The coordinate shifted in Li Fan's mind, a subtle but profound realignment. It was no longer a single point of oppressive weight—the "First Debt." It was now a binary star system, the Debt and its shadowy twin, the "First Creditor." To find one, they had to find the other. The story was not a monologue; it was a conversation that had been brutally edited, one voice silenced.
"The system's ledger," Xuan Zhang said, his voice still raw but his mind sharpening with a new, rebellious purpose. "It is predicated on a single, unshakeable axiom: The Creditor is absolute. The Debtor is eternally obligated. But if the Creditor itself owes a debt…" He trailed off, the implication hanging in the softly lit air of the Grey Meadow. "The entire narrative hierarchy collapses. It's an infinite regress of obligation. A logical black hole."
"Then we find the hole," Li Chen stated, his impatience a grounding force. "How? We can't just go ask the monster who runs the bank for its credit report."
Li Fan, still leaning on his brother for support, focused on the new coordinate. He poured the dregs of his awareness into it, not to travel, but to listen. To hear the echo of the silenced voice in the story.
The ghostly images in the Meadow shifted again. The terrified farmer, the cold moneylender, the digital ticker—they all flickered and distorted. But now, beneath them, a new layer of imagery surfaced, faint and fragile as ancient parchment.
They saw a vast, formless entity of pure, creative potential—a Weaver, fingers dancing across the nascent threads of reality, humming a song of pure existence. There was no debt. There was only the joy of the weave.
Then, a shadow. A single, flawed thread, a mistake of over-ambition, a reality that began to fray at the edges. The Weaver's song faltered. The act of creation had a cost—a drain on its own essence. To stabilize the fraying thread, to prevent a catastrophic unraveling, the Weaver had to… borrow. It had to draw strength from a source outside itself.
"It didn't start as a usurper," Li Fan whispered, the truth unfolding like a tragic poem. "It started as a caretaker making a desperate choice. The 'First Debt' wasn't owed to it. It was a debt it incurred."
The image clarified. The Weaver, now visibly diminished, reached out into the cold void beyond the Tapestry. And it found something. Something ancient, patient, and hungry. It made a pact. It borrowed a measure of primordial power to mend its mistake.
The "First Creditor" was not a banker. It was a loan shark from the void before creation.
The terms of that first, desperate loan were the seeds of the "Interest on Faith." The system, the Usurper, was not the original owner. It was a middleman, a debtor itself, forced to extract a brutal toll from its own creation to pay back its own, even more terrifying, creditor.
The revelation was a vortex, sucking the air from the Meadow. The enemy they were fighting was not the top of the food chain. It was a puppet, squeezing the souls in its grasp to feed the monstrous entity that held its leash.
"The system… it's just a… a collection agency?" Li Chen breathed, the absurd horror of it dawning on him.
"A profoundly efficient one," Xuan Zhang confirmed, his face ashen. "Its entire existence is predicated on servicing a debt it can never hope to repay. It expands, it harvests, it consumes, not for its own glory, but out of existential terror. It is the perfect slave, and it has made slaves of all of us to pay its master."
The shimmering shard of the "First Debt" in the center of the Meadow now seemed different. It wasn't just a tool of oppression. It was a chain, and the system was also bound by it.
Li Fan understood now. Shattering the system wouldn't bring freedom. It would just default on the loan. And the "First Creditor"—the entity from the void—would come to collect its due, directly. The Abyss, he realized with chilling certainty, was not the creditor. It was merely another symptom, another debtor perhaps, or a rival collection agency. The true enemy was the silent, patient hunger in the pre-creation void.
To break the cycle, they couldn't just destroy the ledger. They had to find a way to pay the original, void-shattering debt. Or nullify it.
The coordinate in his mind burned, no longer pointing to a shard, but to a concept far more dangerous: the "Original Pact."
The way forward was clear, and it led into a darkness deeper than any Abyss. They had to find the terms of the Usurper's own damnation. And to do that, they would have to walk into the heart of the failing system and ask the slave-king for the name of its master.