The numbers didn't lie, but they felt like a betrayal.
Silent Choir Reserves: 2.0%
I'd started the month at 3.1%. I'd burned through over a third of my painstakingly harvested prayer-wealth in sixty seconds of playing cosmic referee in Mexico City. The "Vargas Correction" had cost 0.7%. The ongoing "Saint Management" – the dream-pulses to Marcus, the subtle nudges to Sister Maria – was a constant, dripping leak.
Sitting in my study, the early Mumbai heat already pressing at the windows, I felt the first cold trickle of a merchant's worst fear: negative cash flow. My divine start-up was running in the red.
The Silent Choir wasn't a ship. It was a start-up. One with insane overheads. My product was "planetary defense." My revenue was faith. And my operational costs? Shepherding unstable saints and pruning heretics.
Maa bustled in with a steel glass of nimbu paani. "Garmi badh rahi hai. Pi lo." The heat is rising. Drink.
I took it. The sweet-sour tang was real, immediate. A solid transaction. Not like the abstract, draining calculus of souls.
"Tension kaunsi?" What's the tension? she asked, reading my face.
"Bas, Maa. Business mein… kapde ki tarah, andar se ghis raha hai." Just, business… it's wearing thin from the inside, like cloth.
She patted my shoulder. "To naya kapda lo. Ya stitching theek karo." Then get new cloth. Or fix the stitching.
Simple. Profound. Annoying.
She left. I stared at the System interface. The stitching was fraying because I was using gold thread to darn socks. I was spending galaxy-grade devotional energy on micro-managing a nun in Portugal and a guard in Chicago. It was wildly inefficient.
I needed to scale. Or outsource.
The solution, when it came, was so blasphemous it felt right.
I didn't need to guide every saint myself. I needed a middle management layer.
I pulled up Suryananda's file. My original prophet. Now the well-paid, terrified CEO of the "Suryananda Foundation for Cultural & Perceptual Strategy." He dealt in narratives. What was a confused, superpowered nun if not a narrative problem?
I drafted a new directive, not for MAKA, but for him.
PROJECT: LILA
Background: Isolated spiritual phenomena are occurring globally (see attached anonymized profiles: "The Protector," "The Pacifier," "The Guardian"). These are not threats. They are divine Leelas – spontaneous plays of the Mother's energy.
Your Task: Develop a theological framework. Create a new branch of your discourse: "The Unseen Arsenal." The idea: In times of global moral decay, the Mother doesn't just send one prophet. She seeds her power directly into the hearts of humble servants across the world – nurses, guards, teachers – turning them into silent instruments of her will.
Goal: Provide a ready-made, benign explanation for any future "Garden-Variety Miracles." Give them a cosmic job description before they start asking questions. Normalize them within the faith.
I attached sanitized dossiers on Master Li, Sister Maria, and Marcus. No names, locations, or powers. Just archetypes: The Unmoving Wall, The Soothing Hymn, The Watchful Map.
I sent it. Let Suryananda, the master of stories, weave a safety net for my accidental miracles. His theology would be the "stitching" Maa talked about.
But that only solved the PR. It didn't solve the energy crisis.
I needed a new revenue stream. A bigger, steadier prayer-farm.
My eyes landed on the map of the USSR, now a patchwork of green Zashchita zones and red crisis points. Anya's last report spoke of "deepening existential despair" and "a vacuum of belief."
Despair. The amber light on my resonance scanner. Not as potent as crimson hatred, but more abundant than gold-plated devotion. And the Soviet people… they weren't praying to gods anymore. They were praying for bread. For coal. For a tomorrow.
What if I gave them a god who specifically dealt in those?
The idea was a dark, guttering flame. I called Anya on the secure line.
"The 'Iron Mother' pamphlets," I said, skipping greetings. "We need Phase Two."
Her voice was tired but sharp. "Phase Two was gradual cultural osmosis. It is working in pockets."
"Too slow. I need a symbol. Tangible. In a place where hope is dead. A place the state has fully abandoned."
There was a long silence. I could hear her thinking, the gears of her KGB-trained mind spinning. "There is a town. Norilsk-2. A closed Arctic mining settlement. The company store has been empty for six weeks. The heating plant is failing. Moscow has written it off. The people are… waiting to freeze."
Perfect. A petri dish of despair.
"Send a Zashchita convoy. Not with our logo. No logos. Just… a symbol on the crates. A simple, stamped icon." I described it: a shield with a single, straight line like a blade or a stalk of wheat through it. The "Iron Mother's Mark."
"And the supplies? They will ask who."
"Tell them the convoy got lost. A bureaucratic error. A gift from no one. Let the symbol be the only message."
The plan was simple. In the heart of an Arctic hell, where God and the State were both absent, I would stage a miracle of logistics. Not a flashy one. A quiet, life-saving one. Food, medicine, diesel. Arriving anonymously, marked only with a sigil.
The people wouldn't pray to the Iron Mother. Not yet. They would whisper about her. They would tell stories of the mysterious shield that fed them when the world forgot. Stories are the seeds of faith. Desperation is the fertilizer.
It was colder than anything I'd ever done. I was using human misery as farm acreage.
But the math was clear. The focused, desperate hope of a few thousand souls on the brink? That could generate a steady, amber stream of energy. A devotional annuity. It would refill my reserves far more efficiently than managing individual saints.
I ended the call. The nimbu paani glass was sweating in my hand.
I had just outsourced saint-management to my prophet and decided to farm faith in a Soviet ghost town.
Maa was right. I got new cloth. I stopped darning socks. I'd started weaving a tapestry from the threads of other people's desperation and divinity.
The cost of a miracle wasn't just energy. It was the quiet death of the line between merchant and messiah. I was no longer just spending faith.
I was farming it.