Unsettled Year

In a world ruled by the iron law of "equal exchange" in the top ten colleges, all knowledge has a price - until a low-level recordkeeper survived the recycling, and the system popped up an unprecedented prompt: the settlement of equal exchange failed, and the debt continued to expand. His account is not in debt, it is empty. There is no price to gain knowledge. Every time the system tries to force settlement, it transfers the cost of his survival to the nearest small world, the law maintenance area, and even the bedrock of the main world itself. The Law of Karma cannot trace him back to his origins, the Scroll of Destiny leaves him blank, and the Denial Academy attempts to erase him from the record of existence - all dismissed by an immunity clause older than the Academy. For this reason, the Academy of Contracts and Equivalence engraved the first irrevocable amendment on the copper plate log in more than 20,000 years, and the liquidation core updated the highest algorithm on its own: exempt objects will not participate in automatic settlement. Lin Entropy himself had only one response to this - he picked up the child he picked up from the ruins, carried the girl who survived the drained world on his back, and continued walking forward with a handwritten copy of the original terms. This is not a story about heroes overturning the system. This is the story of a man who discovered that he had never agreed to the terms of the trade and refused to continue closing his position for the system. Equivalent exchange is not a law of the universe, it is just a proposal that was signed and then destroyed a long time ago. The person who signed it repented, and the price of that remorse was buried in the body of an unknown recordkeeper more than 20,000 years later, and continues to accrue interest.