The Lamp That No Longer Shines: A LitRPG Action Comedy Chapter 88: Immortal Credit Scores

[Ti]: 07:30 PM

[Location]: White City · Townhouse 107 · Dining Room

She had been rehearsing since the carriage ride ho.

Not nervously—efficiently. The proposal was airtight. The numbers were clean.

The chanical maid cleared the soup course, Rory detached herself from Margaret's collar with a wet, philosophically satisfied sound, and Anna set down her fork with the particular deliberateness of soone who had just resolved a calculation.

Perfect. All conditions nominal.

Hathaway folded her hands on the table, drew one asured breath, and convened—in the tone of a completely functional adult who had everything under control—the First Ludwig Family Financial Restructuring Conference.

The proposal: patent disbursent cleared. Liquid holdings currently significant. She had done the math twice.

The family had outstanding debts. She could pay them off.

The air solidified.

Margaret's eyes went first. Not slowly—instantly, a city-scale power failure, 150 luns to zero in under a second.

The veteran High Witch who had personally diced False Gods across eight separate planes of existence stared at her eldest daughter with the specific, helpless horror of soone watching the premature heat death of the universe unfold in real ti, in her own dining room, over dessert.

Anna forgot her levitation spell.

This was the detail Hathaway's processing threads could not imdiately categorize.

Anna—who maintained antigravity posture through four-course als, through heated marital disagreents, through the incident with the exploding mana crystal that had taken out the third-floor bathroom—both bare feet touched the crystal floor with a soft, utterly unmistakable double-thud.

She crossed the room in three seconds flat. The back of her hand pressed to Hathaway's forehead. Her pupils were checked. The water glass was lifted and sniffed.

"Did you accidentally ingest a hallucinogenic abyssal mushroom," Anna said, with the flat, asured cadence of a woman filing a formal incident report, "or were you exposed to a cognitive-hazard hex in the academy corridors today?"

Hathaway swatted her hand away.

"I'm completely sober. The debt has compounding interest. I want to plug the family's financial black hole before—"

"We are contacting the central hospital." Anna was already pivoting. "We need a curse-breaker. Possibly a psychiatric healer. Margaret—"

Margaret dropped into her chair.

She buried her face in both hands. The sound that erged was not dramatic. That was what made it bad.

It was raw, unperford, authentically anguished—the noise of a woman confronting a genuinely devastating personal failure. An apex predator of the Starry Sea, reduced to rubble by a dinner table.

"Our child." Her voice was muffled and fractured and entirely real. "Our daughter. A Yggdrasil freshman, sitting on her first major windfall, staring at us across a dinner table and proposing to clear our ledgers like a mortal accountant."

She looked up. Crimson eyes at twenty luns, glassy.

"Anna. What catastrophic insecurity have we inflicted on this poor girl?"

"It's my fault." Anna sat down heavily, and the precision of her self-analysis was sohow the most devastating thing in the room. "I should never have complained about the twenty-thousand-Solar speeding ticket at the dinner table. As the adult, I transferred financial anxiety onto a child who should never have been carrying it."

Hathaway stared at them.

Wait. The internal recalibration was instantaneous and furious. This is NOT how this goes. In every Earth drama—across every genre, every cultural variant, every sentintal anthology special—when the child offers their first paycheck toward the family debt, the parents weep grateful tears and declare they have raised a saint. There are hugs. There is a montage. Possibly a song.

Why are you reacting like I suggested converting Rory into Void Engine fuel?

Margaret snapped her head up.

She grabbed Hathaway's hands with both of hers, and the crimson eyes reignited—not to full combat luminosity but to sothing urgent and clarifying.

The Ludwig family had debt, yes. But not bankrupt. The credit line was astronomical, the cash flow continuous, the investnt portfolio aggressive.

Adult debt wasn't a burden. It was leverage. Infrastructure. A precision tool for acquiring rare materials that no reasonable operating budget could accommodate on short notice.

"Your mothers are in our fifties," Margaret said, with the tone of soone announcing a planet's colonization schedule, "the absolute pri of our conquering years. We will budget from this month forward. We will buy a few fewer designer bags, blow up a few fewer planets, and we will land a massive payday very soon—"

ABORT.

ABORT MISSION.

ABORT ABORT ABORT.

The internal threat assessnt ran in under half a second and arrived at a clear operational verdict.

Her original intent: comfortable, worry-free family life.

Current situation: two continental-scale weapons being accidentally handed a motive for overti.

Margaret had literally just confessed to nearly detonating a rebel siege camp ahead of schedule out of sheer joy. Extra commissions to accelerate debt repaynt did not an peace. It ant a statistically significant probability of her mothers accidentally glassing a colonizable low-magic plane, getting slapped with catastrophic fines by the corporate sponsors for "destroying company property," and plunging the family right back into the red.

Also—and this landed sowhere in the background of the calculation like a pebble hitting still water—in Witch society, debt was not a burden. It was a credit score for immortals.

A nurical display indicating exactly how much the banking institutions trusted your eternal earning potential. Witches were a long-lived species in a society built on absolute credit; defaulting on a loan ant complete social death, a humiliation no pureblood Ludwig would ever risk.

They didn't just borrow; they maintained astronomical cash flows, paid massive compounding interest, and sat on a mountain of absurdly expensive, highly illiquid assets—like the literal carpet of Absolute Cryolite currently freezing the living room.

The collection agencies didn't send threatening letters because they didn't need to. To the banks, Anna and Margaret weren't deadbeats; they were premium, high-yield VIP clients. That was why they received gift baskets.

The threat model she had imported wholesale from Earth was simply inapplicable here. Genetic defect in her original framing. Could not be patched.

The optimal move was imdiate, clean retreat.

She placed her hand firmly over Margaret's.

"Never mind. I was confused. Debt is infrastructure. Leverage is an art form." She heard herself and committed fully. "I am going to invest my money entirely in myself and never think about the family ledgers again."

Margaret exhaled. One-fifty cooled to eighty. Anna sat down.

Rory made a soft, evaluative sound from the crook of Margaret's arm that may or may not have constituted comntary.

Then the two mothers looked at each other.

The gleam that ignited simultaneously in both their eyes was very specific, very recognizable—the frantic, narrowed, hyperfocused look of two veteran pay-to-win whales who had just watched a new player load their first major cash injection and were now preparing, with profound investnt, to personally escort her to the equipnt shop.

Anna adjusted her cuffs with the quiet efficiency of soone holstering a weapon.

"Wonderful. Since you've agreed to invest in yourself—and since you're flush with capital for the first ti in your life—we think it's ti you saw the real inheritance."

Margaret was already on her feet, scooping Rory. "Are you full? Good. Co with us."

[Ti]: 08:30 PM

[Location]: Townhouse 107 · Underground Library

The underground library was the only room in the entire Ludwig household that didn't aggressively broadcast its owners' net worth.

The bronze doors swung open and the aesthetic shift was vertiginous.

Gone were the bioluminescent coral walls, the crystalline deck floors, the general "we have money and are not subtle about it in any respect" atmosphere that characterized every other room.

Ten ters of dark mahogany bookshelves, warm amber glow from miniature fire elentals sealed inside floating crystal orbs, the sll of aged parchnt and dry spice and faint ozone.

If you looked carefully, the nouveau-riche details were still there—the wobbly reading table in the corner was propped level by a solid gold brick, the shelf edges were set with abyssal pearls instead of brass fittings—but the sheer mass of knowledge exerted an overwhelming suppression effect.

Enough books and even the gaudiest room beca a cathedral.

The original Hathaway had grown up with a personal loot vault and spent her ti reading fashion magazines and playing video gas in the living room upstairs.

You unforgivable wastrel. The internal verdict was swift and rciless. You were sitting on a strategic arsenal and using it as ambient decor.

"And to think, you never even wanted to co down here before," Margaret teased, balancing Rory against one shoulder with the absent ease of long practice.

"I've reconsidered my priorities," Hathaway said smoothly, already moving toward the nearest shelf like a starving mouse that had just fallen face-first into a heavily fortified national grain silo.

Anna walked her through the exploration log wall: thirty years of outer-plane field manuscripts, law-suppression chanics of low-magic worlds, shallow-abyssal ecology docuntation, and—delivered in a tone of perfect professional neutrality—"the most effective rhetorical scripts for scamming local False Gods."

A dialogue-tree guide for passing speech checks against regional bosses? Hathaway's eyes lit up. That is incredibly practical. Swindling the local pantheon out of their loot is absolutely a core part of the open-world RPG experience. I am definitely bookmarking that one.

She ran her fingers lightly across the worn leather spines.

This is thirty years of my mothers physically walking across the multiverse. First-hand data of conquered stars. She hadn't even left the White City since arriving in this world, but looking at these shelves, the sheer, staggering scale of the Witch Empire finally felt real. One day, she thought. I'm going to write my own exploration logs and put them on this wall.

The Experience Books wall took longer to explain.

Abysmally low production yield, catastrophic enchantnt difficulty, each one spawning a virtual ntor inside your ntal landscape who would teach you while you slept—architectural texts could dismantle and reassemble a fortress inside your mind, brick by brick, while your body rested.

Hathaway’s eyes imdiately locked onto the shelf.

Having experienced the ga-changing benefit of Victoria’s personal tutoring, she understood exactly how broken a "virtual ntor" system was. I am absolutely coming back to read all of these.

A random utility title started at fifty thousand Solars on the open market. Here, they didn't just have one; they had an entire, densely packed shelf of them.

None of that made her brain stutter.

At the center of the hall, on an obsidian pedestal that levitated slowly and silently on no visible support, wrapped in four layered mana chains, sat a single dark-gold grimoire.

Anna's voice carried genuine reverence for the first ti all evening.

"One of the foundational cornerstones of the entire Ludwig bloodline. A Legendary-tier spell. [Luxurious Dispel Magic]."

Legendary.

Hathaway’s breath caught. She knew exactly what that classification ant in the real economy.

A month ago, she had seen an actual High Witch—an elite master of Evocation—working as a high-end hostess at The Witch's House. Elise was navigating the cutthroat social battlefield of the White City, charming Inner Sea aristocrats and hustling for lab investnts, all to grind 514,500 exchange points for Heidi Lucent's [Greater Ti Stop].

It was a grueling, decade-long hustle of pride-swallowing networking just for a fraction of a chance to study a book of this tier.

"As long as a Ludwig reaches the High Witch tier and shows sufficient talent, the main branch grants them access to this," Margaret explained casually. "They reserve the other Legendary spells for the absolute inner circle, of course. But this is our baseline. Even Anna was permitted to study it when we married."

Hathaway stared at the dark-gold cover.

Her Earth-born soul held a brief, deeply respectful mont of silence for the independent Witches out there grinding exchange points in the White City.

So, a brilliant Evoker spends decades pouring vintage wine and networking just to earn one Legendary spell.

And here, it’s just a standard spouse-inclusion benefit for the family trust.

The working-class sympathy lasted exactly one second. The VIP gar took over.

I didn't just skip the tutorial, Hathaway realized, staring at the ultimate endga loot sitting casually in her basent. I was born with the server admin codes. I am the Pay-to-Win anomaly.

Here, this lifeti-defining goal for independent elites was just sitting down here, levitating between an experience book on deep-sea ecology and what appeared to be a collection of annotated False God autopsy reports.

Margaret lifted a crystal lockbox next: Tier-7 [Polymorph: Dragon], a complete skill tree progressing from Tier-3 Partial Dragonification all the way to Tier-7 True Dragon Incarnation. The exact spell she had used to impersonate the Abyssal Dragon in Guregus.

Hathaway stared at the lockbox.

Turning into a dragon. It was the ultimate, undeniable romantic fantasy of any gar. But her min-maxing instincts imdiately vetoed the impulse.

First, there was the pilot issue. Polymorphing ant swapping her human operating system into a completely foreign biological chassis. Managing four massive limbs, wings, a tail, and draconic aerodynamics completely clashed with her current 'Stationary Artillery' Fire-specialist build. She was a turret; she stood on two feet and blasted things from a distance with infinite mana. Diverting massive amounts of cognitive bandwidth to learn how to fly and dogfight as a giant lizard was incredibly inefficient.

Second, and far more importantly: she knew the ultimate version of this exact skill tree existed, and its creator was currently in her social orbit.

Heidi Lucent, the 10th Seat. The greatest Transmutation genius in recorded history. Heidi's signature move was a Legendary-tier Dragon Polymorph. The Ludwig family's version was a phenonal, top-tier asset, but compared to the core inheritance of a Grand Witch, it was just the 'Standard Edition.'

If you're going to be a dragon, you hold out for the best DLC on the server. She ntally filed the lockbox away under 'Do Not Touch' and looked back up, her expression a mask of polite, unimpressed neutrality.

Margaret paused.

Presenting a Tier-7 Dragon Polymorph and receiving a blank, unbothered blink was clearly not the reaction she had anticipated. To a veteran show-off, this lack of awe was a direct challenge to her theatrical capabilities.

Then Margaret's expression shifted.

The proud flexing dissolved into sothing else entirely—a very specific grin, conspiratorial and faintly dangerous, the grin of soone who had been waiting all evening to play their best card.

"But the true heirloom," she said, lowering her voice to an actual hush, "is over here."

She walked to the back wall. A reinforced safe behind four layers of maximum-security encryption runes.

She pressed her palm to the reader with the ceremonial weight of soone unlocking a dynastic legacy. The door swung open.

From the depths of the velvet-lined interior, a very specific, very unmistakable, aggressively fluorescent pink glow spilled out into the dim library.

Hathaway squinted against the neon glare.

Whatever was inside, it clearly commanded a higher security clearance than a Legendary spell that could buy a small country.

She braced herself for the ultimate, server-crashing forbidden magic.