The ledger didn't lie.
Leon sat in the dusty silence of the old north tower, moonlight slicing through the narrow window to illuminate the pages spread before him. Not spellbooks. Not treatises on noble lineage. Account books. Shipping manifests from the port quarter. Grain yield reports from the last five harvests. Maintenance records for the castle's seldom-used eastern wing.
His new power didn't hum with mana. It clicked, like an abacus in the dark.
For three years, the Favorability System had translated the world into a simple, brutal dialect: a smile equaled +2, a snub was -5, and survival was a matter of keeping the sum total positive. It was a language of surfaces.
Now, he was learning the grammar beneath. The real language of this world, and it was written in silver, wheat, and silence.
The discrepancy he'd used on Steward Barnabas was just a preposition. A single word in a sprawling, ugly sentence of corruption. As he cross-referenced the castle's official expenditure with the lower town's black-market prices and the guards' casual boasts in taverns, the full paragraph emerged.
The Duke's vaunted "prosperous reign" was a carefully maintained fiction. The Western Reach was bleeding. Not from monster attacks or poor harvests, but from a thousand small, sanctioned thefts. A tax collector skimming an extra copper here. A garrison captain selling "decommissioned" weapons there. A network of quiet, mutual understanding that greased the wheels of the duchy while slowly splintering its axles.
And the Duke, for all his martial prowess and noble bearing, either didn't see it or chose not to. He spoke the language of honor and magic and divine right. Leon was becoming fluent in the language of decay.
A soft scrape at the base of the tower door broke his concentration. Not the heavy boot of a guard. Not the shuffling step of a servant. This was deliberate, feather-light.
Leon didn't move. He slowly closed the ledger, his fingers leaving no mark on the vellum. The cold focus inside him sharpened, narrowing his world to the sound of the iron latch lifting.
The door swung inward without a creak. Silhouetted against the torchlight of the corridor was a figure too slight to be a threat, and too poised to be insignificant.
Elara.
She stood there, the celestial glow around her subdued but still perceptible to his newly-awakened senses—not as light, but as a faint pressure, like the static before a storm. She wore a simple cloak over her nightdress, her golden hair braided tightly back. The picture of innocent concern. But her eyes, that summer-sky blue, were scanning the room with a speed and sharpness that belied her gentle demeanor.
"I felt a… disturbance," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. It wasn't an accusation. It was a probe. "A void where there shouldn't be one. It led me here."
Leon remained seated. "A void, my lady? This tower is full of them. Neglect is a powerful vacuum."
She ignored the deflection, stepping fully inside and closing the door. Her gaze landed on the ledgers. Not on their content, but on their very existence. "You study commerce? In the dead of night?"
"I study systems," he replied, meeting her eyes. "All kinds. Yours, for instance, is currently generating a low-grade resonant frequency that's interfering with the castle's older, earth-bound wards. It's why the mice in the west cellar have been unusually agitated."
Elara blinked. The serene mask slipped for a fraction of a second, revealing not annoyance, but intense curiosity. Her system, he guessed, was throwing up prompts about him right now. [Target displays anomalous knowledge. Threat assessment: Inconclusive. Favorability manipulation protocols: Ineffective.]
"You speak of things you shouldn't know," she stated, her tone losing its practiced warmth. It became analytical. "You have no magic. The tutors confirmed it. The Duke believes it."
"The Duke," Leon said, leaning back, "believes what his senses and his pride tell him. He sees a radiant daughter returned by the gods and a ward who is… administratively redundant. It's a clean story. Stories are easier than audits."
"Audits." She tasted the word. "You seek to audit me?"
"I seek to understand the rules of the game I've been forced to play." He gestured to the ledgers. "Your system gave you affection as a resource. Mine, it seems, deals in different currency. I'm merely balancing my books."
For a long moment, she was silent. The pressure in the room increased. He could almost see her internal processes whirring, trying to categorize him. He was an error code. An unaccounted-for variable in her destiny narrative.
"They think you're broken," she finally said, and for the first time, there was no pity in it. It was a statement of fact. "A mechanism that ran out of goodwill. I don't think you're broken. I think you were… re-tooled."
It was the most honest thing anyone had said to him since the unbinding.
"What does your system say about me now?" he asked, genuinely interested.
Her lips tightened. "It says you are a 'Neutral Entity.' That your favorability is locked at zero and cannot be altered by standard means. It recommends… observation."
A neutral entity. Not an enemy. Not a friend. A rock in the stream of her predestined path. He found he liked the title.
"Then observe," he said, turning back to his ledger. The dismissal was clear. "Just don't let your resonance disrupt my calculations. Agitated mice are one thing. Miscalculated grain reserves during a coming famine are another."
He felt her stare bore into the back of his head. The coming famine was something he'd pieced together from rainfall patterns, stored seed quality, and the desperate, rising prices quoted by farmers in the town. The Duke's court, basking in Elara's glow, hadn't noticed.
"You're not what I expected," she murmured, more to herself than to him.
"And you," he said without turning, "are exactly what I expected. A solution presented for a problem that hasn't fully been defined yet. I find it… inefficient."
He heard the soft intake of breath, the rustle of her cloak as she turned. The door opened and closed again, softer than before.
Alone once more, Leon looked down at his notes. In the margin of the grain report, he had written a single word, circled:
Harvestmoon.
It was the name of the coming festival. And the date, according to his calculations, when the carefully constructed fiction of the duchy would face its first real test. The date when the language of smiles and divine right would crash headlong into the grammar of empty bellies and broken promises.
And he would be the only one who could read both.
The cold power within him uncoiled, not in anticipation of a fight, but in satisfaction of a hypothesis proven. Knowledge was not just power. It was positioning. He was no longer a player on the board. He was becoming the one who drew the map.
And the map was showing cracks everywhere. All he had to do was wait for the right moment to press his finger down and watch the whole thing split open.