The Sylvan tea's revelation – that Elias was being tracked through lingering karmic resonance – sent a fresh wave of paranoia through him. His every step, every interaction, left a spectral trace for an unseen entity capable of complete erasure. He had to assume this was the same force that had purged the Naga informant.
He buried himself back in the Bureau's records, now with an even more desperate urgency. He wasn't just looking for his own manipulations anymore, or even the Naga's elegant distortions. He was looking for a third signature, a truly hidden hand.
Days blurred into nights, fueled by potent karmic tea and a grim determination. Then, he found it. An anomaly that defied both his and the Naga's known patterns. It was the tribulation record of a Rank 5 cultivator, a rising star in the Grand Council's auxiliary forces. Her recent promotion had been widely celebrated, yet her Ledger entry showed a subtle, almost imperceptible edit: a failed tribulation had been hidden, meticulously altered to appear as a flawless success. This wasn't a re-weighting of karma; it was a fabrication of events, a rewriting of personal history.
Elias analyzed the modification. The style was unlike anything he'd seen. It lacked the raw force of the erasure entity, and it certainly wasn't the deceptive elegance of the Naga. This edit was too precise, too seamless, too perfectly integrated into the Ledger's core narrative. It left no discernible digital residue, no flickering temporal blip. It was as if the failure had simply never happened.
A chilling theory began to form in Elias's mind. The erasure entity, the one capable of wiping a person from the Ledger, might not be erasing failures. They might be protecting them. The meticulous nature of this specific edit, the hidden failure that ensured a promotion, pointed to a powerful, internal force. Elias's suspicions turned towards the very guardians of the Ledger.
His theory solidified: the Sutra Corps was protecting certain cultivators. Not just individuals they favored, but perhaps those crucial to their own agendas, those they needed to ascend regardless of their true karmic standing. It hinted at a deep, systemic corruption, not of greed, but of control, manipulating the very hierarchy of cultivation.
This was a third player in the game, an entity with ultimate access, capable of altering the past itself. And if they were protecting cultivators within the Sutra Corps, then his impending "interview" was even more perilous than he had imagined. He was walking into the lion's den, and the lions were far more skilled at deception than he had ever conceived.