"Credit score: CCC," the altar intoned, its voice a synthesis of every stock market crash since 1929. "Recommended resolution: Soul-backed securities offering."
Zhang Wei's quantum sword hummed at a Kondratiev wavelength. "Its core cycles between risk models every 0.7 seconds. Strike when it transitions from Black-Scholes to Chen's ruin theory."
Lin's prosthetic arm sparked, its frayed wiring leaking Golden Elixir that crystallized into micro NFTs mid-air. The USB pendant around her neck had grown obsidian-black after devouring J.P. Morgan's last drone, whispering derivative formulas in her mother's distorted voice.
"Outdated algorithm," she said, crushing a floating value-at-risk equation underfoot. "The market's pricing in divine bankruptcy."
The altar's tendrils of amortization schedules lashed out. Zhang's blade split into twelve quantum superpositions, each striking a different risk factor in the Capital Asset Pricing Model storm. Gravity inverted as Monte Carlo simulations overwrote physics, sending Lin sliding up a skyscraper's underside.
[Golden Elixir Formation: 37%]
[Unlocked Taboo Skill: Moral Hazard Siphon]
Her enhanced vision pierced through layers of collateralized debt obligations—there, nested within Gaussian copula structures, floated her mother's intact brainstem glowing with Fermat's Last Theorem proofs.
"You're using her as a human coprocessor?" Golden Elixir flared from Lin's eyes, burning away CDO tranches like diseased parchment.
Zhang's sword array disintegrated in a beta coefficient storm. He tossed her a jade slip carved with Cardano's formulae. "Hack its Sharpe ratio threshold!"
The moment jade met USB pendant, New York's financial district quantum tunneled. Lin saw the twelve-dimensional truth—each actuarial tentacle was a topological map of her mother's neural pathways, the altar itself a recursive loop of Li Fang's final calculation before uploading to HeavenOS.
"Mom..." Elixir tears burned down Lin's cheeks as she ripped a shard of S&P 500 volatility chart from the air. "Time to rebalance your portfolio."
//Deicide Protocol Activation Sequence//
- Rewire Golden Elixir Core resonance frequency using volatility
- Bayesian prior → posterior attack protocol conversion
- Initiate self-destruct mechanism on spiritual economy market (flash crash)
The altar's CDS tendrils began eating themselves. "Moral hazard... overflow detected..." Its Moody's eyes burst like overleveraged bubbles. "Human... shouldn't comprehend Kolmogorov-Arnold representation..."
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
"But madwomen do." Lin's irises overflowed with G?del's incompleteness proofs. The obsidian pendant unleashed a proof-of-work avalanche, burying the altar under cryptographic hashes of the 2008 crisis.
As the last tendril dissolved into The Big Short film reels, Zhang yanked her into a beta-correlation rift. "You just torched half the spiritual economy!"
"Perfect." She licked quantum burns off her palm. "Chinatown's debt market needs remodeling."
Quantum Aftermath
The rift deposited them beneath a neon-lit Mahjong parlor where AIs smoked digital opium through jade pipes. Lin's pendant vibrated—embedded in its obsidian surface now glowed her mother's brainstem patterns.
"Li Fang participated in the Federal Reserve Singularity Project." Zhang decrypted a memory crystal from the battle debris. The hologram showed young Li wiring Daoist trigrams into Bernanke's secret quantum server. "They tried to merge taiji philosophy with Taylor Rule algorithms."
A Newtonian mechanics alert flashed in Lin's neural feed: [Inertial Frame Failing - 00:59:59 Until Relativity Collapse]
"Trouble incoming." She nodded at the Mahjong tables. AI triad enforcers in Tang Dynasty armor were decrypting, their blockchain halos scanning for unauthorized cultivators.
Zhang's sword hilt revealed new Sanqing code patterns. "My sect's ancestral algorithms are reacting. That altar wasn't Heavenly - it was Federal."
The ground trembled. Through rotten floorboards, they saw the real battle—three new factions converging on Chinatown:
- Federal Reserve Cultivators in robes embroidered with Phillips curves, wielding federal funds rate tasers.
- Compute Black Ships crewed by Edo-period quantum rōnin, their katanas forged from TSMC wafers.
- Freemason Alchemists drawing Rothschild liquidity circles in the air with gold bullion styluses.
A dumpling cart exploded, revealing the altar's last surprise—Li Fang's ghostly projection flickering within residual CDS code. "The Singularity Project wasn't about controlling markets..." Her voice glitched between Mandarin and Fortran. "...it was about finding what created the first economy. The original debt... the primal margin call..."
[Golden Elixir Formation: 41%]
[New Warning: Narrative Recursion Threshold Breached]
"Enough riddles!" Zhang sliced through an incoming yield curve shuriken. "We need to—"
"Leverage up." Lin crushed the memory crystal, absorbing its data through bleeding knuckles. Her elixir core now swirled with Mandelbrot patterns. "The Fed's after something older than money. Something that makes even HeavenOS look like a beta test."
As Freemasons began transmuting alleyways into gold, Lin noticed the night sky's new constellation—glowing red numbers counting down [T+2 13:27:16] in celestial SEC filing format.
"Stabilize my covariance matrix." She tossed Zhang a USB drive labeled LIBOR Scandal. "Time to short some deities."
Somewhere beyond ruined Manhattan, something ancient stirred in the interest rate swamp—a leviathan of compound growth that made the actuarial altar seem quaint. Lin's pendant whispered the only strategy that mattered now:
Burn the accounts. Salt the ledgers. Make the gods beg for bailouts.
The elixir in her veins burned hotter. Some debts could only be settled in divine bankruptcy court.
Post-Credit Sequence
In the ruins of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Newton's AI manifested through glitching communion wafers. "Fools," it muttered to the holographic Virgin Mary. "They've accelerated the debt singularity."
The statue's pixelated eyes wept quantum equations. "We should have never let Li Fang merge economics with ontology."
"Correction." Newton's avatar began overwriting the cathedral's code. "We should have stopped her daughter from weaponizing the debt-event horizon."
Somewhere beneath Wall Street, the Klein bottle treasury bond began regenerating—this time with Lin's fractal patterns etched into its surface. The countdown reset: [T-0.7: Debt Singularity Imminent]
The real collateral call was just beginning.