The decision was made not in a flash of courage, but in the cold calculus of a unique and fleeting opportunity. The Order Division's alert was a clarion call, pulling the sentries from their posts. Xuan Zhang was gone. The system's gaze, once a laser, was now a diffuse, worried searchlight sweeping the external darkness. The perfect alignment of chaos and inattention would not last.
Li Fan's consciousness descended into the core of his being, to the delicate, illicit script he had woven into his divine essence. It hummed with quiet efficiency, a parasite on the grander parasite that was the system itself. With a thought that felt both like a prayer and a blasphemy, he began rewriting its fundamental directive.
The leakage rate, set at a mathematically insignificant 0.0000001%, began to climb.
0.001%.
0.01%.
He pushed it further, his Divine Spark trembling with the strain of containing such a brazen violation. The script was no longer a subtle leak; it was a tapped mainline. A shimmering, silver river of potential—the Soul-Tithe meant for the system's coffers—now diverged in a torrent into his hidden reservoir. It was no longer a trickle of droplets, but a continuous, roaring flow.
His reservoir, which had taken cycles to accumulate a pittance, began to swell. It was a visceral sensation, like a star being born inside him. This was not the warm, familiar power of faith. This was raw, untamed possibility, cold and brilliant and terrifying. It was the unactualized future of a million thinking souls, stolen before it could be logged and extinguished.
The feeling was intoxicating. For the first time since his ascension, he felt a power that was truly, wholly his own. Unmonitored. Unburdened by debt. It was freedom distilled into a metaphysical substance.
But freedom, on this scale, had a taste. It was the taste of ozone and static, of a reality straining at its seams. And it had a sound—the silent, screaming strain of his own divine form containing a force it was never meant to hold.
Alarms, silent to all but him, began to blare within his soul. The script was overloading. The perfect, undetectable theft was now a raging, uncontrolled torrent. The "rounding error" was becoming a glaring, gaping hole in reality's ledger. It was only a matter of time before the system's automated audits, even in their degraded state, noticed the catastrophic drop in Tithe yield from Asset Li-Fan-734.
He didn't care. Or rather, he had passed the point of caring. This was the gamble. To seize enough power, quickly enough, to be able to face whatever came next.
He looked outward, with senses now magnified by the stolen potential. He could see the fabric of his divine kingdom not as a god, but as a system administrator. He saw the data streams, the protocols, the very lines of code that defined his existence. And he saw the Abyss.
It was no longer a distant, churning darkness. It was a roiling storm of anti-order, a cancer on reality itself. And it was pushing. Vast, non-Euclidean shapes pressed against the dimensional membranes the Order Division was desperately reinforcing. The "storm" was not a metaphor. It was a real, metaphysical hurricane, and he was siphoning power from the eye of it.
A new message arrived. Not from the system, and not the resonant frequency of the ancient presence. It was a raw, unencrypted scream of data, a shard of a dying god's final moment, cast adrift from the battle at the perimeter. It contained no words, only a pure emotion: a bottomless, ancient hatred for the chains of the system, and a terrifying, gleeful anticipation of their breaking.
The message was a warning and a promise. The storm was not just cover. It was the beginning of the end.
Li Fan turned his attention back inward. His reservoir was nearing capacity, a seething ocean of silver potential within him. It was time.
He began the most dangerous part of his plan. Not just storing the power, but weaving it. He used the stolen potential not as a fuel, but as a thread. He began to stitch a new structure around his Divine Spark, a shield not of defense, but of anonymity. A cloak woven from un-logged existence, designed to make him invisible to the system's accounting. A ghost in the machine, finally given form.
He was halfway through when he felt it.
The Oculus of Equilibrium did not manifest. There was no spatial ripple, no cold voice.
The system's response was far more efficient.
Directly above his throne, a patch of space simply deleted itself. It wasn't a hole; it was a perfect, geometric nothing. And from that nothingness, a single, featureless tendril of pure, white logic extended. It was not an attack. It was a diagnostic tool, an ethereal scalpel coming to excise a corrupted cell.
The system had bypassed all protocol. It had sent not a warden, not a warning, but its own immune response.
The final audit had arrived. And it was not here to ask questions.