The siblings bowed together before the throne.
Shanjue stepped forward first. A legal code formed from thought opened beside his hand, articles and amendment records floating in layers beside the page. He moved his finger across three places, and the related loopholes lit up together.
"Father, the current *Code of Heavenly Law* has three loopholes that let the Creditor plant predatory contracts. I've drafted amendments. To go with them, we need to set up a 'Three Realms Court of Inquiry,' staffed with three hundred magistrates stationed at key points across the Three Realms."
When he finished, he left those pages hanging in the air so Pangu could look closely.
Qianhui raised her hand too. Her ledger opened, a few groups of figures moved to either side, and a three-dimensional blueprint for people's livelihoods rose up in the middle:
"Father, discarded memory in the heavenly realm has piled up to dangerous levels, and Hell can't process negative emotion fast enough. The same problems pile up again and again and get processed again and again. Compute keeps getting spent, and nothing gets solved."
She pointed at the blueprint.
"I've designed a two-way purification loop and a public welfare allocation network. We need to add twelve hundred new 'Circulation Officers' and restructure the budget of the Temple of Welfare. First stop the repeated consumption, so the compute we buy from here on goes where it's actually needed."
The savings she listed were all in future spending. Compute already consumed couldn't be recovered. What could change was how the next sum was spent.
She moved the welfare accounts to one side.
"This one handles money, for subsidizing living costs. The other handles divine power and compute. The two have to work together, but you can't take a surplus in one and pretend it covers a shortfall in the other."
Pangu watched her fingertip move lightly, and several sets of accounts lined up beside the blueprint. For each item, what to stop first and what to protect were all marked out.
"Starting it up costs something too," Pangu said.
"We do it in stages. Fix the most wasteful, most urgent places first. We don't wait for income to rise before we start."
Shanjue pushed the code forward.
"Some things can stop right now. Killing people without evidence isn't happening because we can't afford more compute."
——
As Pangu listened, his eyes grew brighter and brighter. When the last word was spoken, he slapped the armrest:
"Good! If Wanquan were here, he'd be thrilled for you."
Then he stopped smiling: "But we can't celebrate yet——we don't have much time."
"Before the Creditor makes his move, all of this has to become real. He won't sit and watch us fix the cycle——once it's fixed, he can't swallow this world anymore."
Pangu stood.
"The Creditor can't openly swallow this world. However ruthless he is, he has to wait for us to default on our own."
"So he'll only gnaw at us in the dark, waiting for the one time we can't pay the interest."
"But even if he does nothing, the old system will drag us down on its own."
Qianhui turned her ledger back to the first page.
"Allocation used to protect the interest payment first, then keep every district's books up to standard. Every entry followed the rules, but no one calculated how much divine power the people living like this could still produce."
Shanjue said: "The law's the same. The faster cases close, the better the books look. The people who got dealt with never come back to drag the numbers down."
Pangu looked at the two blueprints. Those numbers, he had looked at for many years. This time, what the siblings wanted to change was the reason the numbers had been taken as good news.
He looked at the two of them:
"There's only one road left to take——burn the boats."
He pressed both hands toward the two blueprints floating in the air. The light of a Creator God flowed along the edges of the code and the ledger, and finally became an irreversible contract of activation.
"Approved.
Shanjue, starting today, amend the laws and establish the court. I give you the power to set the judiciary and legislature in motion.
Qianhui, starting today, lay the network and build the system. I give you the power of executive action."
He closed his eyes and transmitted everything that had just happened——the blueprints, the loopholes, the urgency of the Creditor——to Wanquan, far away at Heaven's Central Police Headquarters and still unaware of any of this.
Along with it, an order:
"Wanquan, this is the full case. The selection, training, and deployment of fifteen hundred new staff, and support for the next seventy years of execution in the Mortal Realm, are entirely your responsibility. Look at what they might run into first, then assign people; anything that needs appointments, you handle. Put the people who should be in place, at the time they should be in place, in the places they should be. Report the bad first. Everything rides on this."
——
One day in Heaven is a year in the Mortal Realm.
Seventy years in the Mortal Realm, in this family, is seventy days.