Chapter 163 — "The Contract That Bled"
Yue woke to the sound of paper being torn.
Not a page.
Not a handful.
An entire library.
It was a sickening rip — the kind of sound that makes generals flinch and gods take cover. She gagged, coughing dust, soil mixing with the ink that rained from above.
Her arms shook as she pushed herself up.
The world was still wrong.
The sky wasn't cracked anymore.
It had become a ceiling.
A dome of drifting parchment, each sheet glowing faintly, orbiting around the place where Ne Job stood — or floated.
He was suspended upright, eyes closed, palms open, pen still in hand. The ink on his wrist was still fresh — she could smell it — metallic and bitter.
Yue crawled. Her bones screamed. Skin felt like it was turning to paper and folding itself into origami. Every breath was an unpaid invoice.
"Ne…" her voice rasped, ghost-thin.
She reached his leg.
His body wasn't warm.
It hummed.
Light bled from his collarbones, from his fingertips, and from the crack in his forehead where a glyph pulsed like a heartbeat. She heard it, steady and bureaucratic:
STAMP. STAMP. STAMP.
She grabbed his arm. "Ne Job — look at me."
Nothing.
Just the sound of cosmic filing.
Behind her, Arden stirred. The knight lifted her head, blinking through blood and static. She spat a tooth she didn't remember losing.
"Where are we?" Arden muttered.
Yue shook her head, trembling. "Inside the contract."
Arden's eyes narrowed. "He signed?"
Yue nodded.
Arden cursed in ten dialects, half of them celestial.
The dome tremored.
The papers orbiting overhead warped into tighter circles, their edges sharpening. Pages moved like blades; paragraphs like teeth.
And in the center of it all — Ne Job was the sun they revolved around.
Arden limped toward him, swordless, fists clenched. "We have to get him down."
"No," Yue snapped. "You can't touch the ink."
Arden paused. "Why?"
Yue pointed.
Everywhere the paper touched the ground, the earth rotted into ledger-gray pulp. Stones dissolved like eraser shavings. A tree in the distance folded into itself in perfect cubical symmetry.
Arden stared.
"…He didn't sign a contract," she whispered.
Yue swallowed hard. "He signed a system."
A long silence.
Then a voice spoke from behind them.
"Incorrect."
---
The Auditor
He stepped forward — or what was left of him did.
The Auditor wasn't whole anymore.
His cloak still clung to him, composed of pages and signatures, but it was shredded — whole sections of his body were missing, like images torn from magazines. His torso was a lattice of redacted voids. His left hand dripped ink, dark and wet as arterial blood.
He was breathing hard.
A cosmic bureaucrat, out of breath — Yue would have laughed, if she wasn't petrified.
"I did not die," the Auditor rasped. "You do not kill one who has never lived."
Arden positioned herself between him and Yue. "Touch him and I will—"
"You will do nothing," the Auditor interrupted.
He raised his quill — snapped in half — and tossed the broken pieces aside.
"Because this is no longer an audit."
His eyes moved to Ne Job.
"This is a promotion."
Yue felt her spine ice over. "No."
"He signed the clause," the Auditor murmured, almost reverent. "He accepted Phase Two. He forfeited immunity."
Arden snarled, teeth bared. "You tricked him."
"I offered him choice," the Auditor said. "Mortals always mistake desperation for coercion."
He stepped closer, and the papers above bent to his gravity. "The fourth vein does not hunt. It does not punish. It… replaces."
Yue grit her teeth. "Replace him with what?"
The Auditor smiled for the first time.
"With me."
And every contract in the dome exhaled.
---
Ne Job POV
He was floating in the contract.
Not a metaphor — a state. A place between pages. A place where every sentence had teeth.
His memories lay spread before him like archive boxes:
His life.
His failures.
His paperwork.
His absurd destiny as the lowest-ranked intern in a system older than starlight.
Every moment had been stamped, categorized, color-coded. Even his panic was assigned a subheading.
The pen in his hand whispered to him:
SIGN. SIGN. SIGN.
"No," he muttered.
The whisper continued.
PROMOTE. PROMOTE. PROMOTE.
He saw his own name repeated thousands of times, each stamped with veiled rules:
Internship. Internship. On probation.
Internship. Terminated. Intern revived. Unauthorized.
Intern—Phase Two Candidate.
He hurled the pen into the void.
It returned, lodged in his palm.
His bones glowed administrative white.
He screamed.
The void didn't echo — it recorded.
Entry logged: Intern objects.
The paper world shook.
And then Yue's voice, distant:
Ne. You're not alone.
He reached toward it.
The contract grabbed him back.
---
Third POV — Blood Ink
Yue braced herself as the Auditor drew a circle in the air. His ink-blood smeared through space, igniting a glyph. The parchment above trembled.
Ne Job fell.
The dome shuddered as he dropped like a meteor, eyes open but unseeing. He hit the ground in a half-crouch, knees carving scorch-lines into the contract floor.
Arden lunged forward—
Yue caught her by the arm.
"Don't," she hissed. "He's—"
Ne Job's skin split at the wrists.
Not wounds.
Lines.
Black ink poured from them, floating upward, writing itself into the air.
A single phrase, repeated:
APPROVED.
The Auditor bowed his head.
"Welcome, Intern 0000-NE. Auditor Apprentice."
Ne Job lifted his eyes.
No recognition.
No humanity.
Only protocol.
Yue stepped forward, voice cracking. "Ne, listen to me."
His eyes flicked, adjusting like he was reading her.
"…Designation incorrect," he murmured.
"Refer to me by title."
Arden's pulse spiked. "You psychotic report-eating—"
The papers around them snapped.
Not wind — censorship.
Arden's insult vanished. A full three seconds of sound were erased from history. The world filled the gap with silence.
The Auditor smiled.
"His authority exceeds yours already. The Fourth Vein validates him. The old auditors are obsolete. I… am obsolete."
Ink dripped down his jaw. He didn't bother wiping it.
Ne Job finally looked at him.
"Then you know what happens next."
The Auditor nodded. "Yes."
He knelt.
"Strike my record."
Yue screamed, "NE—DON'T YOU DARE—"
Ne Job's hand rose.
Ink coalesced, shaping itself into a massive quill-blade — not created, but promoted from the broken pen.
He reached toward the Auditor's chest.
The cloak-pages fluttered in submission.
Arden tried to run, roaring—
Gravity stapled her knees to the floor.
Yue threw herself forward—
Her body folded mid-air, like paper forced into a shape it didn't want to be.
Ne Job's face was emotionless as the quill hovered over the Auditor's heart.
Yue managed one word:
"PLEASE."
The quill stopped.
Not because he hesitated.
Because the Auditor laughed.
"You see?" he whispered to Yue. "He is fit. The system chose well."
Ne Job blinked.
Something twitched behind his eyes.
"…Yue?"
The dome exploded.
---
Catastrophic Protocol Breach
Every page in the sky ignited at once — not fire, but rejection. The air turned to black ledger smoke. Rules incinerated. Laws combusted under their own weight.
The Auditor staggered back, horrified. "Impossible! The contract—"
Ne Job's pupils contracted to pinpoints.
"You made a mistake," he breathed.
Light erupted from his spine.
The quill grew into a spear.
Not ink.
Bureaucratic lightning.
He thrust it directly into the Auditor's chest.
The blow landed like a court verdict.
Pages turned to ash. Ledger-cloak vaporized. Thousands of signatures screamed as they were unmade.
The Auditor collapsed to his knees, breathing ink foam.
"Intern…" he wheezed. "Listen…"
Ne Job leaned close.
"For what it's worth," he whispered, "I really hated HR."
He twisted the spear.
The Auditor dissolved into dust.
And the sky fell.
---
Aftermath
Everything snapped back.
No dome.
No contracts.
Just scorched dirt under a collapsing midnight sky.
Ne Job lay on the ground, trembling, coughing red-black ink.
Yue ran to him, cradling his head, shaking, sobbing.
"Ne—Ne—talk to me—"
He blinked slowly.
His eyes were still human.
Barely.
"…He…wanted me to replace him."
"What did you do?" she whispered.
He tried to smile.
"I put in my resignation."
He passed out.
Above them, the heavens trembled.
Somewhere in the bureaucracy of divinity—
A red siren lit.
And the words printed themselves across the universe:
UNAUTHORIZED TERMINATION OF AUDITOR CLASS.
BEGIN COSMIC REPRISAL.
---
End Chapter 163