of Inquiry couldn't try someone from outside the world.
"Well done. You may go back."
——
"It has been my honor to serve you!"
The spy bowed deeply, the corners of his mouth rising in relief.
——
On the Far Shore of Causality, the Creditor suddenly started.
His connection to the spy had been cut.
The evidence was already in Wanquan's hands.
——
He walked back to his organization with a light step, and the moment he came through the door he was pinned to the ground. The leader's boot pressed on his face:
"Useless. Ten thousand deaths wouldn't be enough."
To his last breath, he never understood why he had to die.
——
For more than a thousand years, Wanquan had used the Mirror of Fate to choose his timing, arranging false leads and job transfers; when necessary, he appointed the people involved to do something that seemed unrelated, so the spy would run into what he believed were coincidences.
Every one of them was only to make that person believe the road he walked was one he had chosen himself.
——
All of it, for that half second.