Blocking My 5G Dream Channel, the Merit-Light Made the Warden Regret It

1: 1

The interstate dream-delivery speed-up request for the Ghost Festival got kicked back three times.

The third time, the Night Roamer threw the form on the floor.

Interstate dream-delivery needs a 5G channel now?

You think you paid to build the Underworld's relay towers?

I didn't waste breath. I switched to a traditional dream-delivery talisman.

The signal lag pushed the dream four hours late.

The living children got into a brawl at the grave, and the ancestral plot was dug up right then and there.

The Temple Warden's century of merit-light shattered to dust.

The Temple Warden was so angry he smashed his desk apart.

"What in the realms happened here!"

Every soul in the hall was staring at me.

I stood up and spread my hands.

"I'm a low-level shrine-keeper, and the Night Roamer had the port locked down."

"So you tell me. Should I have sent it by dream, or gone up and clawed my way out of the grave myself?"

The air in the hall dropped to freezing in an instant.

The Temple Warden's face went ashen at my words, his heavy body trembling in the great chair.

Not one of the immortal officials or ghost-clerks dared breathe.

The Night Roamer, Albert Henson, stepped out of the ranks, his brow knotted tight.

"Tamara Pruitt, don't stand there passing the blame."

"What do you mean I had the port locked down?"

He strode right up to me, glaring.

"The Ghost Festival is a busy time. Of course network allocation has an order of priority."

"Your own skills are lacking, you can't work a dream-delivery talisman properly, you let something go wrong in the living world, and now you're pinning it on a network port?"

His tone shifted.

"Look, I know it's hard on you, running the relay tower all alone."

"But that's no excuse for you to go biting at people at random."

"We're at a critical stage in the Underworld's reforms right now."

"And here you are. Not only refusing to fall in line with the bigger picture, you're stirring up trouble in front of the Temple Warden."

"Are those few centuries of cultivation of yours worth nothing at all?"

Before I could answer, Albert's assistant, Bianca Whitfield, stepped forward.

"Sister Tamara, I'm sorry. This is all my fault."

Her eyes were rimmed red.

"Albie, don't blame Sister Tamara."

She tugged at Albert's sleeve.

"It's all on me."

"I was trying to get up to speed on our Underworld operations, so I did a little extra research."

"I might have accidentally taken up some of Sister Tamara's dream-delivery bandwidth."

"I didn't know her work was that urgent."

She sniffled, tears dropping one after another.

"Sister Tamara, I'm sorry."

"Bibi's just too dense, no experience."

"If you're angry, hit me, yell at me, that's fine. Just please don't drag Albie into it and get him scolded by the Temple Warden."

Everyone knew Bianca had powerful backing. Word was she was the goddaughter of some big name upstairs.

The moment that sweet little act came out, the immortal officials and ghost-clerks around us all turned reproachful eyes on me.

Seeing Bianca speak up, the Temple Warden's anger eased considerably.

He cleared his throat and turned to me.

"Tamara Pruitt, it's only a will that came four hours late."

"The living getting into a brawl at the grave, that's the living world having no manners of their own."

"You're a senior employee. Why do you have to make things hard for a newcomer?"

"Back before there was any network, wasn't this job done just the same?"

Albert lowered his voice and leaned in near my ear.

"Go apologize to Bibi now."

"Be sincere about it, and I'll bury this whole thing for you today."

"That interstate dream-delivery speed-up form, whatever it's called, I'll sign off on it in a bit."

I ignored Albert and pulled a tablet out of my pocket.

In front of everyone in the hall, I pressed the holographic projection key.

The relay tower's traffic monitoring feed blew up in midair.

On the screen, the red traffic line at the IP address labeled with Bianca's workstation was climbing straight up.

Every data stream eating up the 5G port pointed to one thing: living-world short-video platforms.

The feed cut again, to the workstation surveillance of Bianca herself.

There she was, sprawled comfortably in an ergonomic chair.

Munching on high-end cherries offered up from the living world, thumbing through short videos like mad.

The screen was nothing but living-world male models with eight-pack abs grinding their hips at the edge of decency.

The volume was cranked to the max.

"Thanks to my top-tier sis for the sky-piercing arrow" rang out again and again through the Warden's hall.

The Temple Warden's mouth twitched with fury.

The tears Bianca had just squeezed out froze in her eyes, her whole face flushing red.

"No, it's not like that!" She waved her hands frantically.

"I was surveying the aesthetic trends in the living world!"

"It's forward-looking research for our future culture-and-tourism ventures!"

Albert planted himself in front of Bianca, blocking her from everyone's view.

He whipped his head around and glared at me.

"Tamara Pruitt! Have you lost your mind?"

"Monitoring a colleague's equipment on the back end without permission, that's a serious violation of the rules!"

"Delete that video right now!"

"Or I'll suspend you today!"

I watched Albert hopping mad, and just tore off the jade access token at my chest, the one engraved with "Chief Shrine-Keeper."

I slapped it down on the Temple Warden's altar table with a crack.

"No need to suspend me. You don't have that authority anyway."

"Overtime pay unpaid, annual leave untaken."

"As of today, I'm filing for indefinite leave."

With that, I didn't spare another glance for anyone in the hall, turned, and strode out the door.

2: 2

I'd barely cleared the hall when Albert's voice came ripping after me, furious.

"Tamara Pruitt, don't you dare play hard to get with me."

"You think the network falls apart the second you're gone?"

"This little threat routine of yours? Watch me not care."

He raised his voice to the room.

"Warden, I move that Bianca take over all of Tamara's access, effective immediately."

"Bianca's a top-school grad. Young, quick on her feet. Worth a hundred of some rigid, low-level shrine-keeper who can't adapt."

Bianca's voice jumped an octave.

"Thank you, Albie! Thank you, Warden, for believing in me!"

"I promise the second I take over, I'll upgrade the whole office network across the board!"

"Give me three days and dream delivery goes up two hundred percent!"

A thin, scattered round of applause went up in the hall.

I didn't so much as turn my head. I stepped over the threshold, hooked right, and walked into the power room at the far end of the corridor.

In the corner sat an iron cabinet draped in black cloth.

Inside was the yin-yang relay I'd hunted down myself three hundred years ago, out of my own pocket, at Heaven's secondhand market.

Without that relay, the Underworld's junk servers couldn't even carry a 2G signal.

I threw the master switch. Every indicator light died at once.

I brushed the dust off my hands, shouldered my bag, and walked out.

I hadn't gotten three streets past the Warden Temple before the server-crash alarms behind me tore across the sky.

The clouds over the whole Underworld went dark red in an instant.

Bianca had just gotten the access, and the first thing she did was force open full realm-wide streaming bandwidth.

With no relay to split the load, hundreds of high-frequency channels jammed solid in a heartbeat.

The dream-delivery line blew on the spot.

Up in the living world, it was the Ghost Festival.

Hundreds of millions of the living were burning paper money and offerings like mad.

All of it was supposed to route through the 5G channel, convert straight into Underworld assets, and get distributed to the ghosts.

Now, with the port clogged, every offering turned into stranded data.

Outside the Ghost Gate, the burned villas, sports cars, and gold ingots piled up into a mountain, jamming the gates shut.

The ghosts inside couldn't get out. The offerings outside couldn't get in.

Down by the River of Forgetting, tens of thousands of ghost-soldiers massed at the head of the Bridge of Oblivion.

They gripped rusted spears, banged on their shields, and craned their necks to shout.

"Pay us! Pay us!"

"Where's our Ghost Festival bonus?"

"Get the paper money out today or we walk!"

The Underworld had descended into total chaos.

My phone started buzzing nonstop.

Albert had dropped ten voice messages in the work group, every one of them tagging me.

I opened one. Albert's voice came howling out.

"Tamara Pruitt! What exactly did you tamper with?"

"I order you to get back here and fix it. Now. This second."

"If this holds up something big, you'll be sorry!"

I opened our chat.

I sent over a screenshot of my first-class ticket for the vacation cruise to Penumbra Isle.

Then I typed a line underneath it.

"Wasn't I just playing hard to get?"

"I'm on my way to a seafood dinner."

"Take your problems to Bianca. She's the one boosting efficiency two hundred percent."

"You've got this. Rooting for you both."

The moment I sent it, I dropped Albert straight into the block list.

Powered off. Tossed the phone in my bag.

I slid on my sunglasses.

And boarded the luxury liner bound for Penumbra Isle.

3: 3

The sun on Penumbra Isle was just right.

I lay stretched out on a beach chair, sipping iced coconut water while I logged into the Underworld forums on a throwaway account to enjoy the show.

The forums had already blown wide open.

The front page was buried under bold red threads, one on top of the other.

An old ghost with the handle "Broke When Alive, Broke When Dead" had posted, wailing.

"My grandson burned me three Maseratis and ten paper maids, I swear he did!"

"So why did I only get one lump of scorched, rotting newspaper?"

A pile of ghosts piled on underneath.

"You think that's bad?"

"My family burned me a Manhattan penthouse, and the thing landed straight on the head of some overseas mob boss. Now he's crossing the ocean to come hunt me down!"

I scrolled through the comments and found an even more explosive thread below.

It was about Bianca.

Word was the Hall of Judgment was in total chaos, the servers overheating from the overload, about to burst into flames any second.

In the leaked video, Bianca was directing a few ghost-officers, dumping bucket after bucket of River of Forgetting water straight onto the server boards.

A thick column of black smoke shot up.

Three thousand living-world tracking talismans fried in an instant.

And with that, the yin-yang signal crossed wires completely.

The living world went haywire, the trending lists filling up with one supernatural incident after another.

Someone dreamed of his late great-grandmother, dead at eighty, dressed in almost nothing and working a pole in the dream.

The city's richest man was on his deathbed, about to send a dream-message passing the password for his Swiss bank will to his eldest son.

Instead, in the eldest son's dream, the old man spent the whole time pushing hair-growth tonic and wouldn't stop no matter how much the son shouted.

The worst of it hit two ghost families with an old blood feud.

Their dream-delivery systems got merged by mistake.

So in the dream, the living descendants got taunted and slapped in the face by their sworn enemies.

When they woke, both families grabbed knives and went at each other right there in the street. Made the front page of the local news.

The living world's resentment surged sky-high.

And all that resentment came pouring back down the severed network lines, straight into the Warden Temple.

The temple's century-old incense cauldron, kept burning in the mortal world, split apart with a crack.

They say the Temple Warden, standing in the hall, coughed up a huge mouthful of black blood.

I was really getting into the show when the sky overhead suddenly went dark.

Albert came tearing out of a rift in the air with a squad of ghost-officers and landed right in front of me.

"Tamara, are you done throwing your tantrum?"

"The whole Underworld is in chaos right now because you couldn't control your temper."

"Come back with me and fix the network."

"Just kneel and apologize to the Temple Warden, and I promise everything before this gets wiped clean."

I spat out a grape seed and tugged my sunglasses down my nose.

"Albert, did your brain get left soaking in River of Forgetting water?"

"Your precious Bibi already formatted my access token."

"I don't even have an ordinary admin account anymore. How exactly am I supposed to fix anything?"

Bianca poked her head out from behind Albert.

She was crying prettily, tears streaming, and jabbed a finger at my face.

"Albie, don't believe a word she says!"

"She must have planted a malicious virus during the handover, on purpose!"

"Otherwise why would everything crash the second I took over?"

Albert's eyes went hard.

"Tamara! You're gambling with the safety of all Three Realms!"

"You'd better get back there and fix that network right now!"

"Otherwise I'll go straight to the Hall of Judgment and charge you with high treason!"

4: 4

I brushed the sand off my hands and stood.

I pulled out my phone and brought up the electronic contract we'd signed at the handover.

"Read it carefully. Black and white."

I shoved the screen straight into Albert's face.

"First line of the handover checklist. Bianca Whitfield voluntarily waived all my post-handover maintenance duties."

"And she signed a full liability waiver."

"Complete with a thumbprint. The whole thing's on record, right here."

"You two lost your minds, broke the machine yourselves, and now you come running to me to fix it?"

Albert stared at the bloody thumbprint on the screen, his eyes darting everywhere.

But he stiffened his neck and dug in anyway.

"So what if she signed it!"

"You're the Underworld's top engineer. You knew the risks, so why did you let a rookie run wild?"

"She doesn't know any better. Are you telling me you don't either?"

Bianca pulled a soul-breaking array disc from her robes, black vapor leaking off it.

"All we have to do is draw the array core out of your body and pour it in. The system will repair itself automatically!"

"Albie, we can't let her get away. For the greater good, she's the only one we can sacrifice!"

Albert saw the disc, and he didn't stop her.

He lunged forward instead and clamped down hard on my wrist.

"Tamara, I know you feel wronged."

"But the safety of the whole Warden Temple hangs on one choice from you. I'm afraid we have to put you through this."

"Don't worry. Once we're past this crisis, I'll talk the Temple Warden into promoting you. I swear it."

Looking at that face of his, I nearly threw up.

Bianca activated the disc.

It roared to life with a fierce pull, dragging straight at my meridians.

They meant to drain me dry to plug the catastrophic hole Bianca had torn open.

I stood inside the array without a flicker of resistance and let it sweep my aura away.

Bianca took that aura and jacked it straight into the Underworld system's main network.

"Repair complete!"

"Albie, I did it!"

Bianca burst out laughing, smug as anything.

But the smile lasted all of two seconds.

From the direction of the Underworld's main network, a blinding blood-red light erupted.

Then the top-level alarm screamed out across all three realms.

Even the ground on Penumbra Isle began to shake violently.

Albert's eyes went wide with terror.

He stared at the receiver in his hand, which was now spitting smoke.

"What's happening? Why is this happening?"

The disc hadn't repaired the system at all. The false aura had severed every safety lock on the main network.

Junk data flooded through like a hail of arrows and punched clean through the last firewall of the eighteen levels of hell.

"You... what did you do!"

Albert staggered back three steps, his voice shaking apart.

I wrenched hard and tore my wrist free of him.

Then I opened the fist I'd kept clenched the whole time.

In my palm lay a small control chip, glowing a quiet blue.

This was the true core of the entire Underworld network.

I watched the terror on Albert's and Bianca's faces, and pressed down with my fingers.

"Crack!"