God of Zero Cost

The red clay dust of the Jordan Valley switchbacks swirled in tight, blistering eddies, coating the rough fibers of Ethan’s linen tunic in a brittle, orange crust. He squinted down at the valley floor. His peripheral vision flickered. A non-stop, scrolling text feed flooded his visor as free-to-play skirmishers and light vanguard classes posted un-translated interface screenshots of notched copper cross-hilts operating with an impossibly sharp, blood-red obsidian edge. The rumour of the "Soot-Faced Mason" was going viral.

But it wasn't just the players talking.

As Ethan slipped past the outer, un-rendered mud-brick perimeter walls of Beth Shean, the system audio channels picked up a different kind of chatter. Local Canaanite farmers leaned against wooden market stalls, shouting at guards. Ancient Egyptian storehouse scribes argued over clay ledgers, their hands waving defensively. The topside bronze crisis had paralyzed the entire NPC ecosystem. Chariot axles were cracking in the garrison yards. Copper harvesting sickles were worn down to smooth, useless wood. Merlion Holdings had hoarded the copper veins, and the world was rotting in the dust.

Good, Ethan thought, his eyes tracking a corporate guard struggling to balance a warped, pitted bronze spear against the gatepost. Let them hoard it. Let the prices skyrocket. The more desperate they get, the narrower their margins become.

Near the city's heavy stone gate-arches, a minor disturbance ripple caught Ethan's eye. Two heavily armoured Merlion temple enforcers were roughly shoving a ragged, sun-bleached traveler in a soiled linen robe away from the main thoroughfare. The traveler didn't scream or fight; he simply clutched a worn leather bundle to his chest and vanished into the rocky shadows of the lower ravine cliffs. Ethan turned his focus back to the trade lanes. He had a financial target to hit.

He moved quietly through the lower market plazas, his soot-caked cowl hiding his face. He didn't open a standard player trade stall. He simply stopped near the public weighing stations where independent merchants bartered raw grain for silver. He reached into his tool-bag, pulled out his single test frame, and set it down on a weathered timber counter next to an old grain merchant's bronze scales.

Clink.

The synthetic mahogany glass insert gleamed under the harsh Levant sun. It looked like pooled, frozen blood against the gray silt.

A tall, elderly Canaanite merchant—wearing a heavy, embroidered wool mantle that marked him as an independent trade master—stopped dead in his tracks. He had been in the middle of counting a basket of dried figs, but he dropped the fruit entirely. His nameplate hovered in a steady, historical amber script: Milkilu, Master of the Northern Caravans. His jaw tightened as he looked at the crimson glass tooth.

Milkilu didn't run a script line. He looked around the plaza cautiously, stepped closer to the counter, and picked up the obsidian insert with calloused, dirt-stained fingers. He tapped it directly against the edge of his own bronze utility knife.

Shhhhhk.

The red glass didn't shatter. It cleanly shaved a curl of metal right off the bronze blade. Milkilu sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth, his lifelike, AI-driven eyes snapping straight to Ethan's soot-covered face.

His brow furrowed as he scanned Ethan's face, his eyes narrowing into a tight squint. Then, his forehead smoothed. His eyelids snapped wide, exposing the white rims around his irises as his breath hitched. "The rumours down from the passes," Milkilu whispered, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead as his chest rose and fell. "Stranger, my caravans are completely frozen. The corporate lords at Merlion have locked the copper storehouses, and my guards are marching with blunt sticks. The local smiths are charging silver shekels just to hammer a dent out of an old blade. If you have more of this glass, I will take fifty pieces off your hands. One silver shekel for the batch."

Ethan didn’t change his posture. His eyes remained cold beneath his cowl.

"One silver shekel?" Ethan rasped, his voice dropping into a flat, dry register. "One silver shekel doesn't even cover the heat tokens for the furnace. Look at your guards, Milkilu. Their bronze leaf-blades are notched down to the tangs. If a pack of Level 30 wild mobs hits your next caravan in the canyons, you won't lose one shekel—you’ll lose the entire cargo. Three silver shekels for a block of fifty, or keep your silver and let the wilderness clear your inventory for you."

Milkilu’s face flushed. He angrily set the glass piece back down on the wood, his fingers drumming a tense rhythm against the counter. He was computing the risk, his human-like AI analyzing his remaining caravan margins against the brutal reality of the bronze starvation.

"Three shekels is robbery," Milkilu hissed, leaning in close. "The glass is sharp, but it is brittle. It has no lateral elasticity. If my men twist the blade inside a shield boss, it snaps. I am a factor of the northern tracks, not a desperate casual refugee. Two silver shekels. That is my absolute ceiling. And you throw in a second block of fifty for an extra half-shekel."

Ethan adjusted his canvas strap. Mentally, he pulled up his internal ledger. At three coppers a unit, I would need to craft over two hundred thousand individual inserts to even touch that three hundred thousand dollar downpayment block. Sitting at a crossroads retail peddling to individual refugees is a bottleneck. I need a bulk distributor to move mass volume instantly, but I'm not letting an NPC squeeze my baseline.

"Two shekels for the first block," Ethan countered flatly. "One and a half for the second. Three and a half silver shekels total for exactly one hundred units. Take it now, or I walk down to the Egyptian storehouse quarters and sell directly to the garrison scribes."

Milkilu stared at Ethan for three agonizing seconds. Then, a slow, grim smile cut through his wrinkled face. He reached into his robes, pulled out a small leather pouch of raw Hacksilber—rough, cut-up pieces of silver bullion—and dumped them into a small hand-scale, balancing them precisely against a stone shekel weight before sliding the bullion across the table.

"You barter like a desert wolf, stranger," Milkilu grunted.

Ethan reached into his pouch, pulling out two raw, interlocking wooden crates stamped with his signature clay seals, sliding them across the timber grid.

Milkilu posture instantly shifted as he began waving his hands to summon his caravan drivers from the shadows.

Ethan turned away from the weighing station, his boots kicking up the gray valley dirt as he left Milkilu to manage his drivers. Twenty-five silver shekels total, Ethan calculated, his jaw tightening beneath his charcoal mask as his eyes tracked the newly updated balance line. That's barely a thousand two hundred Singapore dollars. It's a joke compared to the three hundred thousand I need before the sixty-day clock runs out. The blade inserts are just pocket change to keep the furnace burning. If I want to survive this en-bloc, I need to find a premium, high-value asset that the corporate planners will buy in massive bulk transactions.

He didn't head back to the fault lines yet. He turned his character toward the inner markets, his eyes narrowing as he prepared to investigate the high-end Canaanite sanctuary trade quarters. He needed a more valuable product, and the grand temples of Beth Shean may have just what he needed.