The quiet after the Goa affair was a strange one. I had brought a boy home. I had balanced a ledger. And yet, a dissonance hummed in my bones. I had acted the shepherd, but my tools were a hired wolf and a poisoned apple. It felt... inelegant.
That night, while the house dreamed, I returned to the Fragment Hall. Not to the weapons bazaars or mercenary pits. I felt a pull to the quieter sectors, the ones labeled Ephemera & Eschatology. The shops for souls.
It was a different kind of market. Less shouting, more... humming. The stalls glowed with soft light. I passed the Symphony of the Absolute, offering hymns that could calm a riot. I saw the Forge of Dogma, selling pre-packaged miracles ("Guaranteed rainfall manifestation! 90% efficacy!").
The prices were in Karmic Credits, Devotional Amps, Sacred Syllables.
And they were cheap.
I paused by a listing for a "Blessing of Bountiful Harvest (Tier-3)." The energy output was massive. The price? A paltry 50 Resonant Chants. I checked the conversion. It was a fraction of what a simple Tier-2 plasma rifle cost in Sovereign Credits.
The reason hit me like a physical law. I pulled up the System's cultural database, cross-referencing.
Of course.
The high-tech civilizations—the ones trading singularity cores and asteroid busters—they were post-scarcity, post-faith. Materialist. Atheistic to their core. To them, a "prayer" was a neurological glitch, a waste of processing power. They'd sell their grand theological relics for peanuts because to them, it was decorative junk. Useless.
But the relics weren't useless. They just required fuel their sellers no longer possessed: real, collective belief.
My mind, always a merchant's, saw the arbitrage opportunity instantly. The undervalued asset. The gap in the cosmic market.
That's when I saw it. Tucked in a back-alley of listings, like a forgotten prayer book.
Asset: Vessel of the Silent Choir (Non-Military Transport)
Origin: Cult of the Unspoken Verse (Extinct)
Propulsion: Devotional-Thrust Conversion. Sublight capable.
Status: Dormant. Engine requires focused theogenic output.
*Price: One (1) Viable Theological Framework (Tier-0/Tier-1 scalable). Sovereign/Credit bids invalid.*
A ship. A starship. Not bought with unthinkable wealth, but with a good idea about god.
I laughed. A soft, incredulous sound in the quiet study. The tech lords in their crystal cities spent fortunes on antimatter. They'd laugh at this petal-shaped folly.
But I... I had Suryananda. I had the raw, chaotic, desperate faith of a crumbling superpower. I had a "Iron Mother" doctrine that was already proving effective at turning hunger into loyalty. It was a theology, however synthetic, that worked.
This wasn't just a trade. It was a revelation.
The high-tech path was closed to me, a Tier-0 upstart. The price tags were galactic. But this... this was a backdoor. A path to power that ran not through metal, but through the human heart. A path the atheistic giants had paved, abandoned, and forgotten.
I opened the bidding interface. Not with credits. I uploaded the Suryananda Protocol. I packaged it all: the psychological profiles, the ritual syntax of the Shakti Puja, the crisis-to-faith conversion rates observed in the USSR, the draft liturgy for the Iron Mother. I presented it not as a scam, but as a Sustainable Devotional Output Model.
The System processed it. I imagined some ancient, indifferent auctioneer—maybe a bored AI—scrutinizing my crude human "religion."
Analysis Complete.
Theogenic Yield: Stable (Low-High Gradient).
Karmic Coherence: Acceptable.
Cultural Contamination Risk: Minimal.
Judgment: Viable Framework. Trade Approved.
There was no fanfare. A line item in my asset ledger simply updated.
*Acquired: Vessel of the Silent Choir. (Location: Geosynchronous Orbit, Sol-3). Status: Dormant. Awaiting Liturgical Ignition.*
I leaned back. The diya's flame guttered.
I hadn't bought a warship. I'd bought a flying church. Its engine needed prayer.
The irony was perfect. To reach the stars, I had to become a better god-maker. The universe's cheapest engine demanded its most expensive fuel: genuine belief. It forced my hand. I could no longer just use faith. I had to cultivate it. Nurture it. Make it real enough to power a vessel between worlds.
I looked at the flickering flame, then up at the ceiling, as if I could see through it to the silent, petal-shaped ship waiting in the void.
The tech giants had their dreadnoughts and plasma cannons. Let them have their sterile, expensive power.
I had a chapel. And I had a billion hearts to fill its choir.
The path forward was clear, and profoundly, divinely absurd. To conquer the heavens, I first had to learn how to truly answer a prayer.