"So. Solaris sent you."
Caelum’s voice was flat, almost bored.
The indifference struck harder than an insult. Mira’s lips tightened into a thin line.
"You were a god once," she snapped. "Too important to even look at me. And now you’re trash, yet you still think you can speak to me like this?"
Months ago, she’d arrived at his side at Solaris’s request, with every expectation that she would eventually become a deity’s consort.
Instead, he’d barely acknowledged her.
Worse, visiting goddesses had repeatedly mistaken her for staff and ordered her around without a second thought. She, who had been admired and pursued back home. She, who had never once been made to feel insignificant.
Thirty years east. Thirty years west. Fortune always turned.
Now it was her turn to collect.
"Of course the company sent me," she continued, satisfaction slowly creeping into her voice. "You think they’d waste an executive on garbage like you? You think anyone important is coming to see you now?"
Something inside Caelum went very still.
He understood how this world worked.
Nothing came free, least of all a divine company’s investment in a newly awakened god. If that god succeeded, ignited their divine fire, and eventually rose into true godhood, the company stood to make an enormous profit.
If they failed, the company extracted whatever value remained and discarded them.
Deities were assets in the end. Extremely valuable ones, perhaps, but assets all the same. High-value investments with divine realms attached.
And now he had the Creation Pearl.
That could never become public knowledge.
If cutting ties with Solaris was the price of keeping it hidden, then so be it. Losing Solaris wasn’t a disaster.
It was an opportunity.
"I understand that my domain is shattered and my future looks finished," he said evenly. "I don’t expect Solaris to treat me the way it did before. But you’re here, which means a decision has already been made. So tell me what it is."
His composure only made her angrier.
Mira jabbed a finger toward him, her eyebrows drawn sharply together.
"Who do you think you are? After you’re expelled, you won’t even be fit to kneel at my feet, yet you still talk to me like this? You’d better learn some humility while you still have the chance. Once you’re out of this academy, things won’t be nearly as simple."
Caelum gave her a thin smile.
Between the life he’d lived on Earth and the eighteen years he’d spent in this world, his actual age was closer to forty than twenty.
He’d understood Mira from the moment she’d arrived. Vain. Ambitious. Resentful of anyone who outshone her.
What he’d never expected was to see that resentment directed at him from such a low position.
"Just tell me the decision," he repeated.
That was enough to push her over the edge.
"Decision? Even trash has some use before it’s thrown away."
She paused deliberately.
"First, Solaris reclaims the land of your divine domain. Second..."
Her smile widened.
"The company advanced you ninety-eight point twenty-five million G-Credits over the semester. With interest, that comes to one hundred and twenty-three point fifty-two million."
She lifted her chin.
"We aren’t even counting the odd remainder. You’re going to pay every credit back."
Caelum stared at her.
For a moment, he said nothing.
Since the beginning of the Age of Deities, entire nations had vanished into history. Old borders had been erased, old alliances dissolved, and countless civilizations had been absorbed into something larger.
In East Asia, built upon the foundations of ancient Chinese civilization and stretching from the Siberian permafrost to the equatorial islands, a vast power had emerged.
The Asia-Pacific Community.
The Asian Community, as it was commonly called, had retained its own government, culture, and institutions. But like every other surviving power, its economy eventually adopted the same global currency.
G-Credits.
God Credits.
The name had begun as a joke among the treasury officials who negotiated the original accord. Once the divine economy became the foundation of civilization, however, the joke stopped being funny and simply became accurate.
Caelum finally lowered his gaze.
Then he laughed.
Quietly at first.
Bitterly.
Disbelievingly.
For perhaps the first time, he was seeing Solaris for what it truly was.
His domain, the domain he’d personally shaped and cultivated, was worth well over a hundred million credits by itself.
Solaris intended to take it with a single sentence.
As though it had never belonged to him.
As though his awakening had somehow been their property from the beginning.
And then they wanted repayment on top of that.
The original subsidy had been ninety-eight million on paper. Barely sixty million had actually reached him after processing fees, deductions, and other conveniently buried expenses.
Now, after less than half a semester, the debt had somehow grown to over one hundred and twenty-three million.
And they called the difference interest.
The theft wasn’t even subtle.
It was simply dressed in enough legal language to make challenging it inconvenient.
Caelum had read every line of that contract before signing.
He’d still been outmaneuvered.
Divine companies aren’t investors.
They’re traps with very good lawyers.
"What?" Mira asked, her smile widening. "Scared now? Where did all that arrogance go?"
His anger pleased her more than she wanted to admit.
It settled something that had been bothering her for months.
But it wasn’t enough.
Her family had forced her into this posting. She’d endured humiliations she’d never experienced before. Today, she wanted him to understand exactly what it had felt like to be treated as insignificant.
"You’re already going to fail the final exam," she continued. "There’s no saving this. Drag it out for the rest of the semester if you want. Nothing will change."
She folded her arms.
"People like you climb out of nowhere because of dumb luck, then the universe remembers where you actually belong. Trash always finds its way back to the trash heap."
Caelum said nothing.
He’d stopped listening halfway through.
His mind was already dissecting the contract.
There were breach conditions, certainly. But those clauses had been written for newly awakened deities, first-year students who were still establishing their divine foundations.
What he’d attempted was different.
Cultivating a mid-grade retinue during his freshman year, then attempting to push it into high-grade territory, belonged to a completely different category of contract.
Those restrictions applied to agreements renegotiated after graduation, not the introductory contracts signed by first-year students.
Solaris couldn’t simply apply those clauses retroactively because they didn’t like the outcome.
If they tried to enforce the debt using the contract alone, their position wasn’t nearly as strong as Mira believed.
And Elysian Academy would never tolerate a company abusing its position so openly.
The academy was one of the five great academies of the Asian Community, standing at the heart of Nanzhili. Its graduates included some of the most renowned True Gods in recorded history.
Solaris could be ruthless.
It could be wealthy.
But in front of the five great academies, it wasn’t powerful enough to act with complete impunity.
"You’re stubborn to the very end, Caelum."
Mira’s voice softened into something almost resembling pity.
"You’ll fail the final exam. You’ll be expelled. Whatever you do during the rest of this semester won’t change that."
She shook her head.
"People like you get one miracle. One moment when fate hands you something you never earned."
Her eyes hardened.
"Then it takes it back."
A final pause.
"Trash is trash. Nothing changes that."
There was nothing left worth saying.
Caelum gestured toward the door.
"Goodbye. I won’t walk you out."
Mira lingered for another moment, savoring what she believed was victory.
Then she turned and left, moving quickly, almost as though staying any longer might leave some trace of his failure clinging to her.
The villa fell silent.
Only the soft trickle of water from the courtyard spring remained, accompanied by the faint rustling of bamboo beyond the window.
Caelum slowly lowered himself into a chair.
"Solaris."
The name carried weight.
A company of that scale, with that much invested in monitoring him, was not an enemy he could afford to ignore.
Even if he rebuilt his domain from nothing, there would be no path back to a partnership with Solaris.
That bridge hadn’t merely burned.
It had been salted.
The moment anyone discovered that he had found a way to recover, Solaris would move first.
Before recruiting a single new follower, he needed to deal with them.
His bracelet chimed.
A message had arrived.
Every citizen in this era carried one. Identification, banking, communication, and countless other functions had been compressed into a device worn around the wrist.
Caelum raised his arm.
A translucent screen unfolded above it.
He read the message once.
Then he laughed again.
This time, there was no bitterness in it.
Only cold amusement.
Solaris had already filed a request with the Celestial Tribunal.
His accounts had been frozen.
Every G-Credit entering or leaving his accounts was now blocked.
Fast.
Ruthless.
And clearly triggered the moment he’d informed them that his divine domain had collapsed.
They’d been afraid he might move his assets before they could seize them.