Gu Changsheng looked down at the endless ribbon of glowing zeroes wrapping around the pages of the Royal Vault Ledger.
To anyone else, that mountain of numbers represented unimaginable imperial power. To Gu Changsheng, it looked like ten billion years of stolen lunches.
For eons, mortal farmers had frozen to death in leaky huts because their winter firewood tax was too high. Young cultivators had bled out in dark ravines fighting over a single stalk of three-leaf spirit grass. And entire kingdoms had collapsed into famine—all because one cynical writer sitting on Floor Nine had locked ninety percent of creation’s natural abundance inside a dusty basement just to manufacture “dramatic conflict.”
“Artificial scarcity,” Gu Changsheng said, shaking his head in disgust. “He hoarded ninety percent of the universe’s warmth in a dark cellar just so people downstairs would be hungry enough to fight each other for his entertainment.”
“A textbook macroeconomic manipulation tactic of lazy grimdark writing, Father,” seventeen-year-old Ye Xiao noted, pushing up his silver spectacles as he audited the vault columns with his golden bamboo ruler.
“According to these figures, the natural spiritual output of the three thousand worlds was always more than enough to feed, clothe, and educate every living being at an Immortal tier. The poverty in the lower realms was one hundred percent artificially engineered by this vault.”
