November 6. A crisp, late-autumn morning. The air in the woods tasted clean enough to hurt.
At the small estate shared by the Fell family and the Warner family, Amm left early. He was going to try to rescue Red Falcon—and to check on the Goddess of Wisdom and Life, who was rumored to be in bad shape.
Silver Moon had returned to Newstar, still hunting leads on Dreamland and the Crimson Nun.
Skye, meanwhile, was headed to the Nine-Sea-Beast Palace. The Crown Prince had called a national-level summit before his succession, and every governor and major faction had to attend.
“The Nightmare can sense players,” Ethan warned her in their room. “You’re a player now too. Walking into the Crown Prince’s presence is dangerous.”
“I know~” Skye said, smiling like danger was a cute rumor.
She produced a paper doll and flicked it onto the floor. The doll hit the boards—and then rose as Skye, a perfect replica except for eyes that looked a little too empty.
Ethan studied it. “A decoy.”
“I’m a Weaver,” Skye said lightly. “And a Rank 3 player. Controlling a trick like this is easy.”
She circled her own double, fussing with its hair like she was dressing a mannequin. “The Nightmare will notice it’s paper. But so what? He can’t do anything to me through a puppet.”
It was reckless. But it was Skye’s kind of reckless—calculated around what she believed she could afford.
After she left, Ethan read the morning papers and pieced together what the summit had looked like.
The Crown Prince was raising taxes again.
“Last year he raised taxes too,” Ethan said when Skye returned with the highlights. “What did the delegates do?”
“They hated it,” Skye replied without hesitation.
The old nobles who lived in the Royal Capital didn’t react as violently. But the island governors were openly furious. Every island already taxed its own people. Now the Crown Prince was leveraging royal authority to carve out a share of their revenue.
Some governors had shouted at the Crown Prince’s ministers. A few had nearly come to blows.
The industrialists were worse. Their representatives laid out numbers: if taxes went up, profits collapsed. If profits collapsed, wages vanished.
Came the commoner representatives—people sent by worker councils and rural unions. They’d nearly overturned tables.
“If you want to tax us,” they’d said, “then you write a constitution first. You limit royal authority. You reform the system.”
Ethan wasn’t surprised.
This world had entered the steam age. And with players pushing from every angle, an awakening had started—slow, uneven, but real. People were learning ideas like law, equality, and rights. Workers were learning strikes. Farmers were learning alliances.
When pressure rose high enough, the question stopped being “Should we obey?” and became “Why should we?”
Ethan asked about the supernatural blocs.
“Violet Eye opposed it hard,” Skye said. “They have massive mundane industries. They’d be taxed to the bone.”
Violet Eye also had huge supernatural expenses. Taxes meant less money for materials, rituals, training—everything that kept them competitive.
“The Black-and-White Academy stayed silent,” Skye added. “The smaller factions didn’t have much say, but they looked angry too. The whole thing ended badly.”
Ethan leaned back, letting the pattern settle.
The Nightmare didn’t care about balancing a treasury. The taxes weren’t about gold.
They were about friction.
Raise costs. Force merchants to raise prices. Let people fail to buy food. Let them fail to pay rent.
When goods stop moving, raw materials stop moving. When raw materials stop moving, farms and ranches collapse. Factories cut wages. Workers lose jobs. Crime spikes. Cities rot.
Despair and fear spread like smoke.
And the Nightmare feeds.
After that, it could engineer disasters—floods, droughts—until even farmers who could once survive alone had nothing left.
Soon the entire world would be soaked in the emotions it wanted.
Ethan exhaled. Then something clicked into place.
He looked at Skye. “What do you think?”
Skye’s eyes narrowed. Storm Island’s gold—her gold—was not something she planned to hand over.
“I don’t care if he’s the Crown Prince or the Magma Lord,” she said brightly. “If he taxes me, I’ll kill him.”
Ethan stared. “I knew it. Getting a dragon to cough up gold is impossible.”
Skye didn’t even pretend to be offended. “I am greedy. Totally.”
She grinned, sharper. “But I don’t beg. I take.”
“That’s the point,” Ethan said. “Not just gold. Power.”
He folded the paper and set it aside.
“In my world, there’s a way people describe change: contradictions drive everything forward. Every system creates its own pressure points.”
He met Skye’s gaze. “When oppression becomes unbearable, people push back. They revolt.”
“The Nightmare wants the world drowning in fear and despair,” Ethan continued. “But when workers pick up hammers and farmers pick up sickles—when they arm themselves to fight for their rights—the emotion flips. Hope replaces despair. Courage replaces fear.”
“And when that happens,” he said quietly, “the Nightmare starves.
No despair. No fear. No monarchy left standing.
The Nightmare’s plan collapses.”