Silence reclaimed the throne room. The oppressive presence of the Oculus was gone, but its judgment lingered, a perpetual, invisible weight on Li Fan's Divine Spark. He had survived the audit, not by defiance, but by proposing a more insidious form of compliance. The system had accepted, for now, his role as a "self-optimizing asset." It was a victory that tasted of ashes and iron.
He had bought himself not freedom, but leverage.
His first act was not one of power, but of scrutiny. He sat upon the Starry Throne, and for the first time, did not see a symbol of his authority, but a complex control panel for a soul-farm. His divine consciousness, now re-tuned with a painful, hyper-awareness, began to map the "Tithe-Transfer Protocol" in earnest. He no longer saw just the shimmering threads of potential being siphoned away; he saw the ledger.
It was a vast, metaphysical spreadsheet etched into the fabric of his reality. Every ounce of faith, every spark of potential from his Prayers, was logged, categorized, and assigned a value. A portion was marked for his own sustenance and power—his "operating capital." The rest, the "Soul-Tithe," was flagged for systemic withdrawal. The "Interest on Faith" was the elegant, cruel name for this mandatory, draining transaction.
His mind, the mind of a former investigator, began to dissect the ledger's logic. He looked for patterns, loopholes, and delays. He focused on the moment of transfer, the instant the Tithe was drawn from the collective consciousness of his followers and into the void. It was not a single pipe, but a network of microscopic conduits, each connected to an individual soul.
And he found his first crack.
The system was perfectly efficient at harvesting, but its accounting had a built-in, necessary delay—a "settlement period." It took a nanosecond for the harvested potential to be verified, logged, and finally transferred out of his local domain. It was the divine equivalent of the brief moment between a credit card swipe and the money actually leaving the account.
In that nanosecond, the potential was still within his grasp.
A plan, terrifying and brilliant, began to form. He could not stop the Tithe. But could he… intercept it? Not all of it, that would trigger an immediate alarm. But a fraction of a fraction? A sum so small it would be lost in the rounding errors of a cosmic ledger?
He had to try. It was the first, fumbling reach for a lockpick.
He chose a single, newly awakened Prayer, the one who had first resonated with the "shepherd" parable. As the soul engaged in a moment of quiet wonder, generating a tiny, fresh spark of potential, Li Fan watched the Tithe mechanism activate. The shimmering silver thread began to form, ready to be siphoned.
With a precision that made his Divine Spark ache, Li Fan acted. He did not attack the conduit. Instead, he mirrored it. He created a phantom data stream, an echo of the Tithe that perfectly matched its metaphysical signature. As the real Tithe was drawn out, his mirroring construct laid over it like a stencil, and in that fleeting settlement period, he diverted an infinitesimal sliver of the potential—less than a quantum—away from the void and into a hidden, shielded reservoir he had forged deep within the core of his own Divine Spark.
It was not a storage of power. It was a storage of unlogged possibility.
The system's ledger completed its cycle. The transaction was marked as complete. The balance was settled. There was no discrepancy. The missing sliver was too small to register, written off as natural cosmic background decay.
Li Fan held his breath, waiting for the Oculus to reappear, for the cold voice to demand an explanation for the statistical anomaly.
Nothing happened.
He had done it. He had stolen from the universe's central bank and gotten away with it.
The victory was microscopic, but its implications were universe-shattering. He could grow a resource that the system could not account for. A secret fund of power, built from the very substance it sought to control.
But the cost was immediate and visceral. The act of mirroring the Tithe protocol was an immense cognitive strain. It felt like trying to solve a complex equation while simultaneously defusing a bomb, using only a fraction of his mind, all while maintaining a perfect facade of normalcy. He could not do this on a large scale. Not yet.
This was not a path to rapid, explosive power. It was a grind. A slow, painstaking process of siphoning crumbs from a god's table, one soul at a time. It was the work of epochs.
And as he contemplated this monumental task, a new, foreign data packet arrived in his divine perception. It was not from the system. It was sharp, encrypted, and bore the faint, cold resonance of the Abyss. It contained no words, only a single, complex image: a lock, and a key that was beginning to turn.
The message was clear. His distraction had worked too well. The ancient presence in the Abyss wasn't just looking at him. It was starting to see him as a potential ally. A fellow lockpick.
Li Fan looked inward at his hidden reservoir, a single droplet of stolen potential, and then out towards the churning darkness of the Abyss. He was now a thief, an accountant, and a potential partner to a primordial horror. The "self-optimizing asset" had just taken its first step into a much larger, and far more dangerous, world.