Ne Job: The Intern from Hell — Chapter 123: "Mortal Error Detected"
The Bureau was not built for mortals.
That truth, as old as bureaucracy itself, now echoed through every corridor like a warning bell.
Soul streams flickered. Terminals overloaded. The celestial fonts glitched between scripture and static. Somewhere deep in the filing servers, a single word kept replicating through every record: RETURN.
Ne Job and Yue stood in the command hall, the mortal woman from the Living Queue still trembling under the translucent dome of containment light.
Clerks whispered. Supervisors panicked in polite tones. Dreivery Spirit Bao had fainted twice already, revived both times by coffee and mild existential dread.
Yue's voice cut through the chaos, calm but razor-sharp.
> "This shouldn't be possible. The mortal consciousness barrier hasn't been breached since the Shard Court War."
Ne Job leaned on a console, watching the woman. "Yet here we are. Guess someone didn't read the cosmic firewall manual."
The mortal looked around, blinking through the shimmer. "I don't understand. I was… alive. And then…"
Her voice faltered, eyes distant. "There was noise. Like static inside my head. People… remembering things they shouldn't. Like they'd lived other lives. And then—"
She clutched her chest, pained, as light rippled through her veins. The monitors spiked red.
> ALERT: Temporal Echo Detected. Memory Resonance Overload.
Yue's eyes widened. "She's carrying a corrupted timeline."
Ne Job grimaced. "A mortal with admin privileges. That's new."
Bao peeked from behind a console. "Can we… delete it?"
Yue shot him a glare so cold it could freeze entropy. "No deletions. Not again."
Ne Job's tone softened. "She's not a virus, Bao. She's a symptom."
He stepped closer to the containment dome. "Hey. What's your name?"
The woman hesitated. "Lin."
"Lin," Ne Job repeated. "Okay. Lin, you said people started remembering other lives. What kind of memories?"
Lin's eyes darted, unfocused. "Buildings that never existed. Gods walking in plain sight. A city where time reversed every night. And a voice—someone saying the Bureau is coming back."
Yue stiffened. "Coming back?"
Ne Job felt the air change. The Spark inside him pulsed once, like a heartbeat out of sync.
> "Yue," he said quietly. "Run a background scan on the Bureau's resurrection protocols."
> "They're dormant. Xian sealed them himself after—"
The console blared. PROTOCOLS REACTIVATING.
Yue's composure cracked. "That's impossible."
> "Nothing's impossible," Ne Job muttered. "Just heavily redacted."
The dome around Lin flickered, not from malfunction—but from interference. Glyphs on the walls rearranged into something older than Bureau coding, something written in circular, recursive patterns.
> "Containment compromised," Yue said. "It's rewriting the security layer."
Ne Job took a step back. "Yue, what's happening?"
She frowned. "Those aren't Bureau glyphs. They're… mortal."
Lin's eyes glowed faint gold, her voice deepening with layered resonance. "I didn't bring this. It followed me."
The air fractured like glass.
Reality around the containment dome folded, revealing a rift of swirling data—bureaucratic code colliding with mortal time signatures.
From the rift emerged a sound. Not words—just the mechanical hum of the Bureau's old servers. The same hum that haunted Ne Job's first resurrection.
Then came a voice, cold and bureaucratic:
> "Unauthorized project detected. Reinstating Directive: Rebirth Integration."
Yue froze. "That directive was purged millennia ago."
Ne Job's grin was tight, defiant. "Guess Heaven's running on cached files."
The voice continued, its tone merging with Lin's.
> "Subject Lin: temporal anchor achieved. Commencing merge of mortal timeline with divine system."
Yue slammed her palm on the terminal. "If they merge dimensions, mortality itself will destabilize."
> "Then we stop it," Ne Job said. "Before Heaven turns Earth into another branch office."
He summoned the Chaos Spark. Crimson light crawled up his arm, fracturing the Bureau's pale order with streaks of rebellion. The containment dome shattered, but instead of releasing destruction—it froze everything in place.
Ne Job and Lin stood at the center of a still world, surrounded by suspended clerks and static light. Only Yue remained unfrozen, her divine core resonating with his Spark.
> "Temporal freeze," Yue whispered. "But you shouldn't be able to—"
> "Yeah," he said, smirking faintly. "Turns out interns get creative when supervision's asleep."
He knelt before Lin. Her glow flickered erratically. "Lin. Listen to me. The Bureau's trying to overwrite your timeline. You need to reject its signal."
Lin shook her head weakly. "I… I can't. It's inside my name. Inside my record."
Yue's eyes widened. "Her name isn't Lin. It's an acronym—L.I.N.—Localized Integration Node. She's not just a mortal. She's the interface."
The hum deepened. The still world began to move again, layer by layer. Glyphs crawled across the floor, forming the Bureau's emblem—half erased, half reborn.
> "Rebirth Integration: 87%."
Ne Job's expression hardened. "Yue. Disconnect her."
> "That could erase her completely."
> "So will the Bureau if we don't."
Yue hesitated for one heartbeat too long—then raised her badge. The divine symbol pulsed, connecting her light to Ne Job's Spark. Together, their energies intertwined, chaos and order forming an unstable harmony.
They reached toward Lin—both hands out, both terrified and resolute.
> "Directive override," Yue commanded. "Authorization: Assistant Yue Hanzhen."
> "Authorization," Ne Job added, grinning, "Chaotic idiot."
The system stuttered. The emblem beneath them cracked.
For a moment, every light in Heaven flickered. The queues froze. The records blinked. The Bureau itself seemed to hesitate, unsure whether to obey its creators—or its mistakes.
Then Lin gasped, collapsing forward. The Bureau seal shattered completely, dissolving into motes of fading light.
The alarms went silent.
Only the hum remained.
Yue exhaled slowly. "We… we stopped it."
Ne Job looked at the ceiling. "Yeah. For now."
Behind them, the rift closed—but not before a final voice slipped through, cold and amused.
> "Termination incomplete. Rebirth Directive… pending."
Yue turned to Ne Job. "That voice—"
He nodded grimly. "Lord Xian."