Chapter 17: Chapter 17
~1.8k words · 2026-06-22
CHAPTER 17: The Immortal Who Forgot Password
The sphere pulsed once, twice, then went dark.
Zhang blinked. The white void around him flickered like a dying fluorescent light. Somewhere in the distance, he heard a sound he hadn't expected: the ringing of a telephone.
Not a celestial chime. Not a system notification chime. An actual, mortal-world telephone ring.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Incoming Communication - External Line]
[Source: Unknown]
[Warning: External communications are restricted to Tier 5 personnel and above]
[Your current access level: Tier 2]
[Would you like to:]
[Accept Call]
[Ignore]
[Trace Origin]
Zhang stared at the options. External line. That meant someone outside the Celestial Bureaucracy was calling him. But who? He'd been dead for less than a week. His mother didn't even know how to use a smartphone, let alone call the afterlife.
He selected [Trace Origin].
The sphere flickered back to life, but this time it showed a different image: a messy desk covered in stacks of paper, empty tea cups, and what looked like a half-eaten baozi. Behind the desk sat a woman in her thirties, wearing a rumpled business suit and glasses that were clearly taped together at the bridge.
She was frantically typing on a keyboard that had several keys missing.
[Connection Established]
[User: Li Mei - ID 2319]
[Status: Alive]
Zhang's blood ran cold.
ID 2319. The clerk whose error had killed him.
"Hello?" Li Mei's voice crackled through the void. "Hello? Is this working? Stupid piece of—" There was a thud, presumably her hitting the keyboard. "Can you hear me?"
Zhang hesitated. Every instinct told him to hang up, to sever the connection and bury himself in administrative protocols until he figured out what was going on. But Li Mei was alive. She was still in the mortal world, still working in whatever office had caused his death.
And she was calling him.
"I can hear you," Zhang said.
"Oh thank the heavens." Li Mei's voice trembled with relief. "Listen, I don't have much time. They're monitoring my terminal now. But I had to warn you."
"Warn me about what?"
"About Supervisor Hu. He's not just covering up the error that killed you. He's been doing this for years. Hundreds of souls, maybe thousands. He reroutes destinies to meet his quotas, and when there's a mistake, he buries it."
Zhang's grip tightened on the sphere. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I'm next." Li Mei's voice dropped to a whisper. "I found the records. All of them. He's been manipulating the system to make it look like his department is the most efficient in the Heavenly Bureaucracy. But the real numbers? They're catastrophic. Souls getting sent to wrong reincarnation queues. People dying decades early. And the worst part?"
"What?"
"He's been selling access. Rich mortals, powerful families, they pay him to alter their karmic destinies. He's been doing it for three hundred years."
Three hundred years. Zhang's mind raced. That meant Hu had been alive long before he joined the Celestial Bureaucracy. He wasn't just a corrupt official—he was an immortal who had found a way to game the system.
"Where are you now?" Zhang asked.
"Underground parking garage, level three. There's a dead zone in the celestial monitoring here. I've been hiding for two days." A pause. "They found my apartment this morning. Burned it down. Made it look like a gas leak."
"Who's 'they'?"
"I don't know. But they're not regular clerks. They have access to the Core Administrative Interface. They can—" A crash echoed through the line. Li Mei gasped. "Oh no. They found me."
"Li Mei—"
"Listen to me. There's a backup. I stored everything on a—" The line went dead.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Connection Lost]
[Source: External Line Terminated]
[Recommended Action: File Incident Report with Department of Inter-Planar Communications]
Zhang stared at the dark sphere. His hands were shaking. Not from fear—from anger. Supervisor Hu had been running a criminal operation for centuries, using the Celestial Bureaucracy's own systems to cover his tracks. And now Li Mei, the woman whose mistake had killed him, was probably dead too.
But the backup. She mentioned a backup.
He accessed the system logs, searching for any trace of Li Mei's work. The records were there, buried under layers of encryption and redaction. But Zhang had something Hu didn't: a Tier 2 access level that let him see the administrative metadata.
There. A file transfer. Destination: unknown. Time stamp: three hours ago.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Unauthorized Data Exfiltration Detected]
[Source: Clerk ID 2319 - Li Mei]
[Destination: [REDACTED]]
[File Size: 847 GB]
[Status: Transfer Incomplete - 43% Complete]
Forty-three percent. That was better than nothing. But where had she sent it?
Zhang pulled up the routing logs. The data had been sent through a series of proxy servers, bouncing between mortal and celestial networks until it reached... a cloud storage service.
A mortal cloud storage service.
Zhang almost laughed. Li Mei had hidden the evidence of a three-hundred-year-old celestial conspiracy in Dropbox.
He accessed the account credentials from the metadata. Email: limei.notdead@gmail.com. Password: ********
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Warning - Accessing Mortal Networks is Prohibited Without Proper Authorization]
[Violation of: Celestial-Mortal Interface Treaty, Article 7, Section 4]
[Penalty: Soul Deletion, Memory Wipe, or Reassignment to Hell of Unending Data Entry]
[Proceed?]
Zhang selected [Yes].
The white void around him dissolved, replaced by a blur of colors and sounds. He felt himself falling again, but this time it was different. He wasn't moving through space—he was moving through the barriers between worlds. The mortal realm and the celestial bureaucracy were supposed to be separate, governed by ancient treaties and cosmic laws.
But someone had built a backdoor.
The Dropbox interface appeared in front of him, rendered in the same glowing runes as the celestial system. There was only one file: [EVIDENCE_ARCHIVE.zip].
He downloaded it.
The file opened to reveal thousands of documents. Financial records. Karmic ledgers. Destiny modification logs. Names of wealthy mortals who had paid for better reincarnations. Names of souls who had been sacrificed to cover Hu's tracks.
And at the very bottom, a single text file: [CONFESSION.txt]
Zhang opened it.
*My name is Li Mei. I've been a clerk in the Department of Mortal Affairs for twelve years. When I first discovered the discrepancies in the reincarnation queues, I thought it was a bug. I tried to report it through proper channels. But the channels were controlled by Supervisor Hu.*
*He offered me a choice: keep quiet and receive a promotion, or speak out and be "reassigned." I chose to keep quiet. I've been complicit in his crimes for eleven years.*
*But I can't do it anymore. Not after what happened to Zhang Wei.*
*He was supposed to live. He was supposed to invent something that would save millions of lives. But Hu needed a quota filler, and Zhang's destiny was "flexible." So Hu altered the records, made it look like Zhang was supposed to die in that accident.*
*I processed the order. I sent him to the Reincarnation Void.*
*I'm sorry, Zhang Wei. I'm so sorry.*
*The backup of all evidence is attached. Use it wisely. They'll come for me soon, but maybe this will make things right.*
*—Li Mei*
Zhang sat in silence, the file burning into his vision.
She was sorry. She was sorry for killing him, for covering up the truth, for letting Hu continue his operations for over a decade. And now she was probably dead.
But she'd given him the weapons he needed.
He accessed the celestial system again, pulling up Supervisor Hu's file. Current status: Active. Location: Department of Mortal Affairs, Floor 7, Office 712.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: New Quest Available]
[Quest: Expose Corruption]
[Objective: Deliver evidence of Supervisor Hu's crimes to the Celestial Audit Bureau]
[Reward: Promotion to Tier 3, Full Soul Restoration, Reincarnation Priority]
[Warning: Supervisor Hu has connections at the highest levels of the Heavenly Bureaucracy. Pursuing this quest may result in:]
- Soul Deletion
- Eternal Damnation
- Reassignment to Hell of Unending Data Entry
- [REDACTED]
[Accept?]
Zhang's finger hovered over the option. He thought about his mother, never knowing what happened to him. He thought about the invention he was supposed to create, the lives he was supposed to save. He thought about Li Mei, hiding in a parking garage, trying to do the right thing at the end.
And he thought about Supervisor Hu, sitting in his office, probably drinking tea and filing lies.
He selected [Accept].
The sphere exploded with light.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Quest Accepted]
[User: Zhang Wei - ID 7845-B]
[Current Objective: Deliver Evidence to Celestial Audit Bureau]
[Location: Floor 42, Tower of Heavenly Justice]
[Time Limit: 24 Hours]
[Warning: Supervisor Hu has been notified of your actions]
[His enforcers are en route to your location]
The white void dissolved. Zhang found himself back in the storage room, surrounded by filing cabinets and the faint hum of celestial machinery. The door burst open.
Three figures stood in the doorway, their faces obscured by glowing white masks. They wore identical black suits, each with a badge that read: [Internal Affairs - Special Operations Division].
"Zhang Wei," the lead figure said, his voice flat and mechanical. "You are under arrest for violation of Celestial-Mortal Interface Treaty, unauthorized access to restricted records, and tampering with administrative protocols."
Zhang slowly raised his hands. "I have the evidence."
"We know." The figure stepped forward. "And we're going to make sure it never reaches the Audit Bureau."
The other two moved to flank him. Zhang's mind raced. He had twenty-four hours, but they'd already found him. How was he supposed to deliver the evidence if they were watching his every move?
Then he noticed something.
The lead figure's badge was crooked.
Not a lot, just slightly off-center. But in a bureaucracy where everything was supposed to be perfect, a crooked badge was a sign of something wrong. These weren't real enforcers. They were impostors.
And impostors could be outsmarted.
"You know," Zhang said, forcing a calm smile, "you guys really should work on your attention to detail."
The lead figure tilted his head. "What?"
Zhang pointed at the crooked badge. "That. It's going to get you flagged in your next performance review."
The figure looked down, reflexively reaching to adjust it.
That was all Zhang needed.
He dove to the side, rolling behind a filing cabinet as the impostors drew weapons—not celestial enforcement wands, but mortal-made pistols. Bullets tore through the cabinets, sending papers flying into the air.
Zhang scrambled through the chaos, grabbing a jade token from a fallen clerk's desk. He didn't know where it would take him, but anywhere was better than here.
He smashed the token against the floor.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Emergency Transport Activated]
[Destination: Random]
[Warning: Destination may be
The sphere pulsed once, twice, then went dark.
Zhang blinked. The white void around him flickered like a dying fluorescent light. Somewhere in the distance, he heard a sound he hadn't expected: the ringing of a telephone.
Not a celestial chime. Not a system notification chime. An actual, mortal-world telephone ring.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Incoming Communication - External Line]
[Source: Unknown]
[Warning: External communications are restricted to Tier 5 personnel and above]
[Your current access level: Tier 2]
[Would you like to:]
[Accept Call]
[Ignore]
[Trace Origin]
Zhang stared at the options. External line. That meant someone outside the Celestial Bureaucracy was calling him. But who? He'd been dead for less than a week. His mother didn't even know how to use a smartphone, let alone call the afterlife.
He selected [Trace Origin].
The sphere flickered back to life, but this time it showed a different image: a messy desk covered in stacks of paper, empty tea cups, and what looked like a half-eaten baozi. Behind the desk sat a woman in her thirties, wearing a rumpled business suit and glasses that were clearly taped together at the bridge.
She was frantically typing on a keyboard that had several keys missing.
[Connection Established]
[User: Li Mei - ID 2319]
[Status: Alive]
Zhang's blood ran cold.
ID 2319. The clerk whose error had killed him.
"Hello?" Li Mei's voice crackled through the void. "Hello? Is this working? Stupid piece of—" There was a thud, presumably her hitting the keyboard. "Can you hear me?"
Zhang hesitated. Every instinct told him to hang up, to sever the connection and bury himself in administrative protocols until he figured out what was going on. But Li Mei was alive. She was still in the mortal world, still working in whatever office had caused his death.
And she was calling him.
"I can hear you," Zhang said.
"Oh thank the heavens." Li Mei's voice trembled with relief. "Listen, I don't have much time. They're monitoring my terminal now. But I had to warn you."
"Warn me about what?"
"About Supervisor Hu. He's not just covering up the error that killed you. He's been doing this for years. Hundreds of souls, maybe thousands. He reroutes destinies to meet his quotas, and when there's a mistake, he buries it."
Zhang's grip tightened on the sphere. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I'm next." Li Mei's voice dropped to a whisper. "I found the records. All of them. He's been manipulating the system to make it look like his department is the most efficient in the Heavenly Bureaucracy. But the real numbers? They're catastrophic. Souls getting sent to wrong reincarnation queues. People dying decades early. And the worst part?"
"What?"
"He's been selling access. Rich mortals, powerful families, they pay him to alter their karmic destinies. He's been doing it for three hundred years."
Three hundred years. Zhang's mind raced. That meant Hu had been alive long before he joined the Celestial Bureaucracy. He wasn't just a corrupt official—he was an immortal who had found a way to game the system.
"Where are you now?" Zhang asked.
"Underground parking garage, level three. There's a dead zone in the celestial monitoring here. I've been hiding for two days." A pause. "They found my apartment this morning. Burned it down. Made it look like a gas leak."
"Who's 'they'?"
"I don't know. But they're not regular clerks. They have access to the Core Administrative Interface. They can—" A crash echoed through the line. Li Mei gasped. "Oh no. They found me."
"Li Mei—"
"Listen to me. There's a backup. I stored everything on a—" The line went dead.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Connection Lost]
[Source: External Line Terminated]
[Recommended Action: File Incident Report with Department of Inter-Planar Communications]
Zhang stared at the dark sphere. His hands were shaking. Not from fear—from anger. Supervisor Hu had been running a criminal operation for centuries, using the Celestial Bureaucracy's own systems to cover his tracks. And now Li Mei, the woman whose mistake had killed him, was probably dead too.
But the backup. She mentioned a backup.
He accessed the system logs, searching for any trace of Li Mei's work. The records were there, buried under layers of encryption and redaction. But Zhang had something Hu didn't: a Tier 2 access level that let him see the administrative metadata.
There. A file transfer. Destination: unknown. Time stamp: three hours ago.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Unauthorized Data Exfiltration Detected]
[Source: Clerk ID 2319 - Li Mei]
[Destination: [REDACTED]]
[File Size: 847 GB]
[Status: Transfer Incomplete - 43% Complete]
Forty-three percent. That was better than nothing. But where had she sent it?
Zhang pulled up the routing logs. The data had been sent through a series of proxy servers, bouncing between mortal and celestial networks until it reached... a cloud storage service.
A mortal cloud storage service.
Zhang almost laughed. Li Mei had hidden the evidence of a three-hundred-year-old celestial conspiracy in Dropbox.
He accessed the account credentials from the metadata. Email: limei.notdead@gmail.com. Password: ********
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Warning - Accessing Mortal Networks is Prohibited Without Proper Authorization]
[Violation of: Celestial-Mortal Interface Treaty, Article 7, Section 4]
[Penalty: Soul Deletion, Memory Wipe, or Reassignment to Hell of Unending Data Entry]
[Proceed?]
Zhang selected [Yes].
The white void around him dissolved, replaced by a blur of colors and sounds. He felt himself falling again, but this time it was different. He wasn't moving through space—he was moving through the barriers between worlds. The mortal realm and the celestial bureaucracy were supposed to be separate, governed by ancient treaties and cosmic laws.
But someone had built a backdoor.
The Dropbox interface appeared in front of him, rendered in the same glowing runes as the celestial system. There was only one file: [EVIDENCE_ARCHIVE.zip].
He downloaded it.
The file opened to reveal thousands of documents. Financial records. Karmic ledgers. Destiny modification logs. Names of wealthy mortals who had paid for better reincarnations. Names of souls who had been sacrificed to cover Hu's tracks.
And at the very bottom, a single text file: [CONFESSION.txt]
Zhang opened it.
*My name is Li Mei. I've been a clerk in the Department of Mortal Affairs for twelve years. When I first discovered the discrepancies in the reincarnation queues, I thought it was a bug. I tried to report it through proper channels. But the channels were controlled by Supervisor Hu.*
*He offered me a choice: keep quiet and receive a promotion, or speak out and be "reassigned." I chose to keep quiet. I've been complicit in his crimes for eleven years.*
*But I can't do it anymore. Not after what happened to Zhang Wei.*
*He was supposed to live. He was supposed to invent something that would save millions of lives. But Hu needed a quota filler, and Zhang's destiny was "flexible." So Hu altered the records, made it look like Zhang was supposed to die in that accident.*
*I processed the order. I sent him to the Reincarnation Void.*
*I'm sorry, Zhang Wei. I'm so sorry.*
*The backup of all evidence is attached. Use it wisely. They'll come for me soon, but maybe this will make things right.*
*—Li Mei*
Zhang sat in silence, the file burning into his vision.
She was sorry. She was sorry for killing him, for covering up the truth, for letting Hu continue his operations for over a decade. And now she was probably dead.
But she'd given him the weapons he needed.
He accessed the celestial system again, pulling up Supervisor Hu's file. Current status: Active. Location: Department of Mortal Affairs, Floor 7, Office 712.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: New Quest Available]
[Quest: Expose Corruption]
[Objective: Deliver evidence of Supervisor Hu's crimes to the Celestial Audit Bureau]
[Reward: Promotion to Tier 3, Full Soul Restoration, Reincarnation Priority]
[Warning: Supervisor Hu has connections at the highest levels of the Heavenly Bureaucracy. Pursuing this quest may result in:]
- Soul Deletion
- Eternal Damnation
- Reassignment to Hell of Unending Data Entry
- [REDACTED]
[Accept?]
Zhang's finger hovered over the option. He thought about his mother, never knowing what happened to him. He thought about the invention he was supposed to create, the lives he was supposed to save. He thought about Li Mei, hiding in a parking garage, trying to do the right thing at the end.
And he thought about Supervisor Hu, sitting in his office, probably drinking tea and filing lies.
He selected [Accept].
The sphere exploded with light.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Quest Accepted]
[User: Zhang Wei - ID 7845-B]
[Current Objective: Deliver Evidence to Celestial Audit Bureau]
[Location: Floor 42, Tower of Heavenly Justice]
[Time Limit: 24 Hours]
[Warning: Supervisor Hu has been notified of your actions]
[His enforcers are en route to your location]
The white void dissolved. Zhang found himself back in the storage room, surrounded by filing cabinets and the faint hum of celestial machinery. The door burst open.
Three figures stood in the doorway, their faces obscured by glowing white masks. They wore identical black suits, each with a badge that read: [Internal Affairs - Special Operations Division].
"Zhang Wei," the lead figure said, his voice flat and mechanical. "You are under arrest for violation of Celestial-Mortal Interface Treaty, unauthorized access to restricted records, and tampering with administrative protocols."
Zhang slowly raised his hands. "I have the evidence."
"We know." The figure stepped forward. "And we're going to make sure it never reaches the Audit Bureau."
The other two moved to flank him. Zhang's mind raced. He had twenty-four hours, but they'd already found him. How was he supposed to deliver the evidence if they were watching his every move?
Then he noticed something.
The lead figure's badge was crooked.
Not a lot, just slightly off-center. But in a bureaucracy where everything was supposed to be perfect, a crooked badge was a sign of something wrong. These weren't real enforcers. They were impostors.
And impostors could be outsmarted.
"You know," Zhang said, forcing a calm smile, "you guys really should work on your attention to detail."
The lead figure tilted his head. "What?"
Zhang pointed at the crooked badge. "That. It's going to get you flagged in your next performance review."
The figure looked down, reflexively reaching to adjust it.
That was all Zhang needed.
He dove to the side, rolling behind a filing cabinet as the impostors drew weapons—not celestial enforcement wands, but mortal-made pistols. Bullets tore through the cabinets, sending papers flying into the air.
Zhang scrambled through the chaos, grabbing a jade token from a fallen clerk's desk. He didn't know where it would take him, but anywhere was better than here.
He smashed the token against the floor.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Emergency Transport Activated]
[Destination: Random]
[Warning: Destination may be