The fourth mirror

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On the fourth night, the Tiger's fire drew him to his accounting chambers, where ledgers of his empire's wealth lined the walls. But as he opened one, the numbers transformed into names, and the names into faces, and the faces into souls drowning in invisible chains.

A vision seized him:

He stood in a great hall where a single banker sat behind an infinite desk. The banker was lending money that didn't exist, creating debt from nothing, spinning obligation from air. But this was not mere usury; it was alchemy in reverse, turning the gold of human potential into the lead of perpetual servitude.

He watched as generation after generation came to the banker, each one born already owing, each one dying still in debt. The debt had become hereditary, metaphysical, woven into the very fabric of existence. Children played games of debt. Lovers exchanged vows of obligation. Even prayers had become promissory notes.

Then a stranger entered, someone from beyond the system, from a land where debt was unknown. The stranger asked a simple question that rang through the hall like thunder: "What happens if you all stop paying at the same time?"

The banker's face went white. The infinite desk began to crack. Because his power was not real; it was made entirely of their belief in their obligation.

The vision released him, and he found himself at his desk, understanding that debt was not economic but spiritual; a way of binding souls to a future they could never reach, keeping them forever running toward a horizon that receded with every step.

His pen moved across the page with the certainty of one revealing an ancient secret:

"In a nearby land, there once lived a banker. He made money by lending other people's money to them with interest. One day, he became exceptionally greedy and began lending against his debt so that people would take more loans, and, in doing so, he became exponentially wealthier. Then, after some time, the entire population was indebted: it became the way of life. People lived as if this was normal; they couldn't comprehend another way. Then, a man from a faraway land witnessed this and asked: 'What happens if you all stop paying your obligation at the same time?'"

He set down his pen and stared at what he had written. The parable was deceptively simple, but the Tiger's fire showed him its depths. The banker lending against his own debt; this was the ultimate perversion, creating obligation from obligation, an infinite regression of servitude.

But more insidious was how it had become "the way of life." The population couldn't even imagine freedom from debt because debt had colonized their imagination itself. They were born into it, lived through it, died within it. It had replaced religion as the organizing principle of existence.

The stranger's question was not revolutionary rhetoric but simple mathematics. If debt was created from nothing, sustained by nothing but collective belief, then collective disbelief would return it to nothing. The entire empire of obligation could collapse in an instant if everyone simply... stopped.

The fourth mirror was complete. It would show souls how their bondage was not to absolute scarcity but to fictional obligation, how their servitude was not enforced but volunteered, how their prison was made not of iron but of IOUs.