Day one of infiltration began with paperwork.
"This is the least exciting part of robbing tyrants," I muttered, filling out my third application form in the Celestial Court's Office of Administrative Resources. The form requested my name, cultivation level, department assignment preferences, and,absurdly,my favorite color.
"Bureaucracy is the same everywhere," Yun Xia whispered beside me, her own forms equally tedious. "Even tyranny requires filing systems. Actually, especially tyranny. Control requires documentation."
We sat in a waiting area with dozens of other applicants,young cultivators seeking bureaucratic positions, merchants applying for trade licenses, citizens requesting audience with minor officials. The room hummed with quiet conversations and the scratch of brushes on paper.
Our forged identities held perfectly. I was "Wei Chen," Foundation Establishment 2nd Layer cultivator from the Western Provinces, seeking administrative work after my previous employer's business collapsed. Yun Xia was "Yun Mei," Foundation Establishment 3rd Layer, formerly employed by a provincial clan that had been absorbed by the Court. Lin Mei was "Lin Feng," Foundation Establishment 7th Layer, senior administrator transferring from the Southern Branch.
The Court's bureaucracy was so massive that three new employees barely registered. Hundreds of cultivators worked in the administrative building alone—record keepers, formation technicians, security personnel, logistics coordinators. We'd be three faces among hundreds.
"Next!" A clerk called.
I approached the desk, presenting my completed forms and forged credentials. The clerk—an older woman with Qi Condensation 9th Layer cultivation and the expression of someone who'd processed ten thousand applications—examined everything with practiced efficiency.
"Wei Chen. Foundation Establishment 2nd Layer. Experience in resource allocation and inventory management." She stamped each form with mechanical precision. "Department assignment: Artifact Preservation and Cataloging, sublevel seven. Report to Supervisor Chen at hour of the snake tomorrow morning. Orientation is mandatory."
She handed me an identity token—jade slip inscribed with my false name and department authorization. "This grants building access, food hall privileges, and quarters in the eastern dormitory if needed. Don't lose it. Replacement costs three silver taels."
"Thank you."
"Next!"
I stepped aside as Yun Xia took my place. Within five minutes, she'd been assigned to Security Coordination, sublevel three. Lin Mei, with her higher cultivation and forged senior credentials, was placed in Formation Maintenance, sublevel five.
We reconvened outside the administrative building, comparing assignments.
"Artifact Preservation, sublevel seven," I said. "That's two floors above the vault entrance."
"Security Coordination, sublevel three," Yun Xia reported. "I'll have access to patrol schedules and guard rotations. Useful for timing."
"Formation Maintenance, sublevel five," Lin Mei finished. "Perfect position,I'll be expected to inspect and repair formations regularly, including vault security arrays. No one will question why I'm examining the very defenses we plan to circumvent."
[INFILTRATION: PHASE 1 COMPLETE]
[COVER IDENTITIES: ESTABLISHED]
[BUILDING ACCESS: GRANTED]
[DEPARTMENTS: STRATEGICALLY POSITIONED]
"Two days to familiarize ourselves with the building layout, establish routine presence, and identify the exact timing for the heist," Lin Mei said quietly as we walked toward our assigned dormitory. "We act like perfectly boring bureaucrats. Blend in, do mediocre work, become forgettable faces."
"I can do boring," I said.
"Can you? You've spent the last month defying death, fighting Core Formation cultivators, and learning to rewrite causality. Boring might actually be harder."
She had a point.
Sublevel seven of the Celestial Court's administrative building was exactly as tedious as advertised.
The Artifact Preservation and Cataloging department occupied a warren of rooms filled with shelves, storage containers, and endless documentation. My supervisor, Chen Yi—a middle-aged man with Foundation Establishment 4th Layer cultivation and the enthusiasm of a dead fish,greeted me with barely concealed disinterest.
"Wei Chen, yes? You'll be processing intake documentation for newly acquired artifacts. When the Court seizes items from rogue cultivators or dissolved clans, they come here first for cataloging before moving to secure storage." He gestured at a desk buried under jade slips. "Each artifact needs verification of origin, threat assessment, spiritual energy measurement, and storage recommendation. Questions?"
"How many artifacts typically process through here?"
"Fifteen to twenty daily. More during purge operations." He said "purge operations" like discussing weather patterns, completely casual about systematic elimination of bloodlines. "Current backlog is... significant. The recent Fate Weaver elimination campaigns generated substantial intake volume."
My hands clenched involuntarily. He was talking about the artifacts stolen from my murdered clan members, from the Wang Clan, from the Liu and Feng families,stolen from the dead and cataloged like common property.
"Understood," I managed, voice neutral.
"Good. Start with that pile." He pointed at approximately two hundred jade slips. "Work through them systematically. Lunch is at midday, shift ends at evening bell. Don't fall behind,the backlog only grows."
He left me alone with the documentation.
I spent the next six hours processing forms that detailed exactly what the Celestial Court had stolen from my people. Each jade slip was a small tragedy:
"Chen Clan sword, Azure Dragon pattern, Foundation Establishment level. Origin: Chen Manor armory. Seized during purge operation. Recommended storage: General Arsenal, rack forty-seven."
"Wang Clan jade pendant, ancestral heirloom, fortune concentration detected. Origin: Wang family shrine. Seized during elimination. Recommended storage: Artifact Vault, section twelve."
"Liu Clan technique manual, Water-path cultivation methods, Core Formation level. Origin: Liu family library. Seized post-extermination. Recommended storage: Restricted Archives, forbidden section."
Each form was genocide reduced to administrative task. Each cataloged item represented lives ended, families destroyed, knowledge stolen.
By midday, I was sick with controlled rage.
[EMOTIONAL STATE: VOLATILE]
[RECOMMENDATION: MAINTAIN COVER]
[REVENGE AVAILABLE IN: 2 DAYS]
I took lunch in the building's communal food hall, forcing down rice and vegetables while surrounded by Court bureaucrats chatting casually about their work. At the next table, formation technicians discussed array maintenance schedules. Behind me, security coordinators laughed about a drunk cultivator they'd arrested.
Normal people doing normal work for an organization built on systematic murder.
Yun Xia found me after lunch, her own expression strained. "How's your first day?"
"Educational," I said quietly. "I'm cataloging artifacts stolen from Fate Weaver families. Including items seized from the Chen Clan purge."
"I'm reviewing security reports from the elimination campaigns. Reading about how efficiently the kill teams operated." Her voice was flat. "Thirty-seven clan members eliminated in under an hour. Zero Court casualties. Filed as a successful operation."
We sat in silence for a moment, two people maintaining bureaucratic masks while drowning in documentation of atrocities.
"Lin Mei?" I asked.
"Inspecting vault formations all day. Says the arrays are more sophisticated than expected but not impossible to circumvent." Yun Xia leaned closer, voice dropping. "The vault keeper walks the upper levels every evening at the hour of the dog. Follows the exact same route, examining formation nodes. That's our window,when he's furthest from the vault entrance."
"Two days," I said. "We maintain cover for two more days, then we hit them."
"Assuming we don't crack before then. This place..." She gestured at the food hall, at the hundreds of cultivators eating lunch, laughing, living normal lives while serving tyranny. "They don't even know what they're part of. Or they know and don't care. I can't decide which is worse."
"Both are worse." I stood, preparing to return to sublevel seven. "But in two days, we remind them that some ghosts bite back."
Day two of infiltration was worse than day one.
More artifacts to catalog. More jade slips detailing systematic theft. More casual conversations overheard about "successful elimination operations" and "pacified regions."
But I also learned useful information.
The vault operated on a strict access schedule: Main vault door opened only during shift changes at midnight and noon. Between those times, the entrance remained sealed by ninety-seven overlapping formation arrays. Guards patrolled sublevel one (vault level) in four-hour rotations, with minimum three cultivators on duty at any time.
Vault Keeper Shen—the Nascent Soul guardian we had to bypass,maintained quarters on sublevel two. He rarely left the underground levels except for that evening patrol of formation nodes. Creature of habit, according to office gossip. Same routine for forty years.
"Habits create predictability," I told Lin Mei during our evening meeting in her dormitory room. "Predictability creates opportunity."
"True. But Nascent Soul cultivators develop habits because they're powerful enough to not care about vulnerability." She spread out schematics she'd updated with her formation inspection data. "I've identified the critical arrays. Thirty-seven formations control the vault entrance specifically. Sever their causal connections properly, and the door becomes merely a very thick piece of metal."
"Can three people sever thirty-seven formations in the time it takes guards to notice something's wrong?"
"If we work in sequence, no. If we work in cascade, maybe." She traced connections on the schematic. "The formations link together,one supports another, creates redundancy. But that interdependence is also vulnerability. Sever the right master array, and its dependent arrays lose causal cohesion. They'll still function technically, but causally disconnected from their purpose."
"Death by a thousand cuts becomes death by one strategic cut."
"Exactly. You sever the master array. I sever Vault Keeper Shen's connection to his duty. Yun Xia severs the guards' connection to their patrol schedule. Three critical severances, all executed simultaneously."
[HEIST STRATEGY: FINALIZED]
[CRITICAL SEVERANCES: 3]
[COST ESTIMATE: 1,200 LP TOTAL]
[SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 12% (UNCHANGED)]
"What about escape?" Yun Xia asked.
"Temporal severance. Once we have the artifacts, Wei Chen freezes us all in time—disconnects our present from the next few minutes. We walk out while causally not-existing in that timeframe. By the time we reconnect, we're blocks away, and the vault breach is just being discovered."
"That requires maintaining triple temporal severance for several minutes while carrying stolen goods," I said. "The causal strain alone—"
"—will cost approximately 800 LP and possibly kill you, yes. But it's our best exit strategy." Lin Mei met my eyes. "Can you do it?"
I thought about my training, about freezing myself for thirty seconds, about the crushing effort of maintaining even single-target temporal manipulation.
Freezing three people for several minutes while moving through a building filled with cultivators?
It should be impossible.
"I can do it," I said. "Probably."
"Probably isn't confident."
"Probably is honest. I'll do it or die trying. Which, given we're already attempting something with twelve percent success rate, seems consistent."
Lin Mei smiled slightly. "Fair point. Tomorrow we execute. Midnight, shift change window, when Vault Keeper Shen is on his evening formation inspection. We have approximately fifteen minutes from entry to escape before someone investigates the silent alarms."
"Silent alarms?" Yun Xia frowned.
"The formations trigger detection, but we'll sever their connection to audible alerts. Guards will see formation indicators activating but won't hear actual alarms. Creates confusion, delays response, buys us those critical extra minutes."
"Clever."
"Desperate," Lin Mei corrected. "We're three Fate Weavers attempting to rob the most secure facility in history. Clever would be not attempting this at all."
We spent the rest of the evening reviewing every detail, memorizing guard patterns, formation layouts, escape routes. By the time we separated for the night, I'd visualized the heist sequence so many times it felt like memory rather than plan.
Tomorrow at midnight, we'd either succeed in the most audacious theft in three millennia, or we'd die as criminals whose names would be forgotten within hours.
Twelve percent odds.
I lay in my dormitory bed, unable to sleep despite exhaustion. Around me, other bureaucrats slept peacefully—people who served tyranny without question, processed genocide as paperwork, enabled systematic elimination through administrative efficiency.
Tomorrow, I'd rob them blind.
And feel absolutely no guilt about it.
Day three passed in agonizing slowness.
I processed more artifact intake forms, each one a reminder of why we were doing this. Chen Clan swords. Wang Clan pendants. Liu Clan manuals. Everything stolen from my people, cataloged with bureaucratic precision, stored in the vault I'd rob tonight.
Reclaiming what was stolen wasn't theft. It was justice.
At the hour of the dog, I left my desk and made my way toward the access stairs leading to sublevel one. My identity token granted passage—artifact preservation staff occasionally needed vault access for special storage situations.
Lin Mei and Yun Xia converged from their respective departments, three bureaucrats finishing evening shifts, heading toward the lower levels where night workers gathered.
We passed a dozen cultivators on the stairs. None looked twice. We were forgettable faces in a building full of forgettable faces.
Sublevel one was quieter,just the vault entrance and guard station. Three cultivators on duty, exactly as Yun Xia's intelligence indicated. They glanced at our identity tokens, verified our departments had vault access authorization, and waved us through to the staging area where we'd "prepare documentation for morning retrieval operations."
The staging area was a small room adjacent to the vault entrance, filled with desks and filing materials. Empty at night except for us.
Perfect.
Lin Mei checked a timepiece. "Eleven forty-seven. Shift change begins at midnight. Vault Keeper Shen should be on sublevel four examining formation node seventeen. Guards will be distracted by transition protocols."
"Thirteen minutes," I said, feeling my heartbeat accelerate. "Thirteen minutes until we commit to this."
"Having second thoughts?" Yun Xia asked.
"Tenth and eleventh thoughts, definitely. But we're committed." I checked my LP—2,531 points after careful regeneration. "Ready."
"Ready," Lin Mei confirmed.
"Ready," Yun Xia echoed.
We waited in silence, listening to the building's ambient sounds. Footsteps on stairs. Distant conversations. The hum of formation arrays maintaining building security.
All of it about to be disrupted.
Eleven fifty-five.
"Positions," Lin Mei whispered.
We moved to the staging area's doorway, watching the guard station. The three on-duty cultivators were preparing shift change documentation, their attention focused on paperwork rather than the vault entrance behind them.
Midnight bells began ringing across the city.
The guards shifted positions, beginning transition protocols. For exactly ninety seconds, their formation coverage would have microscopic gaps while arrays recalibrated for new authorization codes.
"Now," Lin Mei said.
We moved as one.
I extended my fortune sense toward the master formation array controlling vault entrance security,a complex knot of causality connecting detection, authorization, and response protocols. Lin Mei had identified the exact thread to sever: the connection between "unauthorized access detected" and "defensive response activated."
[ATTEMPTING: CAUSALITY SEVERANCE - MASTER ARRAY]
[COST: 400 LP]
[CURRENT LP: 2,131]
I pulled.
The causal thread resisted,three thousand years of reinforced programming, layers upon layers of redundancy designed to prevent exactly this attack. But I'd trained for two weeks specifically for this moment. I knew how to negotiate with reality, how to make the impossible merely improbable.
The thread severed.
Simultaneously, Lin Mei's eyes flashed silver as she targeted something I couldn't see,the causal connection between Vault Keeper Shen and his duty, his presence, his very awareness of the vault.
Yun Xia activated her own Fate Weaving, severing the guards' connection to their scheduled patrol pattern.
Three critical causality breaks, all executed within seconds.
The guards at the station suddenly looked confused. One checked his schedule. "Wait, are we supposed to be on vault level or sublevel two right now?"
"Schedule says... I don't know. The formation indicator changed."
"Check with Supervisor Wu on sublevel three."
They left, climbing stairs to verify their suddenly uncertain patrol assignments, leaving the vault entrance unguarded.
Lin Mei moved to the massive vault door,three meters tall, carved from single piece of jade, covered in formation script. She placed both hands on its surface, and I felt massive causality manipulation as she severed the door's connection to its hinges, its weight, its very existence as barrier.
The door swung open silently, impossibly, as if it weighed nothing.
Beyond it lay the Celestial Court's artifact vault.
Three thousand years of accumulated treasures. Hundreds of Fate Weaver artifacts stolen from extinct bloodlines. Everything they'd seized through systematic genocide, stored in crystalline cases that glowed with contained power.
"Fifteen minutes," Lin Mei reminded us. "Take what we came for and leave before causality corrects itself."
We entered the vault, three ghosts walking into tyranny's treasure hoard, about to reclaim what never should have been stolen.
The heist had begun.
And reality itself was about to discover what happened when Fate Weavers decided probability was negotiable.