The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 738

The pill went into production on Tuesday.

Beatrix stood at the head of the line, sleeves shoved up, lab smell still clinging to her hair.

The Mana Affinity Pill was powder first — a formula meant to be swallowed, pulling the mana already drifting in the air straight into whoever took it, sharpening their reach for it instead of the person having to hunt for it themselves.

She weighed the first batch by hand. Twenty grams. Forty. Four hundred.

Then every line came alive behind her — four hundred pills an hour, each one, running clean.

She stared at the readout like it might change on her. "It's holding. Every batch. Exactly the same."

"You sound surprised."

“There has never been a pill like this here before.” Beatrix looked at the sticker Alex was working on.

"I watched you burn through four hundred failed talismans before this worked." She looked up at him.

Alex rubbed his jaw. "Took long enough to find a formula that wouldn't break down at scale."

The second product came off a different line an hour later. The Regent Boosting Sticker — grey paper, thumbnail-sized, meant to be pressed onto a tool or a machine instead of swallowed by a person, feeding ambient mana straight into whatever it was stuck to. The mark on it was stamped by machine now instead of drawn by hand. Beatrix picked one off the belt, turned it in the light.

"Two products in one week." She held the pill up in one hand, the sticker in the other. "Mana Affinity Pill. Regent Boosting Sticker."

"You hate the names."

"I love them. They're boring." She set both back down. "Boring is what makes people believe it isn't magic. It's just... better."

...

By Wednesday, every other line in the building had gone dark.

Textiles. Housewares. The tool division that had kept Regent afloat for eleven years. All of it stopped — workers reassigned, floor space cleared, every resource in the company pointed at the pill, the sticker, and nothing else.

The board hated it.

"You're betting the entire company," one of them said, in a meeting Alex sat through without saying a word. "On two items that didn't exist a week ago."

"Yes," Beatrix said. "If you don't like it, you can always resign."

The room went quiet. Every eye on her.

"We're only thinking of what's best for this company," the director said. "If this fails—"

"It won't."

...

Thursday morning, the ad spend went out — and broke a rule Regent had followed for six years.

Twenty million a month, across every product. Steady. Safe. Never questioned.

Alex tripled it with one signature.

"Sixty million." The marketing director read the order twice, like a second look might change the number. "For this month's budget?"

"For two products," Alex said.

...

Friday: a trickle. A few thousand units. The marketing director paced holes into the carpet.

Saturday morning, the servers crashed twice before nine.

By Saturday night, Regent was the most searched word in the Arcanum State. People who had never cared about industrial tooling argued online over whether a scrap of paper stuck to a machine could actually pull power out of thin air.

It could.

Whether the Mana Affinity Pill was even real, whether swallowing something could really change how much mana a person could draw — didn't matter anymore. People wanted it. For themselves. For their kids. For whatever future it promised them.

Everyone who bought either one found out within a day.

After that, it wasn't two products. It was a sensation.

...

Ferrowgate's stock opened Monday and didn't stop falling until the exchange called a halt at noon.

Silas Kessler watched it happen from his glass office, hands folded, face doing nothing at all.

"Lowest print in company history," an aide said, like Kessler couldn't read a number himself.

"I can see that."

"Sir, the board wants—"

"I know what the board wants."

The number didn't move him. Not on the outside. But he sat there long after the aide left, still watching the screen, and something behind his eyes went cold and very, very still.

...

The real damage wasn't the stock. It was the customers.

A man with a twelve-year-old Ferrowgate cargo lift bought one Regent Boosting Sticker for eleven dollars, pressed it to the frame — and watched the lift start hauling loads it had never been rated for. He didn't need Ferrowgate's new model. He needed a sheet of paper.

Multiply that by every warehouse, every factory floor, every farm in the State running a Ferrowgate tool past its warranty.

Ferrowgate's new-line sales dropped fifty percent in eleven days.

Cash flow didn't slow. It stopped.

...

The emergency board meeting ran four hours. Kessler let his people talk for three of them before he said a word.

"We can't out-manufacture him," a director said. "Can't out-advertise him. Can't out-price a sticker that costs eleven dollars to make and does everything his product does."

"Then what can we do?"

Silence.

"Which towers can we buy?" Alex asked.

Beatrix blinked. "Buy?"

"Bring onto our side. Whichever word you like better."

She sat across from him and started counting on her fingers, like she'd already run this math a hundred times in her head and only needed to say it once out loud.

"Red and Black are gone. Kessler's owned them for over a decade — you couldn't outbid that loyalty with the whole Regent treasury."

"Yellow?"

Beatrix went still.

"Yellow is the tower my uncle hired." Her voice dropped. "Thirty of them. They're the ones who died in that factory with him."

Alex said nothing.

"So no," she said. "Yellow isn't a possibility. Yellow is a grave we dug together."

"That leaves three."

"White. Blue. Green." She set the names down like cards on a table. "None of them like us yet. None of them hate us either. That's the best you get today."

...

Alex spent the day reading everything Regent had on all three.

White had neither. White was small. White was poor. Fewest certified magicians of any tower in the union. Fewest followers. A reputation — mostly true — for taking the students no one else wanted.

...

"White," Alex said, on the third morning.

Beatrix looked at him like he'd spoken a different language.

"White," she repeated.

"That's the one."

"Alex." She set down her tile. "They're the weakest tower in the country. Fewest followers of the seven. If you're trying to buy weight to throw against Red and Black, White doesn't have any weight to throw."

"I know."

"Then why them?"

Alex smiled — not a kind smile, the smile of a man who'd already finished the math and was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

"We're not going to support the tower," he said.

Beatrix waited.

"We're going to buy it."