The silence in the wake of the short-sellers' defeat was more ominous than the conflict itself. The celestial markets stabilized, but the political atmosphere grew thick with a cold, resentful tension. Victory on a spreadsheet was not victory in the hearts of the old guard. They had not been defeated by a superior force, but by a superior idea, and that was an insult their ancient pride could not abide.
The attack, when it came, was not financial. It was legalistic, precise, and aimed at the very heart of my sister's authority.
A formal petition, sealed with the sigils of a coalition of stellar and agricultural deities, was presented before the diminished Celestial Accord. Its argument was cunningly simple: the New Goddess of Samsara had overstepped.
"The domain of Samsara is the cycle of life, death, and rebirth," the lead petitioner, an ancient Stellar Deity whose light had cooled to a dull amber, intoned. "It does not grant authority to manipulate fundamental matter, to re-weave causality on a stellar scale, or to create… novel financial instruments."
He spat the last words as if they were poison.
"Her actions in Star System K-73, while… productive," he conceded with palpable distaste, "were an unlawful expansion of her purview. She operated as a Creator Goddess, a role reserved for the Supreme Deity alone. This sets a dangerous precedent. If every god can redefine their own domain, the very foundation of our order crumbles."
The argument was brilliant in its toxicity. It was not an attack on her success, but on its legality. It painted her not as a savior, but as a usurper of my own, the True God's, ultimate authority.
In her pavilion, my sister received the formal writ. The charge felt like a cage crafted from the very laws that held the universe together. Mo Heng stood beside her, analyzing the petition.
"Their logic is technically sound, from a certain archaic perspective," he stated. "Your restructuring of K-73 did involve acts of creation that fall outside the strictest interpretation of the Samsara Charter."
"So saving a star system is a crime if you use the wrong divine department to do it?" she asked, her voice laced with a frustration that was new to her.
"In the eyes of those who fear change," Mo Heng replied, "the crime is not the act, but the challenge to the established hierarchy."
This was a battle I could not directly intervene in. To overrule the petition myself would be to confirm their fears, to show that her authority existed only by my fiat, undermining the very independence she was trying to build.
The solution came not from me, nor fully from her, but from the system we had all built.
My brother, in his strategic chamber, saw the petition not as a legal threat, but as a strategic one. He could not fight it with data, but he could provide the framework for its defeat. He accessed the deepest archives of the Bureau, pulling records not of laws, but of precedents—moments of cosmic crisis where the rigid boundaries of divine offices had been necessarily blurred for the sake of survival.
He sent this curated history to Mo Heng, not as a defense, but as a question.
When my sister stood before the Celestial Accord to answer the charges, she did not plead. She did not justify. She reframed.
"The petitioners are correct," she began, her voice clear and carrying, silencing the murmuring assembly. "The domain of Samsara, as originally defined, is the cycle. But what is a cycle?"
She gestured, and the vibrant, living tapestry of K-73 bloomed in the center of the hall. "It is not merely a circle of birth and death. It is a constant process of recomposition. The stardust of a dead sun becomes the soil for a new world. The memory of a fallen civilization becomes the myth that guides its successor. I did not 'create' in the absolute sense. I… accelerated the cycle."
She then invoked the precedents my brother had provided: the Time God who had briefly stabilized a collapsing galaxy, the Ocean Deity who had once purified a realm of conceptual poison. "In times of existential threat, the strict boundaries of our offices become a suicide pact. The ultimate duty of any god is to the preservation and flourishing of existence itself. My actions in K-73 were not an expansion of my authority, but a fulfillment of this deeper, primary duty."
She looked directly at the ancient Stellar Deity. "You accuse me of breaking the rules to save a dying system. I ask you: is it better to let it die, perfectly in accordance with the rules?"
The hall was utterly silent. She had not argued law; she had argued principle. She had elevated the debate from a territorial squabble to a philosophical referendum on the purpose of godhood itself.
The petition was dismissed, not by a vote, but by a profound, uncomfortable silence that acknowledged the terrifying truth she had unveiled: the old rules were inadequate for the future they faced.
She had won again. But this victory felt hollow. She had defended her right to save a piece of the universe, but in doing so, she had exposed the rotten timbers holding up the heavens. The real enemy was no longer a group of short-sellers or jealous petitioners.
It was the Principle of the Thing. And that was a battle that had only just begun.