The agreement with Mei Lin's uncle was a lifeline, a direct conduit into the Sutra Corps' veiled operations. Elias now possessed knowledge of the "forced memory purges," the systematic erasure of Ledger breaches. He needed to understand the full extent of this power—not just how to expose it, but how to wield it himself. Could the Ledger be made to completely forget, to utterly erase a fact from existence, leaving no trace for even the most meticulous auditor?
He returned to the empty, silent Bureau after the midnight window had passed, his mind ablaze with a dangerous hypothesis. If the Ledger had a lag, a brief moment of vulnerability, could he exploit that lag to create a self-cancelling loop? A judgment so contradictory, so inherently unstable, that the Ledger would purge it entirely rather than attempt to reconcile the impossible.
He selected a hypothetical, highly volatile case from a decommissioned archive: a dispute between two powerful, warring Guilds over a resource claim where both sides had an unassailable karmic right to the asset, according to different interpretations of ancient law. A paradox.
Elias began to craft his experiment. He meticulously constructed a contradictory judgment, simultaneously awarding the resource to both Guilds with equal, unchallengeable karmic weight. He designed it to exploit the Ledger's internal processing lag, embedding a hidden protocol that would activate milliseconds after the initial "judgment" was recorded. This secondary protocol would then immediately issue an inverse, equally valid, judgment, creating a self-canceling loop that would theoretically overload the Ledger's reconciliation mechanisms. It was like forcing the system to stare at an infinite paradox, hoping it would simply give up and erase the problem.
He executed the command. The hum of the Ledger intensified, a deep, grinding sound that vibrated through the floor. For a terrifying second, Elias thought he had broken it, that the entire system would crash. The screens on his terminal flickered wildly, displaying a cascade of unresolvable errors.
Then, just as suddenly, the hum subsided. The error messages vanished. Elias quickly checked the case file. It was gone. Not reverted, not re-filed, but completely, utterly absent from the system. It had been scrubbed from existence, leaving no trace, no record, as if the dispute, and his impossible judgment, had never occurred. A possible way to erase evidence.
A wave of exhilaration, cold and exhilarating, washed over him. He had found it. A method for true erasure, a way to make the Ledger forget. This wasn't just hiding; this was an obliteration of truth.
The triumph was short-lived. A piercing, metallic shriek echoed through the vast hall. Down the corridor, the lights in the main Bureau chamber flickered violently. A Sutra AI terminal in the main adjudication section, one of the massive, central processing units, began to smoke. Its internal lights pulsed red, then died with a loud crackle. The very air around it rippled with residual, chaotic prana.
Almost immediately, the distinct, rhythmic footsteps of Celestial Sentinels pounded down the hall. The self-canceling loop had not been completely silent. While the case itself was erased without a trace, the sheer processing overload had manifested physically, causing a significant malfunction that had clearly drawn Sentinel attention.
Elias quickly wiped his own terminal, forcing a cascade of generic system errors to mask his recent activity. He had achieved the impossible, but the cost, and the risk of detection, had just spiraled to a dangerous new level.