Chapter 6 Chapter 6: A Buying Spree and a Market Cornered

[A regional penalty event has been triggered.]

Beside the floating red hourglass, scarlet text kept flashing, over and over.

"My Life Points where did ten of my Life Points just GO?!"

The man in the suit hadn't even finished shouting before he seized up. His eyes rolled back, thick white foam poured from his mouth, and his hands clawed at his own throat, nails digging deep enough to draw blood.

Under three seconds.

His body dissolved starting from the feet, breaking apart into countless motes of white light that scattered into the murky air and vanished completely. All that was left on the ground was an empty suit and a handful of real-world coins, rolling across the stone with a hollow rattle.

The crowd around him tipped straight into chaos.

Some dropped to their knees, kowtowing at the sky hard enough to split their foreheads open. Others tore through their own pockets, desperate for anything tradeable. A few lunged straight at the people next to them, grabbing and fighting over whatever meager supplies anyone still had.

"Boss... he's just gone!"

Duke stumbled back a half-step, his bulk slamming into the safe-zone barrier hard enough to send ripples through it. He glanced at his own panel and went pale as a sheet.

"What's everyone panicking for?"

Julian dug at his ear, flicked the dust off his fingertip.

He checked his own panel. He'd banked thousands of points off the last two fights ten points meant nothing to him. But he understood exactly what it meant for someone who hadn't even managed to land a hit on a level-1 rabbit.

The system wouldn't run a game engineered for guaranteed death. If base points were bleeding out daily, there had to be a way to refill them. And the big guilds absolutely would not let an opportunity like that go to waste.

"Let's go check the black market."

Julian started walking.

A wide clearing sat on the east side of the camp, now packed wall-to-wall with improvised stalls a trading district that had sprung up out of nothing.

The air reeked of sweat, blood, and panic.

A gaunt man stood on a busted wooden crate, waving a fistful of jagged weeds, spitting as he shouted.

"Low-grade bloodroot! Risked my neck pulling this off the cliffs out back! One plant restores ten health and bumps your Life Points! Fifty plants left, five points apiece, no haggling! You're desperate, you pay up now!"

A crowd of hundreds stood below him, every eye bloodshot.

"Five points?! That's robbery! The shop lists it at one!"

A kid in a school uniform bounced on his heels, tears welling up.

The gaunt man sneered, waving the weeds inches from the kid's face.

"Shop price is real, sure but can you actually buy any? Ten minutes after launch, the big guilds cleaned out every unit of stock. There's a hundred thousand people crammed in this camp and not one scrap of potion left to loot off a monster. Too pricey? Fine. Go ahead and die, then."

The kid bit through his own lip, blood running down his chin, and pulled up his panel with shaking hands, trading away five Life Points for the withered plant.

He shoved it into his mouth and swallowed whole. His health bar and his point total ticked up by exactly one notch.

Duke's jaw flexed as he watched.

"Boss, these guys are straight-up bloodsuckers. Five points of somebody's life for one weed."

Julian didn't answer.

He studied the gaunt man, and System Loophole's passive grid snapped up on its own.

[Target: Milo Grissom Independent Player]

[Status: Hoarding and price-gouging. Contracted through a shell crew of the Ashcroft Vanguard, currently reselling low-cost herbs at markup.]

The Ashcroft Vanguard. Vivian's people.

Julian ran the math fast in his head.

Big guilds cornering basic resources, jacking prices, wringing lower-tier players dry that trick worked fine in the real world. In here, it was outright lethal. Regular players bled Life Points daily, couldn't earn enough farming monsters to keep pace, and got forced into buying garbage herbs for a fraction of what they needed just to stay alive. These guilds were profiting off the dying.

"Duke, hold position here. I've got something to handle."

Julian turned and slipped into an empty side alley.

He leaned against a moss-slick wall and pulled up the system display.

"Activate the Eternal Star Core."

A dark blue halo lit up across his chest, his heartbeat syncing for a moment with some rhythm far older than his own body.

[Privilege Three activated: One daily-store item forcibly reduced to 10% of listed price.]

Julian swiped fast through the interface, dropping down to the basic consumables tab.

[Low-Grade Bloodroot: Unlimited system stock. Price: 1 Life Point.]

Guilds could empty the shelves in seconds because they had enough banked Life Points to convert from real-world cash. But underneath it all, the base resources in the system shop restocked infinitely only the refresh rate was gated by the system.

"Target locked: Low-Grade Bloodroot. Adjust price."

[Confirmed. Modification applied. Current price: 0.1 Life Points.]

Julian glanced at his balance. After everything the boss fight, the cave detour he was sitting at 4,076 Life Points.

Without hesitating, he keyed in a quantity: 20,000.

[2,000 Life Points deducted. Purchase successful. 20,000 units of Low-Grade Bloodroot added to inventory.]

His balance cut in half instantly, and he didn't so much as blink.

In a landlord's math, the guy too scared to bet big only ever gets to pick up someone else's leftovers. He was going to turn those two thousand points back into ten times that, with interest.

Julian walked out of the alley and back to the trading district.

Milo was still hoarse from shouting, but his stock had thinned to almost nothing. Some of the players around him who couldn't afford it had already collapsed to the ground, waiting to die.

Julian walked to the spot directly across from Milo's stall, pulled a battered tarp from his inventory, and spread it flat on the ground.

"Duke. Bring the crates."

Duke scrounged up two empty wooden boxes and stacked them into a makeshift counter.

Julian stood behind it and flicked his wrist.

SHHHK.

A mountain of cheap, earthy-smelling herbs spilled out of nowhere, piling up on the tarp in a heap of lush green stark against the gray dirt of the camp.

Every conversation nearby died on the spot.

Hundreds of bloodshot eyes locked onto the pile. People swallowed audibly.

The wilted weed in Milo's hand slipped from his fingers. His eyes bulged as he stared at the mound.

"That's that's impossible! The guilds cleared every scrap of herb around this camp! Where did you get all that?!"

Julian ignored him completely and shouted at the top of his lungs.

"Low-grade bloodroot! Two Life Points a plant! Plenty to go around, take as much as you need! Form a line anybody who cuts gets thrown out!"

The words dropped into the black market like a grenade into a septic tank.

"Two?! It's actually TWO?!"

"Brother! Please! I've got twenty points saved, give me ten of those!"

The crowd surged forward like a stampede.

"LINE UP! Everybody get in line right NOW! Anybody crowds my boss's stall, I split your skull with this rod!"

Duke roared, slamming the rat-blood-crusted rebar into the ground hard enough to crack the stone.

At six-foot-three, wrapped in venom-scarred rat-leather armor, he looked less like a bouncer and more like some kind of enforcer god the crowd froze on the spot.

A line snaked out and out, farther than anyone could see the end of it.

Julian's fingers flew across the display.

Take payment, hand off goods. Two points. Two points. Two points.

His Life Points ticked upward at a dizzying rate.

Across the way, Milo sat frozen, completely gutted. His five-point-a-plant stock half a day's worth of hoarded product was now worthless. Not a single person in line even glanced his way.

He gritted his teeth, shoved through the crowd, and stormed up to Julian's stall.

"You're wrecking the whole market! You know the rules around here?! Prices in this camp are set by the Ashcroft Vanguard! You think you can just torch our income stream? You're begging for trouble!"

Milo reached down to flip the tarp over.

Julian didn't even look up. The Ratfang dagger flashed once and pinned itself into the edge of the tarp the blade landing a half-inch from Milo's fingers.

The cold gleam off the blade raised the hair on the back of Milo's hand.

"Rules?" Julian rolled a Life Point orb between his fingers, voice bored. "In this spot, I sell, people buy. That's the only rule that applies. The reason your stock's dead weight is because you got greedy. Not satisfied? We can step outside the safe zone and settle it."

Milo's eyes flicked from the bloodstained dagger to Duke's murderous stare, and his legs went visibly weak.

PvP was locked down inside the safe zone but the second you crossed that light barrier, you were on your own. He was a small-time reseller. Ten lives wouldn't be enough to make him pick a fight with a man carrying black-iron steel and a look that said he'd already killed today.

"You you just wait! Chairwoman Ashcroft's not gonna let this slide!"

Milo scrambled off through the crowd to spread the word.

Julian didn't spare him another glance, head back down, still collecting payment.

An old man near the front limping, clothes threadbare pulled off his last remaining shirt and held it out.

"Son, I got nothing left to trade. Would you take this for half a plant? My daughter's about to hit zero." His voice shook on every word.

Julian looked up at the pale, shrinking girl standing behind him.

He didn't take the shirt. Instead he grabbed two plants of bloodroot and pressed them straight into the old man's hand.

"Keep your shirt. I don't deal in junk."

"This this isn't right!" the old man protested.

"Call it a four-point tab. You find anything good later, you bring it to me first." Julian waved the next person forward.

This wasn't charity.

Undercutting the Ashcroft Vanguard's prices this hard was going to draw heat from the big guilds no matter what. He needed the lower-tier players tied to his own interests, not theirs.

These people could barely afford to eat right now. But if they survived, they'd turn into the most loyal foot soldiers and intelligence network he could ask for.

Half a day passed.

The green mountain on the tarp had vanished down to nothing.

The last player in line thanked him half a dozen times before shuffling off.

Julian leaned against the crate and rubbed at his sore wrist.

He pulled up the panel.

[Life Points Available: 42,076]

Forty-two thousand and change.

At a stage where 99% of the camp couldn't scrape together ten points, he was sitting on enough capital to buy out half the starter zone.

"Boss, we're RICH! We actually hit it big!"

Duke leaned in, staring at the string of digits, grinning wide enough to show his back teeth.

"That's pocket change. The real show hasn't even started."

Julian tapped the crate twice with his fingertips.

He didn't look up, but System Loophole's grid had already swept the full fifty-meter radius around them.

Thirty meters off to the left, tucked in shadow, stood three men not in starter cloth, but matching light leather armor. Positioned in a loose pincer, hands resting on weapon hilts, eyes locked on Julian like snakes waiting to strike. The regular players around them scattered on sight of the leather armor, like they were avoiding a plague.

[Target: Grady Voss Enforcement Captain, Ashcroft Vanguard]

[Level: 3]

[Status: Ordered to

detain target for market disruption. Lock confirmed.]

Julian slid the dagger back into his inventory and dusted off his shorts.

"Duke. Break down the stall. Looks like we've got a big client here to collect protection money.”