The anxiety gnawing at Elias after the "observed" message was a constant companion, but it sharpened his focus. With Mei Lin now diligently, if unknowingly, retrieving data on decommissioned Sutra AI nodes, Elias turned his attention to a different, more volatile source of information: Scholar Yan's confiscated research. After Yan's arrest by the Alchemists' Guild, his personal effects and academic data scrolls had been impounded by the Bureau's internal security. Elias, leveraging his position and citing a need to "understand the seditious elements of Yan's work," managed to gain temporary access to the sealed archive.
The scrolls were dense, filled with Yan's feverish scrawl and complex diagrams. Most of it was theoretical musings on karmic philosophy, dismissed as fringe academia. But buried deep within a heavily annotated sub-folder, Elias found it: a series of encrypted notes, labelled simply, "The Rift."
He spent hours decrypting them, his fingers flying across his holographic interface, the bootleg Earth Core a low thrum against his chest, masking his intense focus. The notes detailed Yan's theory of a "karmic blind spot": a fleeting, yet absolute, window of time when the Karmic Ledger's recording protocols briefly faltered. According to Yan's research, for precisely 12 minutes after midnight, the Ledger entered a cyclical recalibration phase, during which any direct edits made to the karmic record would be registered, but not recorded in the primary audit logs. It was a temporal anomaly, a systemic oversight that allowed for un-audited manipulation.
The implications were breathtaking. A twelve-minute window of absolute invisibility, where karmic actions could be performed without leaving a traceable signature. It explained how the Naga had performed their subtle, untraceable edits, and how the unknown entity had purged the original Naga informant.
But using this window came with an immense risk. The Bureau, normally deserted at night, was not empty. Only High Sages and Celestial Sentinels maintained patrols, their movements unpredictable, their senses heightened. These were the very individuals most likely to detect any unusual spiritual activity, or even a lone analyst working illicitly. The presence of his unstable Earth Core, though masking his signature, also posed a continuous, low-level risk of a spiritual flare-up.
Elias knew he had to test it. He couldn't afford to walk into a trap.
He waited for the midnight hour, the Bureau sinking into an almost reverent quiet. He pulled up an old, long-settled case from the archives: a minor inheritance dispute from decades ago. A single, irrelevant digit in a financial transaction record. An utterly meaningless change, designed solely to confirm the blind spot.
As the clock on his terminal chimed midnight, Elias felt a surge of adrenaline. He waited precisely twelve minutes, then, with trembling fingers, he altered the digit. The Ledger accepted the change, the familiar hum acknowledging the input. He immediately ran a diagnostic on the audit logs for that particular case. They remained unchanged. The edit was present, but no record of who made it, or when, existed in the official audit trail.
It worked.
The rush of triumph was intoxicating, quickly followed by a chilling certainty. He now had a way to operate truly unseen, to carve out his own secret space within the Ledger. But it was a tightrope walk over an abyss. And the entities that controlled the Ledger, the ones now watching him, would surely notice if he started moving too freely in the darkness.