The number crossed the threshold.
Silent Choir Reserves: 1.02%.
A shiver went through the ship's ancient bones—not a mechanical sound, but a harmonic shift in the vacuum around it. It could move now. Not far. Not fast. But it was no longer a floating chapel. It was a vessel.
I felt it, a new thrum in the back of my skull. Capital.
I left the sleeping house and returned to the Fragment Hall. Not to gawk. To shop.
I bypassed the gleaming weapons bazaars and slave pens. Too expensive. Too obvious. I went to the dusty back-alleys of the market, the stalls labeled "Metaphysical Relics & Psionic Infrastructure." The junk shops of the cosmos.
And there it was.
*Listing #7741-G: Tier-2 Theogenic Resonance Amplifier (Damaged/Obsolete).*
*Description: Focuses/amplifies ambient devotional energy within 1 planetary radius. Yield increase: 300-500%.*
Status: Non-functional. Primary ethical governor module missing. Core lattice unstable. Sold as-is.
Starting Bid: 50 Sovereign Credits.
I almost laughed. Fifty credits. For a device that could triple my prayer harvest. It was cheaper than a good pressure cooker.
The reason was obvious. A note in the log: *"Item deemed hazardous waste by Forge-System K-7. Ethical governor removed for study; not replaceable. Amplification without moral filtration induces psychic feedback loops, potential reality shearing. Useless."*
Useless. To them.
To a civilization that had transcended messy faith, a device that amplified raw, unfiltered prayer was a radiation hazard. A psychic dirty bomb.
To me, sitting on a planet boiling with seven billion souls screaming their hopes and hatreds into the void? It was a geiger counter for god-energy. And I was standing in the richest uranium mine in the spiritual galaxy.
I placed a bid. 55 Credits.
A ripple went through the few listless entities browsing the junk aisle. I felt a query, thick with condescension.
*From [Entity: Logistical Mind-7]: "Primitive host. The device is broken. It amplifies chaos, not usable power. You waste your limited currency."*
I sent back a pulse of pure, neutral data: the Silent Choir's energy signature, a snapshot of Earth's roiling, multi-spectrum devotional output. No words. Just proof.
Reply: "Ah. You swim in the sewer and seek a larger pump. A… niche strategy. Proceed." The contempt was palpable. I was a rat buying a bigger shovel.
No one else bid.
Auction Closed. Asset transferred.
The device materialized in a sealed MAKA warehouse in Gujarat. I viewed it through a camera. It wasn't beautiful. A twisted lattice of black crystal and burnt-out silver, throbbing with a malevolent, carmine light. It looked like a cancerous lung, still breathing.
I didn't try to fix it. I didn't want it fixed.
Using the Silent Choir's new whisper of thrust, I nudged the ship. It extended a grasping field of solidified resonance, enveloped the cancerous amplifier, and drew it into a close, geostationary orbit. A parasitic twin.
Then I initiated the integration. The Silent Choir, powered by prayer, fed a trickle of that same energy into the broken lattice.
The amplifier awoke.
It didn't purr. It gulped.
Like a starving mouth, it latched onto the planet's psychic static. The diffuse cloud of a million Ave Marias, a billion Om Namah Shivayas, the furious whispers from a thousand jihadist caves, the desperate chants in a Lagos prosperity church—all of it was suddenly pulled into a tighter, fiercer stream.
Reserves: 1.4%... 1.9%... 2.3%...
The numbers climbed. The crimson logs in the ship's readout—the hatred, the zealotry—glowed brighter, hotter. The amplifier had no ethical governor. It amplified everything equally. The love. The fear. The rage.
My edge wasn't technology. It was positioning.
I was the only merchant in the Fragment Hall sitting directly on top of the source. The high-tier traders with their antimatter reactors and zero-point cells… they'd paved over their own spiritual swamps millennia ago. They saw this device as broken. I saw it as the perfect key to a lock only I possessed.
A new plan crystallized. Project: GARDEN.
I wouldn't just hoard the energy. I would use it. I programmed the amplifier-ship combo to do one thing: take the amplified, chaotic, multi-faith prayer-energy and bleed it back out as a constant, low-level metaphysical shroud around Earth.
To a passing cosmic scan, Earth wouldn't look like a quiet, ripe Tier-0 fruit.
It would look like a psychic riot. A spiritual superfund site. A planet that shouted so loudly in the language of souls that any would-be harvester would think twice. The energy signature would be intense, chaotic, and—critically—indigestible without specialized, unpleasant filtering.
I was turning my planet's greatest vulnerability—its turbulent, believing heart—into a defensive shield. Using the galaxy's junk to weaponize our prayers.
The reserve counter settled at 2.7%. The ship, with its parasitic twin, hung in the silence, humming a discordant hymn built from the hopes and hells of all mankind.
I closed the interface. The dawn was breaking over Pune. Maa would be up soon to make chai.
I had just bought a piece of galactic trash for pennies and used it to turn my homeworld into a fortress of noise.
The merchant's path was clear: never compete on their terms. Find the resource they ignore, the tool they discarded, and build your kingdom in the blind spot.
And right now, the most powerful, overlooked resource in the cosmos was the sound of a human being, praying in the dark.