Hector Voss stepped into the office.
The infernal negotiator wore a midnight-blue coat and an expression of attentive warmth, like a man arriving exactly on time for a dinner reservation. He did not look like someone who had just bypassed the heaviest security in the Eastern Underworld.
"Infernal observers have treaty access to contested records," Voss said smoothly, anticipating Shen's objection. "And this record is highly contested."
"You have no jurisdiction here, Voss," Rosa said, her hand resting near the inside of her coat.
"I have an interest," Voss corrected. He stepped closer to the desk, glancing at the document. "The Preservation Authority. They've been operating in the shadows since the eleventh century. They aren't a recognized pantheon. They are conservationists. They believe that what exists should continue, and what does not yet exist should be smothered in the cradle."
"So they kill people who don't fit," Wei said.
"They contain anomalies," Voss said. "And you, Mr. Chen, are the largest anomaly in three thousand years. You are the catalyst for the Ninth Pantheon."
Shen frowned, her procedural mask cracking. "The Ninth Pantheon is a theoretical model. A records crisis. It doesn't exist."
"It doesn't exist yet," Voss said, his eyes gleaming. "But belief is fracturing, Magistrate. You see it in your own queues. For the first time in human history, people are forming their deepest emotional bonds not with gods or ancestors, but with screens. With algorithms. With attention economies."
Voss spread his hands, warming to the subject. "Look at the mortal world. An AI resurrection bot trained on a dead teenager's texts getting more daily confessionals than a cathedral. A tech CEO's keynote address treated as a corporate sacrament. A livestreamer in Seoul with four million followers whose daily sign-on is functionally a mass invocation. The belief is accruing, and it has nowhere to go. Traditional systems like yours—and mine—aren't calibrated for digital connection. When this new generation dies, their souls won't carry a traditional signature. They will overwhelm the system."
"Unless a new system is built," Rosa said, her voice tight. "A system designed to harvest them."
"A system designed to receive them," Voss corrected gently. "A Ninth Pantheon. Built for the faith of the displaced, the digital, the unanchored. But a pantheon needs a founding hinge. A cornerstone." He looked directly at Wei. "You."
"No," Wei said. The word came out harder than he expected. "I've met gods. I've met angels. I've met you. I'm not becoming one of them."
"You misunderstand," Shen interrupted, her voice snapping like a whip. "He isn't offering you a throne, Wei. He's offering to be your landlord."
Voss smiled, a slow, predatory curving of the lips. "New systems need infrastructure. Contracts, processing capacity, legal frameworks. Hell has been in the infrastructure business for a long time. I want to offer you competitive terms before the Preservation Authority decides containment isn't enough and moves to eradication."
Wei looked between them. Voss, seeing a massive emerging market. Shen, seeing a catastrophic administrative failure. The Preservation Authority, seeing a heresy that needed to be burned.
None of them saw him. They saw an asset, a threat, a problem, a portfolio. They saw an Unclaimed Soul, and every single one of them was trying to figure out how to claim it.
"So it's just violence," Wei said, sounding very tired. "You just put it in better folders."
"It's the only thing keeping the universe from eating itself," Feng Qiao whispered from his desk.
The building shook again, harder this time. The glass rods outside clattered violently against their racks. The communications channel Feng Qiao had opened was no longer just a line of transmission—it was a door, and something heavy was walking through it.
"The Preservation Authority," Voss noted, checking his watch, "has apparently decided to skip the paperwork."
Wei looked at the ancient, brutal seal on his death warrant. He looked at Voss, and Shen, and Rosa.
He reached into his pocket and closed his hand around the cracked bronze guide bell.
"Wei," Shen warned, seeing his movement. "If you ring that in the main hall—"
"I know," Wei said. He turned his back on the clerk, the infernal negotiator, and the Magistrate, and walked out of the office, heading straight for the thousands of waiting dead.