Zack liked to be seen. Not for the flash of the lightning that surrounded him—that was merely the nature of his craft—but for the fixity of the eyes that followed him. When he descended upon the Solar Hall, the world seemed to tilt in his wake: torches flickered out before he passed, gold-laden dens trembled, and the voices of the court dropped as if observing a new and brutal liturgy. Behind the black veil that protected him, there was a smile as patient as it was dark. That smile was a map: pathways to power, shortcuts to fear, routes to worship.

  In the main hall, giant screens displayed his image—Zack walking among regimented ruins, carrying children who had just been "rescued." The images were carefully edited: sharp cuts, lighting that obscured details, and angels of smoke that transformed dust into a singularity. One did not see the fires he himself had ignited, nor the fists that hired mercenaries to ensure the spectacle. One saw the savior. One saw the hand that gathers the people. One saw the promise of order.

  "Sir Zack," whispered a counselor, his face slick with fear and caviar, "the clips… the squares are cheering. Your approval… it has surged."

  Zack tilted his head with the slow deliberation of a predator. His fingers, thin and marked by runic scars, traced a gesture in the air that was not of affability, but of calculation.

  "Excellent," he said, his voice smooth as oil. "The people love blood when it comes wrapped in bread. Give them enough bread, and they won't ask where it came from."

  On the periphery, the machinery hummed. They received bags of coins, small bonuses, the promise of repaired roofs. In exchange, groups of "people’s vigilantes"—militias Zack had sponsored with weapons and badges—made their rounds. The public discourse was simple: now the poor had the strength to avenge themselves. The narrative fed on legitimate resentment and transformed it into a tool. Where there was once hunger, there was now a licensed, patented fury.

  Zack saw no contradiction in this. He saw social science. When the most oppressed men and women tasted power—whether to break down the door of an old nobleman or to drag an administrator into the street—it revealed what he had always known: oppressor and oppressed were two sides of the same coin. The history of the Empire was a cycle, and he—Zack—was now pressing the button that accelerated the rotation.

  At the island theatrically named the "Salvation Fair," he descended from the podium accompanied by mid-ranking soldiers and distributed coins. Children surrounded him, wiping his boots with innocent hands. He picked one up and held it for the camera. The gesture paid off. The crowd roared. A new poster circulated the streets: Zack, the Redeemer.

  But in the shadows of that same market, another machine was in motion. Recruits wearing the uniforms of the "Saviors" headed to the homes of the wealthy. The so-called "Cleansing of Traces" was a technical euphemism: it was the name given to operations that burned financial records, destroyed contracts, and occasionally left noble families with specific "inconveniences." Ships full of merchandise burned for the cameras; entire villas were exposed as examples. For the people, the spectacle offered immediate moral satisfaction: seeing the arrogant reduced to the same level of misery justified the brutality.

  The first public execution was organized in the Sun Square, under the aegis of jurists he had previously corrupted. A banker—old, with the eyes of a horse—was forced to kneel. The staging was prophetic: leather bindings, a paper crown, and someone reading the sentence aloud. The crowd did not watch the reading in silence; they watched in catharsis. When the militia officer pulled the trigger of the local executioner—a man with a criminal record of theft, now proud and wearing new boots—the explosion was discreet, as clean as a machine. The banker’s body slumped. The public screamed. Someone tossed a coin to a crying child. The official press called it "the justice the people deserved."

  Zack watched from the palace, hands interlaced, while the King clapped mutely. The King was a shadow that permitted and fed; his laughter was cold. There, before that theater, the lesson became clear: no one would be punished for having hunger in a rotting womb. Punishment would be a bargaining chip—a mechanism that traded blood for popularity.

  However, what few narrated was what happened after the shouting: the face of the old servitude changed. Those who had broken a satin napkin with hurried pleasure returned to sleep with the same hungry exhaustion of the shanties. The impulse of violence filled a void for a night, but the next day, the same hand that had killed coveted a soft pillow. It was as if the palate of an oppressor was learned the moment one tasted the first ember. There is a human cruelty that transcends the throne; the small square had witnessed the conversion of victims into executioners in a process as natural as rain.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Zack noticed this and smiled. In his calculations, he added and subtracted: the people wanted power, and he gave it; in return, the people gave him legitimacy. The action was cyclical and perfect. It was tyranny with marketing.

  In the privacy of the palace corridors, he spoke with the captains of the Royal Guard and local lords. Always with the same circulating calm, he spoke of needs, of patches, and of the future that would sprout from beneath the fire.

  "Organize the sermons," he said one night, hands resting on a counter of obsidian. "Have the preachers speak of redemption. Take the children to the market. Talk to the blacksmiths. Make it clear: we rescued them, and therefore we must eliminate the corruption that was the root of the problem."

  The captains nodded like well-oiled automatons. They knew the orders involved favors, bribes, and inevitable executions. They also knew that in every square converted into a people's court, there was a new political asset: public opinion.

  Zack, however, was not merely the conductor of a social orchestra. He was a surgeon of emotions. He needed the poor to see him as a father so they would become obedient children. He needed the rich to be seen as guilty so the people would justify their own horror. Everything was a show that required the complicity of the audience to exist.

  One night, in a village to the south, he organized a "Bath of Mercy": a convoy brought bags of wheat and fuel; fires were lit in the granaries of local lords who, in the public narrative, would be accused of being "hoarders." The spectacle tested the ethics of the masses. The fire devoured documents and shelves; the so-called "popular leaders" distributed torches. The crackling sounded like music.

  As the smoke rose, a figure emerged from the flames: a poor woman, her hair singed and her eyes dry with rage. She climbed onto the rubble of the granary and raised a bloodied hand, as if offering the act itself as a sacrifice.

  "For us!" she bellowed, and the crowd echoed her.

  The scene, later edited and broadcast, became an icon—"The Woman Who Created Justice." The court reporters called it the "resurgence of the popular spirit."

  In a smaller hall, while the palace scribes typed reports, Zack received letters—requests, pleas, orders. Some came disguised as gratitude; others as hate. He answered them with clinical economy: coins, favors, a timely execution when necessary. Every action was measured. He knew that time would plant his footprints in the social memory. It was necessary to create heroes and demons. He needed, above all, for the crowd to pin his name to the former and burn the latter.

  In the streets, the transformation was harder to see. The poor man who killed over an old debt later looked at the face of the dead and saw a mirror. He discovered, ashamed, that the act had not cleansed his misery. On the contrary: it left a shadow over his own soul. Some took to drinking to drown the guilt; others laughed out of necessity. Brutality was not a monopoly of the throne: it was part of the social body.

  Zack, for his part, observed everything with the coldness of someone watching ants at a barbecue. He felt pleasure not only in the system’s efficacy, but in how much he could manipulate the moral fabric of men. He invented stories about justice, wrote speeches for priests, and funded charity networks that were born with clauses of adoration for him. He was generous with the visible hand of the people and lethal with the invisible hand of the powerful.

  On a night of acid rain, when the palace lights flickered like candles in a chamber, a messenger brought news: a group of youths led by a certain name—Theus Barack—still resisted in some remote point. There was a request, encrypted: "Let him be publicly humiliated." Zack tilted his face and smiled.

  "Do not kill him," he said, voicing a cold calculation. "Let him live. Let him be a symbol. Let him carry the burden. If we kill him, he dies anonymous. If we let him be, he will be the living memory of what failed."

  And so he imprisoned the legend of the survivor, feeding the theater. The man who had become the Savior equally needed a martyr who was not dead, so the people could compare them. He needed a Theus who breathed, as proof that the dream of the oppressed had been shattered.

  Zack went to bed shortly after, the entire palace at his feet like a game. He slept poorly: he dreamed of circuits burned in the shape of Venice and the feeling that, finally, the world could be reprogrammed in his image. He woke in the middle of the night with a low laugh—not of madness, but of conviction. That conviction told him he was making the history he wanted to read. That blood would be the ink. That order would be the poem.

  The next morning, when the city awoke, the squares were already singing. Zack returned to the streets and received hugs from people who, a few hours earlier, had begged him for mercy. Amid the applause, step by step, he grew greater. And beneath the podium, as he distributed bread and narratives, no one wanted to see that, in the dead of night, the hand that had placed them there was the same one that had sealed fates with leaden ink.

  The Lord of Sparks knew how to manipulate the demands of the flesh and the memory. He knew that hatred could be his most effective rationing. And as the banners of the Empire fluttered in the wind down below, the truth he planted was simple and cruel: giving power to those who have known hunger did not make them better—it only gave them the means to reproduce their own cruelty. And in the end, the dream of the oppressed becomes another, identical to that which had crushed them.