Silence returned to the Core Room.
Well, not silence. The air was humming with power. My mana bar had stopped draining. In fact, it was refilling simply by absorbing the ambient waste I had just dumped.
Mana Reserves: 100% (Overcharged).
Seraphina was sitting on the floor, staring at me. Her mouth was slightly open.
"You..." she whispered. "You crashed the economy."
"I adjusted the inflation rate," I said, feeling better than I had in days. My crystal surface gleamed with a healthy, deep obsidian luster.
"Max," Seraphina said, standing up and brushing dust off her armor. She looked angry, but there was something else in her eyes. Respect? Or maybe just fear. "Do you realize what you just did? You didn't just stop Vane. You made gold worthless in this region. A loaf of bread is going to cost a wheelbarrow of coins tomorrow because everyone has infinite magic."
"Short-term pain for long-term gain," I said. "Lilith, status report."
Lilith stepped forward. She had put on a hard hat she found somewhere. "Siege lifted. Operations are secure. However, we have a new problem."
"What?"
"You broke the sky," she said, pointing up.
I looked at my external sensors. The blue pillar of light had faded, but the sky above the dungeon was... static. It looked like a TV screen losing signal. Pixels of reality were flickering in and out.
System Alert:
Critical Error.
Local Reality Stability at 15%.
Administrator Intervention Required.
"Oops," I said.
"You created a dead zone," Seraphina said, her voice grave. "The System can't calculate the math here anymore. You’ve created a blind spot in God’s eye."
She walked up to me, her hand resting on her sword hilt.
"The Church won't come back with soldiers next time, Max," she said softly. "They’ll petition the Gods for a System Reboot. They’ll try to delete this entire hex grid."
"Let them try," I said. "I have a Manager, a Paladin, and a skeleton janitor. We’re a lean, mean, disrupting machine."
I turned my attention to the static sky.
"Besides," I added, "if the System is broken, that means the rules don't apply anymore. And if the rules don't apply..."
I looked at my debt counter. It was flickering, trying to reconnect to the central server.
Debt: Connection Lost.
I grinned.
"We’re tax-exempt."
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.