The numbers didn't help.
Zephyr ran them anyway — the way a drowning man kicks, not because it will save him but because the alternative is stillness, and stillness is the thing that actually kills.
Rank 9 requirements: 100,000,000 FP. 5,000,000 believers.
Current FP generation: ~21,600/day (2.16M believers × avg 10 FP/day at Devout median). Annual: ~7,776,000.
Current FP reserves: ~14,200,000 (after Sovereign Lake creature maintenance, Morreth garrison blessing support, and baseline infrastructure costs).
Time to 100,000,000 FP at current rate: approximately 11 years of net-positive accumulation, assuming zero major expenditure, zero military crisis, zero rank-up vulnerability from external competitors.
Believers needed: 5,000,000. Current: 2,160,000. Required growth: ~2,840,000. At current organic growth rate (~3% per year adjusted for territory expansion): approximately 28 years.
The Arbiter had been accumulating at this pace for twenty-two hundred years.
