God of Zero Cost

The continuous, rhythmic crunch-shhhk of Emmett’s slate-grey clay hands slicing through the bedrock settled into a steady subterranean heartbeat.

Ethan sat deep in the unpaved limestone recess, his back flat against the cool stone to maximise his Unyielding Frame safety profile. He did not lift his patinated bronze trowel. He did not consume a single grain of market porridge to recover energy. Thanks to his newly unlocked [Silt Sieve] passive, his baseline fatigue accumulation remained completely frozen while his bare feet remained grounded in the natural red silt of the fissure.

He was executing the ultimate frictionless industrial flip.

"Emmett, route primary extraction to the lower copper-slag vein," Ethan commanded, his voice a flat, clinical whisper. "Then pivot forty degrees east to reap the unmanaged wild barley roots breaking through the Upper terrace silt."

The two-hundred-kilogram clay giant didn't hesitate. Driven by Ethan’s massive thirty-seven points of Perception, the construct's data pathing was flawless. Its tree-trunk arms drove into a dense vertical fault line, tearing out thick, heavy nodules of raw, ninety-eight percent pure sponge copper with zero tool wear and zero stamina decay. Once its tax-free 500-kilogram inventory slots hit maximum load capacity, it systematically turned, its blunt fingers harvesting clumps of wild, unmanaged grain from the ravine floors without triggering a single copper bit of crown municipal tax.

Every single time Emmett’s stone-hard fingers tore an asset from the environment file, a crisp, golden stream of transaction data funnelled straight back into Ethan’s master ledger:

The Artisan Class Balancing Matrix was operating at maximum velocity. Because the server core rewarded crafting profiles based on the net utility and total physical volume of their non-combat trades, Emmett's non-stop, mechanical extraction loop was generating an exponential mountain of experience points. Ethan didn't swing his arm once. He simply rested in the camouflage shadows, his eyes tracking his character progress bar as it flew through the numerical milestones like a runaway train.

Level 16. Level 20. Level 25.

The golden pixel ripples cascaded down his burlap apron in a continuous, rapid sequence of automated system chimes that rattled his haptic headset.

Level 29.

For forty-eight continuous hours, the invisible automated assembly line ran without a single milligram of administrative friction or wage leakage. By the time Emmett completed its twelfth bulk-harvest rotation, Ethan's visual interface pulsed in a blinding, permanent deep gold.

Ethan closed the massive gold window with a swift, predatory swipe of his hand. His inner math engine clicked with absolute, cold-blooded satisfaction. The elite corporate trainees from the Marina Bay syndicates had spent real-world cash, premium health potions, and hundreds of hours grinding dangerous monster camps to cross the Level 30 threshold. Ethan had completely erased his level deficit from the dirt up, matching the global average while his total out-of-pocket operational overhead remained locked at absolute zero.