Chapter 61: The Flow of Money
First came the weapons.
Hide dumped twelve swords of varying quality and two pairs of jagged daggers onto the glass scanning bed. They clattered heavily against the surface, bearing the grime and chipped edges from the Ossian skeletons who had wielded them.
The scanning bed lit up immediately. A grid of green lasers swept horizontally across the pile, logging, categorizing, and weighing them in real-time.
Hide paused, reaching into his inventory again. He pulled out a small, teardrop-shaped pendant and set it carefully beside the pile of weapons. It was one of the random artifacts he had acquired while clearing the Black Castle.
He pointed his AAA ring at it.
A pale blue interface appeared over the pendant.
Item: Raindrop Pendant
Rank: E
Type: Artifact
Effect: Projects a localized micro-barrier that completely repels non-pressurized water. The user cannot get wet while wearing this item.
Hide stared at the description for a long moment. It was, objectively speaking, an entirely useless item for combat. Unless he planned on fighting a Lesser Calamity Lord in a light drizzle and was concerned about ruining his jacket, it offered absolutely no tactical advantage.
He tossed it onto the scanning bed with the rest of the pile.
Next, his inventory had almost gotten empty only leaving behind the items he had received as direct system rewards for leveling up. He compared their stats against the dungeon drops. It wasn’t even close. The system-issued weapons were pristine, better balanced, and hit considerably harder than the rusted, brittle armaments he had ripped from the skeletons.
He decided to keep only one weapon from the entire inventory. A short sword, roughly the length of his forearm. The blade was dark, slightly curved, and lacked a crossguard. It was perfectly balanced for throwing from a distance, but sturdy enough for close-quarters fighting if his primary weapon was knocked away.
He pointed the AAA ring to it and a similar window opened above it.
Item: Night Singer
Rank: B
Type: Weapon
Durability - 1000/1000
Attack power - 330
The stats were far better than the normal ones and it was a B rank so he kept it.
Then, he withdrew the centerpiece.
It was a jagged, heavy bone shaft, nearly a meter long, pulled directly from the corpse of the Lesser Calamity Lord. It radiated a faint, cold pressure, even now.
This was what he got as the main reward from clearing the spot Dungeon.
He set it gently on the center of the glass bed.
The green lasers swept over it. This time, the machine hummed louder, taking several seconds longer to process the dense, concentrated mana signature.
A holographic display flickered to life above the table.
[Appraisal Complete]
Items Logged:
12x Rusted Broadswords (E-Rank / Damaged)
2x Serrated Daggers (E-Rank / Slightly Damaged)
1x Raindrop Pendant (E-Rank Artifact)
1x Calamity Lord Bone Shaft (C-Rank Artifact)
Market Liquidation Value: 1,224,500 Credits
Action: [Sell All to NEA Reserves] / [List on Public Board]
Hide’s eyes locked onto the breakdown of the numbers.
The rusted swords, daggers, and the useless raindrop pendant had barely cracked twenty-four thousand credits combined.
The bone shaft alone was worth a staggering ’one point two million credits.’
Hide looked at the number. He had spent the last eighteen years of his life in Area 17, where a good month meant scraping together enough loose change to cover rent and the electric bill, and a bad month meant not having three meals a day.
The cheap jacket he was wearing had cost him two thousand credits, and paying for it had physically hurt.
He pressed [Sell All to NEA Reserves].
The glass bed hissed, the center retracting, and the entire pile vanished into the building’s internal sorting system. A second later, his NEA card chimed softly in his pocket. He didn’t even need to look at it to know the funds had transferred.
He walked out of the Selling Room with 1.2 million credits to his name.
His next stop was the 19th floor.
The raw materials floor was even louder than the main market, filled with the sharp, coppery scent of unrefined cores and monster parts. Hide ignored the displays of rare metals and went straight for the beast core vendors.
He had a five-star talent. He had a skill that required him to build a Phantom Court. To do that, he needed anchors.
He purchased five F-Rank Calamity Beast Cores and five E-Rank Calamity Beast Cores. The transaction was swift and brutally expensive—four hundred thousand credits vanished from his account in the blink of an eye. The vendor asked Hide if he had a storage device or he would like to buy one.
Fortunately enough, thanks to the system he would not need to buy a storage device. He could simply use his inventory.
Hide walked out of the Trade Center and stepped into the crisp, late-afternoon air of Area 5.
He found an empty bench near the edge of the NEA courtyard and sat down.
He pulled up his talent interface.
He reached out, resting his hand over one of the cores, and willed his talent to activate. He pictured the dark, suffocating energy that had filled the Black Castle. He tried to draw upon the power he had felt when he slaughtered the skeletons.
Nothing happened.
Hide frowned. He focused harder, trying to pull the ambient mana around him and convert it.
Still nothing.
The ambient mana flowing through the courtyard, the streets of Area 5, the air he was breathing—it was all standard, neutral energy. It was light, formless, and completely useless to him.
Dark Liege didn’t convert normal mana into dark mana. It required dark mana to function. And the real world didn’t have any. The only place dark mana existed in high enough concentrations to fuel his abilities was inside gates or near the areas were a recent Gate had materialized.
He couldn’t practice his talent on a park bench. He couldn’t forge a Phantom Court out of thin air.
Two months until the tournament, Hide thought, his jaw tightening slightly. And my strongest weapon is dead weight without a fuel source.
He needed a steady, controlled supply of dark mana. He needed a place where he could hunt, absorb, and experiment without the NEA tracking his every move, and without a twenty-four-hour spot dungeon collapse timer breathing down his neck.
He pulled out his communicator and tapped the search bar.
It took him less than thirty seconds to find what he was looking for.
’Public Gate Training Facility 1.’
It was located barely two blocks away, practically attached to the sprawling NEA headquarters complex. A facility filled entirely with Loop Gates—controlled environments that never closed, where the beasts regenerated, and where Exterminators went to train.
Hide had found where he was going to create his first army member. He walked to the Gate Training Facility not to far away from him.