Laia filed Lyra's wild, idealistic plan away under the label of well-meaning but reckless, and gave it no more of her time. She liked the girl—truly, she was the closest thing to a friend Laia had made at the academy—but fondness did not mean she was willing to throw her life away on a suicide mission into the deep void. They had chatted, traded notes on realm management, never asked anything of each other that crossed into real danger. The best she could do, she decided, was keep talking Lyra down, convince her to grab her sister and run before the Voss clan's gambles dragged them both under. As long as you kept the fire alive, you would always have wood to burn. There was no honor in going down with a sinking house.
It was a lost cause, she knew. The Voss clan had always been a family of gamblers. They had built their entire fortune on risky void expeditions generations ago, and now they were wagering that same centuries-old legacy on a shot at a true name. The habit ran in the blood. Lyra was no different, betting everything she had on a sliver of hope and the last frayed threads of family loyalty.
Laia shook her head and pushed the whole messy business out of her mind.
The War of True Names, though, stuck with her.
Ever since she'd watched ten thousand divine crystals slip through her fingers with the first-place prize, she'd been turning over new ways to make money in her head. The academy had pulled in over a million crystals just from streaming the tournament, a figure that had made her eyes water when she'd heard it. Most trade in the divine realms was tightly regulated, yes—but where there were people, there were wants. Where there were wants, there was a market. And where there was a market, there was a way to get paid.
If the grand cities of the higher realms had movie theaters, shopping plazas, paid entry viewing platforms for godly events, there had to be other avenues. Serial stories. Short clips. Live streams. Gods did not spend every waking hour tending to their realms. They got bored. Boredom always paid.
She logged into the Void Sphere, the divine realms' shared network, and pulled up QianDu, the most widely used divine search engine. If there was a loophole, a legal way to monetize without a merchant license, she would find it.
She found something better.
With abyssal incursions worsening every year, the imperial government had opened the Abyssal Hunt program to all registered deities. Any creature slain in the official abyssal border zones could be turned in for merit points, no trade license required. Merit points could be exchanged for artifacts, medicinal herbs, even vials of Far Shore water.
None of that was what caught her eye.
Fourth place on the merit exchange list: the *Box of Avarice*.
The description was long and dense with bureaucratic fine print, but one line leaped off the page: The artifact generates divine crystals passively by siphoning minor ambient life energy from the daily activity of a realm's inhabitants. No permanent harm to subjects. No damage to realm integrity. Only a mild, manageable increase in general fatigue.
Laia leaned forward in her chair, her eyes wide.
She thought of her subjects. The drakes that trained from dawn till dusk just for fun. The apes that hauled boulders for sport. The humans that ran three separate forges and a full-scale research lab on top of regular farm work. The elves that tended to three separate forest groves before breakfast. A little extra fatigue? It would be a blessing. It might finally slow them down enough to keep them from rocketing straight to Fifth Tier before she was ready.
She had a sinking feeling that once she hit Fifth Tier, her realm maintenance costs would skyrocket again, burning through crystals faster than she could earn them. A little enforced downtime for her overachieving subjects was exactly what she needed.
She scrolled down to the price.
Fifty thousand merit points.
A lot, on paper. But the payout rates were straightforward: one point for an unranked abyssal spawn, ten for First Tier, fifty for Second, a hundred for Third, five hundred for Fourth.
A hundred Fourth Tier beasts. That was all it took.
Laia shot to her feet, slung her worn travel satchel over her shoulder, and called over her shoulder to her roommates, "I'm heading out. Won't be back for a few months. See you."
The other girls grunted and waved, not looking up from their desks. They were used to her vanishing for days at a time. None of them realized it would be the last time she slept in that cramped dorm room.
She was a woman of action. No point waiting around.
Ten minutes later, she was standing in her homeroom advisor's office, sliding a three-month leave request across the desk.
Bai Xu stared at the paper, then up at her, his brow furrowed. "You are aware semester break is only three months away, correct?"
"I am," Laia said calmly.
"Then why request three full months of leave now?"
"I left a week open for final exams."
Bai Xu's frown deepened. "I know you are Lord Thorne's apprentice. I know you are a hard worker. But you cannot simply throw your formal studies aside like this."
Laia tilted her head. "You know the basic Divine Script proficiency exams, right?"
"Of course," he said, a little huffily. "I am currently studying for the Level Six certification myself."
Laia pulled a gilded certificate out of her satchel and slid it across the desk. The embossed words *Level Eight Divine Script Certification* glinted in the office light, sharp and official.
Bai Xu blinked.
He opened his mouth to argue that script proficiency was only one subject, that there was still core curriculum to cover—when Laia pulled out a bound thesis paper and set it down beside the certificate. He glanced at the cover, then did a double take. It was the graduate-level divine realm management thesis that had been circulating the department all semester, the one every professor had praised as the most insightful work in five years. Graded perfect marks.
"Wrote it in my free time," Laia said. "Had a senior professor slip it into the graduate batch for grading. Got an excellence award."
She waved a hand, already turning for the door. "That's all. I'll be back for exams. See you, sir."
Bai Xu's face had gone tight with frustrated disbelief. He scrabbled for one last foothold, one last way to assert his authority as her instructor. "This thesis is well-written, yes—but I have seen its core framework before, in an academic journal. There is a non-zero chance of plagiarism."
Laia paused in the doorway, not even turning around fully.
"The piece from *Divine Realm Quarterly*? Called *Autumn Winds Over Fertile Years*?"
Bai Xu blinked, caught off guard. "You know the author?"
"The pen name is *He Yuan Qiufeng Du Fang Nian*," she said, her tone dry as dust. "It's mine. And for the record, that journal is a rip-off. The pay barely covered my rent and realm maintenance fees. Don't bother submitting to them."
She stepped out into the hallway without another word.
Behind her, Bai Xu sat frozen at his desk, staring at the certificate and the thesis and the empty doorway, his entire worldview slowly tipping sideways.