Chapter 3

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!"