As I left the chamber, Dhriti was still pawing at herself like she expected to find a glowing heart-shaped scar or something. Maybe a healing heart injury could be seen here, but I doubted it. I didn’t stop to ask; I just walked right past her, the soles of my heels squelching against the slick stone.

  “Leaving already?” She asked, her voice steadier now, amazing what a little magic and a title can do for someone’s confidence.

  “Nah, I’ll be back. It’s time to annoy Cloudy,” I said over my shoulder.

  She just shrugged, like whatever mysterious business Queens had was way above her sewer-grade pay level.

  Fair.

  What I said was right, though. I had promised Cloudy I wouldn’t exploit. And yet… standing there thinking about that obelisk and the little soul-gobbling eldritch jellyfish inside, it wasn’t exactly a tough call. If I had to choose between offering souls and doing a little bit of my classic Charlie brand rule?bending?

  Exploiting wins every time.

  “Hope Cloudy’s in a good mood when he finds out,” I muttered to myself, my voice echoing just enough in the cramped corridor to make it sound like someone was agreeing with me.

  Okay, technically? Sacrificing players was also on the table. They didn’t have souls here, not in the Rimelion sense, anyway, and they respawned in a day.

  Pragmatic and efficient. The kind of greater?good move that made strategists pat themselves on the back while they stared into their reflectionless moral void.

  But it didn’t sit right.

  It would be clever. Cold?blooded. A very Queen Charlie thing to do. It would definitely work.

  But… come on.

  Showing the middle finger to the Altandai system felt so much better.

  That thought made me grin as I climbed out of the sewers, leaving behind the humid, grave?breath air and exchanging it for the slightly less terrible stench of the streets, but full of merchants.

  When I got that debuff, I noticed one, but important detail. In parentheses.

  The magic, or system, there thought I was a master. That told me it had a slave variant, probably to sacrifice people.

  The market wasn’t far, and like always, it was a chaotic mess; stalls crammed together under patchy awnings, the smell of overripe fruit battling with the sour tang of unwashed crowds, vendors hawking everything from spiced meat skewers to suspicious daggers.

  If anything, Scamantha and her use of potions and especially selling the less stable ones made me wary of things like that.

  But I wasn’t here for any of that.

  I spotted my target instantly: one of the most popular items in this whole hellhole.

  Slave collars.

  Yay.

  As I’d remembered and heard, binding stones weren’t a thing in most cities, at least not big ones like this. Maybe some tiny ones, hopefully not powered by souls, but Altandai had the mother of them all. And where there was a giant soul?sucking obelisk, there were always enterprising assholes with a need for portable ownership tools.

  “I’ll take the blue one,” I said, pointing at the least?ugly option in a row of collars displayed on a velvet?lined tray.

  What would happen if I put the collar on me and made myself a master… and a slave? Both at the same time? Would I get both curses? One? Neither? Reality breaking?

  Genius me.

  The merchant, a wiry old man with one eye permanently squinted and the other glittering with greed, looked me up and down. His gaze lingered on my pristine clothes, the subtle shimmer of enchanted fabric. His grin was pure predator.

  “Of course, of course!” He rubbed his hands together literally, like he’d been waiting his whole life for a rich idiot. “Do you also need a commanding crystal?”

  Oh, Genius Charlie's gone again.

  I blinked. Then nodded smoothly, like this had been the plan all along. “Of course.”

  We did the exchange. I probably overpaid. It wasn’t my money anyway, so who cared?

  “I know a guy who can insure you against breaking or running out of mana. Or,” the merchant added with a shrewd smirk, “I can offer an enhanced collar at a ten percent discount. Some slaves can protest orders; especially when they’re outside the binding stone.”

  I blinked at that, surprised, but only for a moment. Then, I shook my head and gestured toward the blue collar. “No, thank you.”

  He handed it over. It was a polished band inlaid with a small crimson gem, the faint hum of runes vibrating beneath my fingertips, as well as the matching control crystal.

  It felt heavier than I remembered, though that might’ve just been the weight of fifteen years since I’d last seen one up close.

  And then, lucky me, it was back to the sewers.

  Ugh.

  When I reached Dhriti, her eyes went wide, snapping straight to my hands.

  At first I didn’t get it—was there blood on me? Did my tiara slip?—but then… oh. Yeah. I would also freak out if a supposedly benevolent Queen told you to keep quiet and then strolled back in holding a slave collar like it was the newest hot accessory.

  “Oh, don’t worry, this is for me,” I said with my best harmless smile. It didn’t work. Her face only got grimmer, like she was bracing herself for my next war crime.

  “Let me explain.” I shook the collar lightly, so the gem caught the flickering torchlight, its faint red glow painting my fingers as if I’d dipped them in blood. “Inside is very dangerous for those who don’t wear this. There needs to be someone with it.”

  She bobbed her head so quickly I thought it might roll off. “I will stay here,” she said, and the way her hands tightened around her rusty sword told me she was serious.

  “Great, you do that.” I waved her off and walked toward the bars.

  The metal was cold, condensation beading where the sewer’s swampy air met the unnatural chill of the obelisk chamber beyond.

  “Here goes nothing…” I muttered, more to the universe than to Dhriti, as I snapped the collar shut around my own neck. The clasp clicked, the sound too loud, like a lock sealing my fate.

  “Well…” I closed my eyes.

  The panic came instantly, fast and choking. A cold current of memory pulled me under: Karzi, her chains biting into raw skin, the endless blank stares of the other slaves. Their hopelessness felt like it was crawling up my throat.

  No. Bad Charlie. Happy thoughts. We do this for a reason. We are our own master. And now we talk about ourselves in third person, apparently.

  I forced my feet forward and crossed the threshold.

  “Yup, works as I—”

  Before I could finish, the messages started flickering faster. And faster. And faster.

  My entire vision filled with flashing notifications, the system spitting out errors like a slot machine on overdrive.

  The reality broke around me. Literally.

  It wasn’t like the standard glitch?and?reload I’d seen before; this was… wrong. Everything in the room fractured like a dropped mirror, shards of existence splintering away from one another. They floated in the air like rugged glass panes, reflecting other shards in an endless cascade of “me” and “not?me”, all slightly distorted, like a nightmare funhouse.

  But me-me? I stayed solid. Constant. The binding stone, door, and walls were untouched too, anchored in this mess, while the rest of the world stuttered and fell apart.

  My ears rang with the system’s shrill span of warnings, too many to track, each one stacking over the last.

  “I asked you not to exploit for a reason.”

  I froze.

  “Cloudy? Hi!” My voice pitched up in a way I really wished it hadn’t. “Uhmm… I was—” My brain went blank, panic elbow?checking every clever excuse I’d lined up. “I mean…”

  “Naughty Queen.” Cloudy’s tone was maddeningly neutral, like an exhausted teacher talking to the problem kid in class. “You are not a goddess. Yet. Stop breaking reality.”

  That tone always got me. As if I’d been caught pressing a big red button with a “DO NOT TOUCH” sign on it.

  Which… okay, fine, yes, that’s exactly what I did. And would defenitely press if I saw that button.

  “Are you mad?” I blurted, because apparently my survival instincts were garbage. The last thing I needed was the system, whatever part of it Cloudy counted as, actively mad at me.

  “I am not the system, yet I am the system,” Cloudy said, his words annoyingly cryptic. “Your actions have consequences, not?yet?goddess. You are The Exploiter. I always honor free will, so I will remain impartial. But please, stop exploiting. For your own sake. Thanks to this, I had to divert system resources here, instead of fixing the hundreds of problems players are making. Or diverting resources to repair your hybrid system. This set you back a week. Now I will divert it…”

  Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Hybrid system? Set me back a week? I opened my mouth—

  A flash of blinding white light exploded outward, searing my vision, and then… reality stitched itself back together. Shards folded inward, snapping into place like puzzle pieces. The phantom was back where it belonged. So was the floor.

  But the door? Open.

  And in that doorway, a curious Dhriti peeked inside.

  Before I could shout, “Don’t step in here unless you want to become goo bait!” she dropped to her knees so fast I heard them smack the wet stone. “You… broke reality,” she whispered, voice trembling. “Yet stood… divinity. You are not merely a queen. You’re… a mythical queen I heard about!”

  And reality shattered. Again.

  The shards flew apart like a thousand jagged snowflakes, swirling around me in a dizzying cascade of broken reflections, while Dhriti knelt frozen in the doorway, staring at me as though I’d just rewritten the laws of creation.

  “I know it was not intentional,” Cloudy’s voice echoed over the chaos, unbothered, “but I have to divert mana from the weave to prevent a cascading effect. Rimelion is going to have slightly weaker interdimensional defenses. You know the consequences now. The choice is yours.”

  With a loud sound, like the air snapping back into place, reality reassembled once more. I blinked. Dhriti was still there, still kneeling, but now she was… praying. “Uhm, Dhriti,” I said slowly, “you think I am Queen Irwen, right?”

  She nodded so eagerly I thought her neck might snap.

  “Well, no. She’s my mother.” I could feel my face heating, actually blushing. Great. “I know how it sounds… but, can we, like… not kneel?”

  “Of course, Queen, as you command!” she said, springing to her feet and standing at attention. Well… an attempt at attention. Looked more like an overcooked noodle trying to salute.

  I stared at her. She stared back, eyes practically glowing with newfound zeal.

  “No, you didn’t witness a miracle,” I pointed out.

  She nodded anyway.

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