Chapter 2
Even after delivering that line through the door crack with what I felt was genuine flair, the moment I actually had to pull the blast door open wide enough to conduct business, cold sweat broke out across my back.
I couldn't be blamed for the nerves. What was standing outside was, after all, a dozen creatures, any one of which could reduce me to ribbons without breaking a sweat.
I drew a slow breath, pushed the door open to a gap roughly half a meter wide, and gripped the blinking scanner like it was the only thing keeping me alive.
The Brute at the front — the one the size of a truck — immediately stepped forward. It was so tall it had to hunch its massive, mountain-of-flesh back just to fit its head down to door-gap level. To get its oversized face close enough to look through, it clasped both enormous hands behind its back, the image somehow perfectly resembling a schoolboy standing in the corner as punishment.
Hot, rancid breath washed over me. I swallowed the nausea and raised the scanner toward its vein-mapped forehead.
Trigger squeezed.
Beep —
[Target Scan: Tier-1 Mutant (Brute Type)]
[Counterparty Request (Offering): 30 kg Frozen Meat (any variety)]
[Counterparty Payment (Reward): Attribute Point: Strength +20 / Special Ability: Intermediate Titan Strength]
[Does Host agree to this transaction?]
"Agreed. Obviously agreed!"
I spun toward the shelving units behind me. With [Agility +10] in play, I moved like a monkey — fluid, effortless. I grabbed three ten-kilogram boxes of frozen pork ribs from the bottom shelf and kicked them across the smooth floor toward the door gap.
The instant the Brute caught sight of the food, a raw, bestial rumble rose from deep in its throat, one enormous hand beginning to swing down.
"Back of the line! Take the meat and go!" The command came out of my mouth before I could stop it.
The second it left my lips, I regretted it. What was I doing, dressing down a Brute?
But what happened next was surreal. Under the absolute suppression of the Abyss Law, the creature physically choked back its roar. With painstaking care, it used two thick fingers to pinch the three crates of frozen meat — the way you'd pick up three small crackers — and then gave me a deep, solemn bow.
[Transaction complete! Reward has been delivered.]
Boom.
A black mist — far denser and more violent than the night before — tore free from the Brute's body and slammed into my chest.
If last night's agility boost had felt like a satisfying, full-body stretch, this was something else entirely: brute-force renovation, with no regard for comfort. A thousand tiny tearing sounds erupted across every inch of my body. I could feel my arms — thin and hollow before — inflating like balloons being filled with concrete. Veins rose under my skin like dark green serpents. My bones groaned and cracked as they restructured themselves, fortifying, thickening.
I gasped for air and looked down.
My thermal underlayer, once baggy and loose, was now straining against my arms and chest as though it might split at any moment.
I bent down and grabbed an iron crate beside me — the kind used to hold whole Argentine beef legs, packed to a hundred and twenty jin. Yesterday, hauling one of these had taken every ounce of strength I had, dragging and heaving just to move it a meter.
Now, I picked it up with three fingers.
Light. Like lifting a box of tissues.
Strength +20, compounded by the [Intermediate Titan Strength] ability. Riding the wave of exhilaration, I drove my fist into the aluminum alloy shelving unit beside me. A thunderous clang rang out, and when I pulled my hand back, a dent a full two inches deep was pressed into the load-bearing metal column.
"Next!" My eyes were blazing. My voice trembled with excitement.
The Stone-Armored Mutant second in line immediately shuffled forward and extended its head — encrusted with angular rock plates — toward the gap.
Beep —
[Target Scan: Tier-1 Mutant (Stone-Armor Type)]
[Counterparty Request: 20 kg Frozen Meat]
[Counterparty Payment: Attribute Point: Constitution +15 / Special Ability: Novice Petrified Skin]
[Transaction complete!]
Twenty kilograms of frozen meat went out, another wave of black mist came in. No tearing sensation this time — just a profound, bone-deep solidity settling through me. I looked at my hands and noticed a faint, barely-there gray sheen across the surface of my skin. I picked up the utility knife I used for opening crates and dragged the blade hard across the back of my hand.
No split skin, no blood. Just a grating, tooth-edge friction sound — and not even a white mark on the skin afterward.
In a wasteland where you could lose your life at any given second, this kind of impervious, armor-plated sense of security was more addictive than any drug on the market.
"Next!"
Third in line was a Night Fiend, crouched low to the ground, radiating a smell that I had long since given up trying not to register.
Beep —
[Target Scan: Tier-1 Mutant (Night Fiend Type)]
[Counterparty Request: 10 kg Lamb Ribs]
[Counterparty Payment: Attribute Point: Perception +10 / Special Ability: Infrared Vision]
[Transaction complete!]
The moment the lamb ribs left my hands, a mild burning sensation passed across my retinas. I blinked on instinct — shut, then snapped open.
The world had changed.
The dim storage corridor was gone. In its place, my entire field of vision had shifted into a thermal imaging display, like the kind you'd see through a high-tech military monocle in a film. Through the thick cardboard of the crates, I could see a fat rat in the corner — radiating a faint, steady red glow — gnawing placidly at packaging material. The mutants beyond the door burned like deep crimson flames. Every shadow and every corner of the underground complex was now laid bare.
The darkness held no more secrets.
I looked at the creatures lined up outside — the same ones that had, days ago, nearly made me lose control of my bladder — and found that my gaze had shifted entirely. I was looking at them the way a merchant looks at delivery men bearing gifts.
These creatures, whose daily existence before had amounted to gnawing on corpses and killing each other for scraps, had formed an orderly queue outside my cold storage. They didn't care about money. They didn't care whether the meat had expired. As long as it was meat, they were willing to hand over the most valuable thing inside them — their abilities — in exchange.
A few crates of cheap frozen meat, and what came back was superhuman capability. The most terrifying part: the Abyss Contract System seemed to have absolutely no cap on how many times it could stack.
For the next solid half hour, I became the most efficient, most ruthless backroom dealer the wasteland had ever seen.
Beep!
Agility +5! Novice Bone Reinforcement! — Meat out.
Beep!
Strength +8! Acoustic Capture! — Meat out.
Beep!
Constitution +10! — Meat out.
Scan. Push meat. Absorb ability. Repeat. In this absurd underground trading post, I was riding the feedback loop of accelerating power with pure, undiluted joy. From a scrawny, sleep-deprived night-shift stockman who couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag, I was visibly, rapidly transforming into something that no longer resembled a human being in any conventional sense.
At some point I decided the thermal underlayer was getting in the way. I tore it off with one hand, exposing the granite-slab muscle architecture underneath. I flexed my fingers, felt the shadow coiling at my fingertips, felt the stone-hard density sleeping beneath my skin, and looked out at the world through eyes that could see through darkness — and something flooded my brain that I had no name for. Not quite pride. Not quite madness. Something in between.
I still had a hundred thousand tons of stock.
If I wanted to, I could trade myself into something genuinely divine inside this cold storage.
Three days later.
I was still riding the high of becoming stronger, scanner raised toward the next mutant dog wagging its tail eagerly at the door, when —
BOOM.
A deafening explosion tore through the air from the floor above — the ground-level underground parking structure. The earth heaved. Several ventilation shaft covers directly above my head were shaken loose and crashed to the floor.
That was not a mutant ramming a door. That was the sound of high-purity C4 demolition charges.
The outer-layer alloy security shutter — the one designed to stop vehicles — had been ripped open from the outside with savage, blunt force.
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!!!
The sharp, rattling burst of automatic rifle fire shattered the quiet of the underground corridor. Through my infrared vision, tactical flashlight beams sliced through the darkness like thrown blades.
The low-tier mutants that had been standing patiently at the far end of the queue — they didn't even get to understand what was happening. Dense steel-core armor-piercing rounds turned them into sieves before they could react. They crumpled, screaming, into spreading pools of blood.
"Stay in line! Who the hell told you to move?!" The shout was out of my mouth before I'd even processed what I was seeing.
Then my pupils contracted.
The ones being killed were my customers.
The ones shattering my quiet development hours — were human.
Heavy, clattering tactical boots descended the stairwell. Crude, shouted voices carried down the corridor.
"Christ, this dump is crawling with ugly bastards!"
"Captain! The armored door's half open — there's light! I'm picking up a smell — fresh meat, very fresh!"
"Ha! Boys, we're rich! Unfrozen meat in this wasteland?! Everyone goes in — males get cut up for monster bait, females stay for the boys to enjoy, and every goddamn thing of value gets stripped and hauled out!"
I stood behind the door crack.
The euphoria that had been swelling in my chest for three days turned to something cold and clean and very still.
Wasteland raiders. The kind of garbage that roamed the ruins with a handful of guns, treating every survivor they found as an opportunity.
Through the infrared, I counted seven heat signatures — fully armed, blazing red against the black — stepping over the bodies of my customers, rifles raised, converging on my half-open blast door.
