Smoke didn't drift up in soft curls over Vhal-Dorim. It got pushed out of chimneys like the city was breathing hard and not quite getting enough air.
The industrial district throbbed under a blank sky. Steam bled from side valves. Gears turned outside in steady loops. Rails shook under wagons loaded with ore and chemical waste. Nothing was quiet. Nothing was clean. Nothing stopped.
Until today.
They'd sealed off a whole sector with temporary metal barricades. City guards kept people back. Workers stood in rough lines with assistants in white watching them. You could see the symptoms from across the street: skin cracked and raw, a dry cough that came out with a metallic scrape, hands trembling even when they were still, veins gone dark like ink bleeding under the surface.
It wasn't unusual. Fast industrial growth had a price that came due regularly.
What wasn't regular was who'd taken over.
The Church of the Solar God. No argument. No pushback. When the white robes with the gold sun on the chest came through the gates, the crowd parted without thinking, like it was the natural thing, like they'd been expecting it all along.
Gepetto watched from a distance.
Not with his real body—that was still sitting in the rented workshop across the city, eyes shut, breathing slow. It was the Hunter standing in the crowd, posture straight, face blank, blending in with the people pretending not to stare.
He watched. Logged. Ran the numbers.
A Solar priest stepped into the middle of the sealed area. No showmanship, no dramatic gestures. His voice was firm but not loud. Every move looked practiced rather than performed.
The workers were lined up. One at a time.
Before each healing, the priest laid down a simple condition.
"Do you acknowledge that you ignored established limits?"
The first man, face blotched with dark marks, nodded with effort.
"Do you acknowledge that imprudence leads to corruption of the body?"
A weak murmur.
"Do you acknowledge that only the purifying light restores what has been degraded?"
Silence. Then almost a whisper: "Yes."
Only then did the light come.
It didn't drop from above. It didn't flare. It just spread—warm, golden, dense but contained—moving through the worker's body like it was sweeping something invisible out. The skin started clearing. The dark veins pulled back. The coughing stopped after one last spasm.
The man took a deep breath. First one without pain in a while.
The crowd didn't clap. They watched in quiet reverence. There was relief in it. Gratitude. And that specific kind of attention people give to things they've already decided they can't do without.
Voluntary submission.
It repeated. Organized. Efficient. Methodical. After each healing, assistants came up with clipboards. Names got written down. Addresses. Where they worked. Small solar medallions handed out—temporary. Come back in thirty days for preventive spiritual review. Pamphlets passed around, low-key. Suggested donations. Priority access to spiritual services. Special protection for families who were devoted.
Nothing forced. Everything arranged.
Gepetto didn't need to catch every word to see the machine.
Industry made contamination. Contamination made fear. Fear made dependence. Dependence kept institutions alive. He wasn't questioning the miracle. The energy was real. The healing measurable. What sat wrong wasn't that it worked. It was the shape of it. Gods that carved up territory, that wanted formal confession, that handed out favors with strings, that sorted followers into strict ranks. Not fake. Strong. But limited.
The absolute didn't split into pieces. Didn't compete. Didn't need you to say it out loud.
Under all that ritual gold light, he felt a quiet wrongness. Not a lack of faith. A lack of recognition. This wasn't Unity. This was competition dressed up as divinity, multiplied.
He didn't hate the priest. He didn't hate the workers.
He hated the structure.
Something pulled his attention.
A different mark stitched inside the priest's mantle. Not the usual sun. A variation: an inner circle with three vertical lines through it. Small. Easy to miss. Deliberate.
He searched his memory.
In the game, the Church had branches. Inquisitors, healers, Observers. But that specific mark turned up nothing. He remembered the big events clearly—political crises, institutions rising, international fights. Not minor details. Not new offshoots. Not quiet changes inside the structure.
This was new.
New meant a variable.
A small, tight unease moved through his math. He wasn't inside a perfect copy. He was inside a version that adapted. The difference was subtle. But structural.
The priest raised his hands again. Light washed across another trembling body. The crowd breathed together.
Gepetto stayed still.
The world wasn't just following the script he remembered. It was answering back. And answers made things unpredictable.
The industrial haze faded behind him as the Hunter moved into narrower streets where coal smell gave way to ink and damp paper and machine oil. The buildings got smaller, more patched together. Through open windows, shelves crammed with technical books and quick sketches on loose paper.
The academic sector didn't have big chimneys. It had weak light through dirty glass, tired students bent over cluttered desks, ideas nobody had decided to fund yet.
The contrast was structural, not poetic. The Church worked with ritual and warm light. Here, it was math and trial runs. Priests lined up the faithful. Researchers lined up theories. Both sides ran on dependence. Just different kinds. The industrial district leaned on miracles. Here, they leaned on money.
The Hunter walked into a makeshift lab in the back of an old print shop. Too small for everything stuffed into it. Glass tubes ran along the walls. A homemade ventilation system rattled under strain. In the middle, a metal cylinder hooked to charcoal filters and layers of treated cloth.
The engineer didn't notice him at first. He was adjusting a valve, forehead smeared with soot.
"This won't hold up under industrial loads," he muttered.
Gepetto looked at the cylinder and the setup. The idea was right. The filters pulled toxic particles before they hit the outside air. Scaled up, it would cut the constant exposure workers breathed in. Less contamination. Less need for healing. Less dependence.
He asked only technical things. Seal integrity. Production cost. How long to install per factory.
The engineer answered—hesitant at first, then speeding up. What he didn't have was money. Access to factories willing to test. Someone to carry the first risk.
Gepetto filed a note. Profile one. Viable.
In another building, a medical researcher stood among flasks of neutralizing compounds. Results were mixed but promising. She was working on breaking toxic chemical bonds without needing divine help.
"If we stabilize the formula, recovery could be hours instead of days," she said, already defensive before anyone had challenged her. She'd been turned down by three backers. The argument was always the same: why put money into this when the Church already fixed it?
Exactly.
Profile two. Disruptive.
The third was farther out, in a nearly empty room at the biomedical institute. A young researcher making antidote compounds for common poisonings. Not miracles. Repeatable steps. Measurable outcomes. He talked too fast, expecting to get cut off.
"It's not perfect yet. But it's repeatable. And it doesn't need divine affinity."
Repeatable.
That word. Miracles needed someone to be there. Methods needed scale.
Profile three. Strategic.
The Hunter left the academic sector as the sun dropped behind the factory towers.
Gepetto ran the equation.
He didn't need to beat the Church. Just make it unnecessary more often. Faith organized crowds. Industry rebuilt cities. Knowledge shifted balance. Capital steered flow. Control the flow, and the balance tilts. No speeches. No public fight. No declared stance.
That night, in the workshop across the city, his body opened its eyes slowly.
Papers laid out. Money moved through middlemen. Small stakes bought under quiet names.
A private foundation came together.
No propaganda. No mission statement. Clear rules: it had to work in cities, had to scale industrially, had to lower collective risk, had to share the tech. Hidden clauses: partial exclusivity, first look at results, a cut of patents, priority on production if things got bad.
He wasn't buying geniuses. He was building a skeleton of dependence—a network that grew not from belief but from being useful. Factories put in filters. Labs neutralized toxins. Antidotes got handed out before priests showed up.
The choice wouldn't be ideological. It would be the easy one.
And easy changed behavior faster than doctrine.
One piece still hung open.
The player behind Armand de Veyr.
He had no line into Insir. Nobody on the ground. No channel where information would flow on its own. The paper told him what happened. It didn't tell him why. And why mattered more than what, because a player who could reverse lethal outcomes three times in a row wasn't messing around. They had a plan inside a powerful position, and he didn't know enough about it to map it yet.
He needed a fixed point in the Empire. Not to move, not yet. To watch. To pile up details. To understand the shape of someone whose game knowledge and choices he couldn't map.
A new puppet. Not the Hunter—the Hunter was already working in Elysion. Something built to sit still and wait, for a role that didn't need fighting or talking, a presence that could exist inside Insir's trade or diplomatic edges without pulling the kind of attention that came from being close to a duke.
He didn't have the body ready. He didn't have a cover.
He marked it as a priority, not a plan. The difference counted. Plans needed conditions he didn't have yet. Priorities waited for conditions to show up.
Outside, steam thickened in the dark over Vhal-Dorim. The chimneys kept going. The Church was setting up another ceremony somewhere else. The broke labs held their shaky results and their good ideas and their researchers who talked too fast.
For the first time since landing in this world, he could feel the shape of the competition. Not as a threat. As the landscape.
Somewhere in the city, another structure was being built.
He planned to be ahead of it when it finished.