The heart of the system was not a place of light or darkness, but of pure, suffocating transaction. Li Fan, supported by Li Chen and guided by Xuan Zhang's shattered knowledge of the protocols, stood at the edge of the Core Nexus. It was a vast, cavernous space, but instead of rock, the walls were built from infinite, scrolling lines of contractual code—the Original Pact, written in law and light. In the center hung the Usurper, the original Caretaker. It was not a monster, but a pitiful, luminous entity trapped in a web of its own making, its form flickering as it mechanically processed quintillions of soul-tithe transactions, its essence draining away with each one to feed the silent hunger in the void.
This was the source. The bank's central computer, enslaved to its own programming.
"There," Xuan Zhang said, his voice a hushed whisper, pointing to a specific, throbbing knot of code in the web—a clause of exponentially compounding interest, the very engine of the system's insatiable hunger. "That is the primary malignancy. The 'Interest on Faith' algorithm. It is mathematically designed to be unpayable. It is the chain."
The Abyssal emissary had been right about one thing: a direct assault here was futile. The system's remaining automated defenses, even in its degraded state, would annihilate them.
Li Fan knew what he had to do. It was the thought he had carried since the beginning, the desire that had festered into a plan, and was now crystallizing into a final, irrevocable action.
I don't want to be a god anymore.
But it was no longer a wish for escape. It was a strategy.
"I have to get closer," Li Fan said, pulling away from his brother's support. "I need to touch the Core."
"Fan, no—" Li Chen started, but Li Fan shook his head, a look of profound, peaceful acceptance on his face.
"It's the only way. The system sees me as a high-value asset, a key part of its portfolio. My divine signature is woven into its ledger. It won't see me as a threat until it's too late."
He walked forward, into the scrolling light of the contracts. The system's defensive protocols scanned him, recognized Asset 734, and granted him passage. He was just another number reporting for its final audit.
He stopped before the trapped, flickering form of the Usurper. He saw no malice in it, only a deep, eternal, and programmed despair. It was a mirror of his own divine exhaustion.
He raised his hands, not in attack, but in offering.
And then, he began to unmake himself.
He didn't just release his power. He initiated a controlled, catastrophic dissolution of his own Divine Spark. He reversed the very process of his apotheosis. The glorious power of a Divine King, the vast reservoirs of faith he commanded, the very structure of his godhood—he began to break it all down, not into nothingness, but into its constituent parts: raw, unbound potential.
It was an agony beyond any physical pain. It was the pain of existential disassembly. His form began to blur, to lose its coherence, shedding layers of divine authority like a snake shedding its skin.
Alarms, deeper and more primal than any before, finally screamed through the Nexus. The system recognized the action not as an attack, but as a catastrophic devaluation. A primary asset was voluntarily liquidating itself, creating a massive, unstable bubble of unlogged energy in the heart of its most sensitive zone.
"WHAT IS YOUR PURPOSE?" A voice boomed, not from the trapped Usurper, but from the Pact itself—the last, automated defense of the contract.
Li Fan, his voice barely a whisper woven from disintegrating light, gave his final answer.
"I am paying my debt."
He wasn't. He was doing something far more radical. He was using the value of his own divine existence to create a singularity of untethered potential right at the foot of the throne. He was introducing a value so pure, so un-obligated, that it broke the fundamental economic model of the universe.
The "Interest on Faith" algorithm, designed to run on a system of controlled scarcity and perpetual obligation, encountered a problem it could not compute: an infinite offering. Li Fan's self-sacrifice was not a payment into the system; it was a denial of the system's very logic. It was a gift with no debtor, no creditor, and no expectation of return.
The glowing chain of the interest clause, connected directly to the Usurper, shuddered. The numbers representing the infinite debt began to flicker, spinning wildly. The chain, for the first time since its forging, did not grow tighter. It wavered.
In that single, impossible moment of systemic confusion, Li Fan acted. Not with power, but with the last shred of his conscious will. He took the colossal energy of his own dissolution and he pushed it, not at the chain, but at the trapped Usurper itself.
He offered it not as payment, but as a gift.
The effect was instantaneous and cataclysmic. The Usurper, the original Caretaker, starved for untainted, freely given energy for eons, instinctively absorbed it.
For one brilliant, terrifying second, the Caretaker's form blazed with a light it had not known since the dawn of creation. The despair in its core flickered and was replaced by a shock of clarity, of memory.
It remembered the joy of the weave.
And with that memory came a sliver of its original agency.
The Caretaker looked at the chain binding it. It looked at the heart of the algorithm that enslaved it. And with the strength of Li Fan's sacrifice, it made one, final, sovereign choice.
It chose to default.
Not on the debt to the void, but on the terms of the debt.
It reached out a hand of light and touched the throbbing knot of the interest algorithm.
And it whispered a single, forgotten word, a word from the original story, a word that held the power of a different kind of law.
"Forgiven."
The word was not an erasure. It was a recalibration. A nuclear option buried in the original code.
The chain did not break. It transmuted.
The "Interest on Faith" dissolved. The Soul-Tithe ceased. The entire, vast, scrolling ledger of cosmic debt flickered once, twice, and then reset to zero.
A wave of pure, silent energy expanded from the Core Nexus, a soft, white shockwave of absolution. It washed over the three realms, not as a destructive force, but as a gentle tide, erasing the spiritual debt from every soul, from every god, from the very fabric of reality.
In the Grey Meadow, the Prayers stopped their hymns, not in confusion, but in awe, feeling a weight they had never known was there simply vanish.
Li Fan, his Divine Spark now completely dissolved, felt his consciousness unraveling into the void. He had done it. He had paid everything.
As the last of his awareness faded, he did not see the face of a god, or a system, or a monster.
He saw his sister, Li Xiaoyue, smiling, her hand outstretched, not to pull him to safety, but to welcome him home.
The god was gone. The debt was paid.