God of Zero Cost

Ethan did not move. He stood on the limestone floor of the barracks registry, his gaze fixed on the blunt bronze trowel in his right hand. The infinite durability metric glinted in his blurred vision like a cruel joke.

A slow, cold numbness crawled up his spine, followed immediately by a violent, throat-burning surge of pure fury that rattled the manual emergency levers of his capsule back in Chinatown. His real-world heart monitor spiked, but his brain was too tired to process the panic.

"Forty levels," Ethan whispered. His voice was a thin, trembling raspy hiss that made the NPC garrison sergeant step back toward the weapon racks. "Forty levels of digging in a ditch."

His trembling finger swiped twice, his sleep-deprived eyes struggling to focus on the flashing blue interface as he pulled up his master balance sheet. The line item that had read 52.65 Silver Shekels blurred, then snapped into focus. It was completely blank, wiped clean to a miserable 2.65. The engine had swallowed fifty silver pieces—over two hundred real Singapore dollars, a massive chunk of his grandmother’s next medical layout—and converted it into a garbage-tier crafting title that the elite corporate players from Pixel Rex used to mock free-tier labourers.

"A potter," Ethan muttered, his knuckles turning a digital white as he gripped the trowel. "A mud-collector. I am a dropout with forty thousand dollars of debt, and the computer just turned me into a construction worker."

His mind spun through the economic destruction of the scam, the math rendering a terrifyingly bleak future. Crafters couldn't clear high-tier dungeons. Crafters couldn't get hired by the Marina Bay syndicates for elite mercenary contracts. He was locked out of the Chariot track forever. He had spent thirty-one agonising hours optimising his extraction routes just to be handed a bucket of wet silt and a manual labor curse.

"System," Ethan spat, his chest heaving violently under the coarse burlap apron. "Delete character. Revert profile to Novice Level 1."

Ethan froze. His mental calculator ground through the timeline with a sickening click.

Thirty days. It left a twenty-three-day void where he would be physically barred from extracting a single copper bit, completely ensuring the smart-meter would hit zero long before his capsule could reconnect.

The system had completely hemmed him in. He had no option but to run the numbers.

With a deep, shuddering breath, Ethan forced his fingers to open his raw attribute profile to inspect the damage. If his level metrics had been completely ruined by the crafting transition, he would have to find a way to blackmail another NPC just to crawl out of the deficit.

He tapped the flashing blue tab.

The profile screen opened, but instead of the narrow, standard attribute caps of a low-tier artisan class, a massive, towering column of deep crimson data blocks filled his field of vision. Ethan’s photographic memory scanned the metrics, his internal math engine freezing mid-calculation as the baseline numbers settled.

Ethan’s jaw froze. The crushing, phantom weight that had been dragging down his virtual limbs suddenly vanished, overridden by the massive raw baseline metrics of the First Shaper. His avatar's body felt like solid iron, a stark contrast to the throbbing neural migraine still hammering inside his real-world skull. The fury in his chest dissipated, forced out by the rapid, clinical ticking of his economic processor.

A regular, free-tier Yotzer was just a common potter. Ethan had seen their data sheets on the forums—low-status crafting profiles with zero combat capability, locked into manually hauling clay chunks and paying heavy municipal kiln taxes just to turn out cheap kitchen vessels. A normal potter's attribute points were systematically drained into agility and perception, leaving their health pool non-existent. But the HaRishon suffix—the First Shaper—completely overrode the artisan template.

The stats are broken, Ethan realised.

He turned his back on the stone registry desk, his bare, mud-covered feet moving with a rapid, silent stride out of the barracks portico. He didn't look at the corporate players queuing for the chariot stables. They were paying fifty shekels to rent a horse that required upkeep. Ethan was carrying a core attribute sheet that didn't cost a single copper bit of maintenance.

Ignoring the agonizing throb behind his eyes, he marched down the lower-ward lanes. His movements were no longer sluggish; the massive passive attributes forced his avatar into a rapid, clinical stride, even as his real-world mind felt like it was floating outside his body. He reached the southern drainage ditch outside the mud-brick walls—the very site of his jackal-harvesting exploit.

He dropped to his knees in the moist silt, his hands sinking deep into the iron-rich, ochre mire. The moment his skin touched the wet red earth, the three-letter Hebrew root he had seen in the limestone ravine materialized in his visual field, flashing in a deep, burning crimson text: א-ד-מ—A-D-M.

Ethan’s mind tracked the code structure branching from the consonantal roots. In older virtual reality titles, crafting required an active recipe book, a stationary forge, and an input menu that charged a system manufacturing tax. But Bereshit Online’s engine operated on raw linguistic creation logic.

Man, Earth, and Red shared the exact same structural file.

If they share the same file, Ethan thought, his breathing slowing as he pressed his blunt bronze trowel into the silt, then the soil isn't an item in my inventory. It’s an extension of my character's physical model.

He focused his high Perception metric onto a loose, heavy lump of the wet ochre clay. He did not click a button. He simply utilised his new Grade 1 syntax capability, mentally isolating the letters א-ד-מ and channeling his mana pool straight through the bronze trowel into the earth.

The red mud beneath his fingers didn't just shift; it responded.

With a low, grinding sound that vibrated through the limestone bedrock, the wet soil rose from the riverbank, its physical dimensions expanding as it molded itself directly into a thick, solid, one-metre-tall slab of hardened terra-cotta that wedged itself perfectly into the mouth of the drainage channel.

Ethan stood up, wiping a smear of wet ochre from his burlap apron. He looked at the massive earthen wall blocking the culvert. It was as hard as stone, completely tax-free, and it had a durability rating higher than an expensive bronze tower shield sold in the Upper City markets.

If a monster hit it, the wall took the structural wear. If it broke, he didn't have to pay a blacksmith a single copper bit for repairs; he just had to scoop up another handful of free river mud and trace the letters again.

A sharp, cold grin cut through the dirt on Ethan's face.

The rich boys from Pixel Rex were still spending their real-world dollars to buy iron armour that rusty. They thought they owned the Levant because they held the king's commercial charters. But Ethan was looking down at the very floor of the world, his fingers dripping with the infinite, zero-cost code of creation.

He dug his trowel back into the red earth. The hoard was no longer just silver. It was the land itself.