Chapter 172: One Million Crystals and the Service Fees Nobody Read

Breakfast at the Vance estate consisted of minced-pork congee, crisp-fried river fish, runny eggs, and four hundred and thirty-seven pages of Divine Realm Infrastructure Compliance Regula-tions, bound with gold thread.

Lucian nudged the thick stack of parchment away from his bowl with a chopstick.

“Gods have paperwork?”

Sylvia served him some congee and adjusted her glasses. “Judg-ing by the structure of this document, I suspect they invented it.”

“At last. The origin of all evil.”

He took a sip of tea, picked up a red quill, and divided the doc-ument into four categories: actual Bifrost repair costs, airspace safety fines, geological risk assessment, and mana-network com-pliance procedures.

On page fifty-one, he found the supplementary charges.

“Divine inspection processing fee: five thousand Divine Crystals. Processing fee for the processing fee: twelve hundred. Historical document retrieval: eight hundred.” He paused. “Emergency messenger pigeon’s replacement feathers: fifty.”

He set the quill down with a click. “No.”

Sylvia looked up from her dictionary. “Which item do you object to?”

“Their concept of taxation.”

Unified System v3.0 opened over the documents.

[REGULATORY TEXT ANALYSIS COMPLETE]

Clauses, including incorporated references: 11,842. Direct financial liability: Calculable.

Legacy infrastructure liability: INSUFFICIENT DATA.

[ESTIMATED MANUAL READING TIME]

Approximately ninety hours, excluding sleep. Host response: ABSOLUTELY NOT. Alternative: Pay Sylvia Lunaire to read it.

Her current rates remain embarrassingly reasonable.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

[RECOMMENDATION]

Collect adequate data before attempting optimization.

Eleanor sat beside him in a plain white silk shirt, her hair pinned up with a wooden clip. She had claimed everything from page two hundred onward.

“You’re a princess,” Lucian said. “Reading several hundred pages of garbage legislation with me isn’t part of your duties.”

“I know.”

She turned a page and underlined another clause concerning Solaris’s sovereignty.

Lucian returned to his own stack.

The million-crystal compensation claim was not the real problem. If Regulus had merely broken a bridge, the family could pay for it from their mineral reserves.

But cutting Bifrost had triggered a defensive protocol dating from before the ancient war. Solaris now had to demonstrate that its mana network and protective barriers met the original safety standards.

Failure meant the Divine Realm’s central network would isolate the continent, cutting off its interdimensional energy supply. Un-der the old rules, that isolation had no automatic expiry.

The gods weren’t invading. They were operating a ten-thousand-year-old circuit breaker.

“Lucian.”

Sylvia had stopped at page three hundred and eighty-nine of the technical appendix. She held a magnifying glass over a phrase that appeared throughout the document.

“The court translation calls this the ‘Keystone Maintenance Stan-dard.’ But the original grammar gives it a rather different mean-ing.”

She looked up.

“Living load-bearing designation.”

Lucian stopped with a piece of fish halfway to his mouth. He lowered his chopsticks.

Sylvia looked back at the words. “Do you think it means a specific person?”

Outside, sunlight filled the windows. “I hope not,” Lucian said.

By then, word of his legal review had reached the palace. Officials were discussing it in the corridors with the sort of terror normally reserved for military mobilization.

A message forwarded to his tablet supplied the current rumor: Young Vance was preparing to sue the gods in an interdimensional court for fraudulent damages.

He was trying to get fifty crystals’ worth of pigeon feathers removed from the bill.

A shadow passed across the breakfast table.

Lucian looked up. A vast, pale-gray rectangular vessel hovered over the capital. Its sides were flat, its lines severe. There were no angel statues, no visible guns, and not a single attempt to make bureaucracy look welcoming.

Pale-blue letters glowed along its hull.

CONTINENTAL INFRASTRUCTURE AUDIT DIVISION

Apparently, the formal audit started in seven days. The paper-work had arrived early.

Evelyn stepped onto the balcony in her work overalls and stared up at the ship.

“Oh God.”

Lucian joined her with his tea. “Apparently several.”