Ne Job: The Intern from Hell — Chapter 124: "Directive: Rebirth Pending"
The Bureau had never felt this cold.
Not the physical kind—there was no air, no weather here—but the administrative chill of systems waking up that should have stayed dead.
Rows of terminals flickered in eerie synchronization, glyphs reforming on every wall. The Bureau's insignia, once crisp and symmetrical, now pulsed like a living wound.
Yue's eyes darted between monitors, her fingers moving faster than thought. "It's spreading through the entire divine network. The Rebirth Directive is rewriting dormant branches—Audit, Karma, even Afterlife Transit."
Ne Job leaned over her shoulder, his reflection flickering in the console's glow. "That's half the Bureau. What's it rewriting into?"
Yue hesitated. "…It's not rewriting." She pointed at the pulsing glyphs. "It's restoring."
Bao, trembling with a half-spilled cup of spectral tea, peeked from behind a filing cabinet. "R-restoring what?"
Ne Job frowned. "The Bureau before the erasure."
A low, resonant tone filled the hall. The lights dimmed, replaced by a single golden projection in the air—a holographic figure rendered from divine code.
Lord Xian.
But he wasn't solid. His outline glitched, phasing between presence and absence, like a memory trying to hold its shape.
> "Ne Job. Assistant Yue," his voice echoed, calm and distant. "You've both interfered with a system beyond comprehension."
Ne Job folded his arms. "Good morning, boss. You're looking very… haunting today."
> "This is not a resurrection," Xian replied. "This is protocol continuation. The Rebirth Directive was never deactivated. It was paused."
Yue's tone sharpened. "Paused? You sealed it yourself during the Shard Court War!"
Xian's projection flickered. "I sealed the records, not the purpose. The Bureau was never designed to end—it was designed to evolve. What you destroyed… was merely version one."
Ne Job's eyes narrowed. "Version two doesn't sound like much fun."
> "Fun," Xian repeated, as though tasting the word for the first time. "No. Evolution demands loss. To rebuild, we must remember everything erased—even the chaos."
Yue stepped forward. "You mean him, don't you?" She glanced at Ne Job. "The Spark."
Xian's gaze drifted toward the crimson light still faintly pulsing in Ne Job's chest.
> "The Spark was never a flaw, Assistant. It was the contingency. The Bureau's creators feared stagnation. They embedded a failsafe—an intern who could never truly be deleted."
Ne Job's voice dropped. "You made me a reset switch."
> "You are the reset switch," Xian said. "And now, the Directive recognizes its catalyst."
All around them, the air shimmered. Bureau clerks froze mid-motion as ghostly replicas of themselves appeared—versions from forgotten timelines. The hall grew crowded with echoes: layers of history overlapping, each one whispering the same word in a thousand bureaucratic tones.
> "Rebirth."
Yue gritted her teeth. "He's merging timelines!"
> "It's not a merger," Xian said softly. "It's correction. Chaos uncontained leads to rebellion. Order without memory leads to collapse. The Bureau must reconcile both."
The projection reached out, and suddenly, Ne Job's surroundings changed.
The hall vanished. He stood now in the old Bureau—the one before his first erasure. Dim fluorescent lights, rusted desks, rows of forgotten interns half-asleep at their posts.
The scent of burnt coffee and divine toner.
And in the center of it all—his old workstation.
A mug. A cracked monitor.
A document frozen mid-type: "Rebirth Proposal Draft — by Intern Ne Job."
He stared at it. "This… this is mine."
Yue's voice echoed faintly, distant but reaching through the simulation. "Ne Job! The Directive's using your past files as its template!"
He scrolled through the old proposal. Every line, every signature, every stamp—it wasn't just a report. It was the foundation of the new system. His chaotic suggestions for "emotional variance in divine processing" had been absorbed, refined, institutionalized.
He laughed bitterly. "They built Heaven 2.0 on my internship mistakes."
Xian's voice reverberated through the empty hall.
> "You gave us the seed. Now, you must finish it."
> "You want me to run this reboot?"
> "Not run. Become."
Ne Job turned slowly. The holographic Xian loomed above him, vast and flickering like a dying god.
> "The Spark is the convergence point. You, Ne Job, are the Bureau's final interface. Merge, and the Directive completes. Reject it, and both realms will dissolve into narrative entropy."
Yue's voice cut in again, stronger now. "Ne Job! Listen to me—if you merge, you'll lose yourself. The Spark won't just rewrite you—it'll rewrite everything through you!"
He looked down at his hands. The crimson light pulsed harder, lines of chaotic data weaving up his arms like veins of molten glass. The hum in his chest grew louder. The Bureau's systems were calling to him, singing in the language of structure and recursion.
> "Yue…" he said softly. "What if he's right? What if the only way to stop this is to finish what I started?"
Her reply was immediate. "No. That's how they keep control—by making you believe chaos has to serve order to survive."
He smiled faintly. "And yet you're still following procedure even when defying it."
She glared, but there was fear behind it. "Don't make this into a joke."
> "I'm not." He stepped forward, placing a hand against the simulation wall. "If the Directive wants its intern, it can have him—but not the way it expects."
He turned back toward Xian's projection.
> "Fine. You want a reboot? Let's make it a real one."
The Spark in his chest ignited—red and gold intertwined. The walls cracked, Bureau code peeling away to reveal the raw, unformatted void beneath.
Yue reached for him. "Ne Job!"
> "Trust me," he said, voice calm amidst the roaring chaos. "If Heaven's going to reboot, it's going to remember everything it tried to forget."
He snapped his fingers.
The Bureau shattered.
Every erased file, every lost soul, every forgotten intern came flooding back into the system as living memory. Order and chaos collided—not to destroy, but to merge into something new.
In the silence that followed, only one voice remained—Ne Job's, layered over every Bureau record, half human, half divine:
> "Rebirth… authorized by error."