Seven Sins System Chapter 826. A Tragic Prince
Seven Sins System Chapter 826. A Tragic Prince
I almost cried.
Almost.
Not because this made me sad in the poetic way. No. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t standing in Mamon’s office having a dramatic emotional breakdown under market projections and infernal fluorescent lights. I still had dignity. Somewhere. Probably buried under three centuries of trauma and unpaid overtime.
No, I almost cried because I realized something horrifying.
I used to be pitiful.
Like really pitiful.
My dad spent centuries doing whatever he wanted, messing around with succubi, enjoying himself like a man who outsourced consequences to fate.
Meanwhile me? His son? The Lord of Wrath? I worked myself to the core. Filing reports. Handling soul flow. Managing punishments. Negotiating with execution pits that kept exceeding capacity because apparently mortals discovered new creative ways to ruin each other every decade.
Poor me.
Truly.
A tragic prince.
A victim of administrative abuse.
I pitied myself so hard I almost wanted to summon a chair and sit dramatically by a window.
“Human, what are you doing here?”
The voice snapped me out of my very noble self-pity.
I turned slowly.
One of Mamon’s staff stood a few paces away from me.
Accountant? Chief accountant? Secretary? All of them looked the same after a while. Dead-eyed, sleep-deprived, spiritually taxed, and dressed like they had been born inside a ledger.
This one had eye bags so deep they could qualify as minor valleys. In one hand, he held a presentation pointer. In the other, a thick book of accounting that looked heavy enough to kill a horse.
Weapon.
Greed demons usually weaponized objects related to money, calculation, or financial suffering. Pens. Ledgers. Coins. Contract scrolls. Audit stamps. Calculators blessed by despair.
This guy chose a pointer and an accounting book.
Annoying, but respectable.
I tilted my head.
“Human?” I repeated.
My tone dropped.
Just enough.
He stared at me with the same dead eyes.
“Yes.”
Oh.
Wrong answer.
A ripple moved through my back.
My tentacles slid out slowly, six dark shapes unfurling behind me with lazy menace. Their tips sharpened, not fully into blades, but enough that the air around them understood consequences.
I looked at him coldly.
“Who,” I asked softly, “are you calling human?”
The accountant blinked once.
Then his gaze shifted.
Tentacles.
Aura.
Face.
Recognition finally booted up.
“Oh,” he said flatly. “The prince.”
Then he bowed.
Not panicked.
Not terrified.
Just tired.
“Forgive me.”
That somehow annoyed me more.
Do you know how dead inside you have to be to mistake a lord of Wrath for a mortal, then apologize like you misplaced a receipt?
He straightened again. “Do you want me to wake Lord Mamon?”
I looked past him toward Mamon, still collapsed over the desk like capitalism had finally claimed him.
“What happened?” I asked. “Is this normal?”
The assistant or secretary, or senior accountant of despair, shifted the accounting book under one arm.
“Lately, yes.”
That was not comforting.
“There have been imbalances in soul flow,” he continued. “Some Damned Souls who should have been converted into soul coins or processed as trade commodities have disappeared.”
I stared at him.
“Disappear?”
“Yes.”
“Like leaks?”
“No evidence of leakage.”
“Thieves?”
“No trace of intrusion.”
“Crazy hungry demons?”
He blinked again.
“Not impossible, but unlikely.”
I frowned.
This was Mamon’s domain. Greed doesn’t lose track of assets. Not souls. Not coins. Not dust under the desk if it has resale value.
If souls were disappearing here?
That wasn’t small.
“Then what?” I asked.
A voice came from behind me.
“It wasn’t stealing, El.”
I turned.
Mamon had woken up.
Barely.
He lifted his head from the desk like a corpse remembering it had quarterly obligations. His hair was slightly disheveled, glasses crooked, one cheek faintly imprinted with the edge of a document.
He put his glasses back on with visible irritation.
“It just disappeared.”
His voice was flat.
Hoarse.
Annoyed.
Very annoyed.
Which for Mamon meant this was catastrophic.
He glanced at his assistant.
“Coffee.”
A pause.
“Strong.”
The assistant nodded immediately. “Of course, Lord Mamon.”
He turned and left with the precision of someone who had made emergency coffee for a financial god more times than emotionally healthy.
I watched him go, then looked back at Mamon.
“Tell me.”
Mamon didn’t answer verbally.
He picked up his tablet, tapped twice, swiped once, then threw it toward me without warning.
One of my tentacles snapped out and caught it mid-air.
I glanced at him.
He was already rubbing the bridge of his nose like existence was an unpaid invoice.
I lowered my gaze to the screen.
Report.
Soul Flow Loss Summary.
My eyes moved quickly.
Dates.
Batches.
Domains.
Conversion points.
Processing errors.
Missing entries.
At first, I expected hundreds.
Maybe a few anomalies.
Maybe a suspicious cluster.
Then I saw the total.
Thousands.
My expression went still.
Oh, that was bad.
Really bad.
Thousands of damned souls missing from Greed’s processing stream.
That wasn’t a leak.
That was a hemorrhage.
For mortals, thousands might just be a tragedy number. A statistic. Something they hear on news and forget after dinner.
For Hell?
Thousands of souls meant currency imbalance. Punishment delay. Domain overflow. Contract debt. Trade disruption. Judgment mismatch.
It was like someone taking entire shipments of gold from a royal treasury and somehow leaving no footprints.
I slowly looked up from the tablet.
“Mamon.”
He leaned back in his chair, eyes half-lidded but sharp.
“Yes.”
“This is not small.”
“No,” he said dryly. “Thank you for the analysis, Wrath.”
I ignored the jab.
“When did it start?”
He lifted one hand slightly.
“Several weeks ago. Minor discrepancies at first. Small enough to be dismissed as routing errors.”
I looked back at the report.
“And now?”
“Now,” he said, voice colder, “someone is removing souls before my system can classify them.”
I felt my tentacles twitch.
Before classification.
Before record finalization.
That sounded familiar.
Too familiar.
I thought of the chamber in the mortal realm.
Trapped ex-mortal souls.
No celestial registry.
No underworld intake.
Intercepted before judgment.
My jaw tightened.
“They’re taking them.”