Chapter 257: Four Times What He Has
He opened the appraisal that night, alone, with the door shut.
[Item Classification: Evolution-Related Resource]
[Target Compatibility: Glitch — High]
[Digital Consumption: available — significantly reduced permanent benefit]
[Physical Manifestation: available]
[Manifestation Cost: 42,000 Coins]
[Current Coins: 12,000]
[Status: insufficient Coins]
Jin looked at the classification line for a while, waiting for it to say more.
It didn’t. For this item, the Engine gave him a classification and the actions available to him, then stopped short of describing the result. Whether that was an oversight or a personality remained unclear.
High compatibility. That’s the whole message.
Twelve thousand against forty-two. The price was three and a half times his entire balance, leaving him thirty thousand Coins short if he wanted to be precise about his own poverty. He wrote the deficit beside the item tag before closing the balance.
The Tide Token counter sat below it, unmoved. Five hundred and fifty, exactly where it had been, useless here — the Evolution Workshop still wanted a thousand of them and had nothing to do with manifestation anyway. There was no bridge between the two economies, and he had already checked twice.
Digital consumption glowed there, available, free, immediate.
He could feed it to the avatar tonight. He’d get something. He’d get a fraction of something, permanently, and the fruit would be gone.
No.
He had made that trade before, back when he thought a safe shortcut was the same thing as a cheap one, and he had spent months paying for the difference. A reduced permanent benefit meant a permanently reduced Glitch. There was no version of that arithmetic he liked.
He put the fruit in Inventory, tagged it, and started listing routes.
Forty-two thousand Coins was not a weekend. It was a project.
Doyen cleared Glitch the next morning.
She did the puncture sites first and spent almost no time on them. "Closed. Plating’s seated over the shoulder one. He’ll have a mark behind the foreleg and that’s the whole of it."
The throat took longer. She had him open his jaws twice, ran the scan along the underside, and made him hold still for a count that he resented visibly.
"Inflammation’s gone," she said. "He’s clear."
"Gradual return," Jin said. "Walking and slope work today, light bracing tomorrow, contact work after that if nothing swells. No full-power Acid Breath for at least another week, and nothing maximal until I’ve seen him do a hard session and stay quiet the next morning."
Doyen closed the scanner. "You’ve taken all the fun out of this."
"You’d have said the same thing."
"I’d have said it better." She scratched Glitch under the jaw, which he permitted. "He’s a strange animal, Astor. He heals like something twice his Quality and recovers like something half his weight. If you ever want to tell me why, I’ll listen."
"I’d have to understand it first."
"Mm," Doyen said, in the tone of a woman who had decided not to pursue something, and left.
Jin took Glitch on a long walk with slope on it. Glitch spent the entire thing radiating the specific satisfaction of a creature who had beaten a doctor in single combat.
Faultline Rush stayed exactly where it was — in the avatar, unsynced, unmentioned. The real Glitch had been cleared to walk uphill eleven minutes ago. Whatever else Jin was, he wasn’t in enough of a hurry to put a leg-destroying skill into a body that had just finished healing, especially not with a highly compatible evolution resource sitting in Inventory waiting on money.
Sequence mattered. Fruit first, if he could pay for it. Then the skill, into whatever came out the other side.
That left the ladder, which had not politely paused while he was busy.
[Regional League qualifier requirement: Top 20]
[Ranking cutoff: 5 weeks]
Five weeks. Jin was Rank 30. The ladder let him challenge five places up, and every instinct he had about efficiency said take the biggest jump available and skip four fights.
He watched the recordings instead.
Rank 29 was Perrin Vale, and Vale’s beast was a Sickle-Wing Harrier that spent the entire match above head height. Jin watched eleven minutes of it and shut it off. Tremor Sense read ground. Against something that never touched the ground, Glitch’s best sense was a decoration, and his answer to airborne opponents was currently wait for it to land, which was not an answer. The smallest possible climb was the worst available matchup, which felt like a personal insult from the universe.
Twenty-seven through twenty-five were worse for simpler reasons. Their beasts were bigger, better developed, and in two cases genuinely well trained. Jin marked them not yet rather than never, because he intended to come back for all three of them eventually and saw no reason to lie to his own notes.
Which left twenty-eight.
Dell Varro. First-year, unremarkable in interviews, precise on the field. His beast was a Slate-Horn Ram called Anvil — grounded, heavy, considerably more developed than Glitch was today. One clear step above, not a joke, not a slaughter.
Anvil fought by lying.
Jin watched four of Varro’s matches and the pattern was consistent enough to be a philosophy. Anvil never committed first. It stuttered forward, feinted a charge, pulled up short, drifted, feinted again — and it kept doing that until its opponent finally spent something. A charge, a skill, a lunge, anything with commitment in it.
Then it countercharged into the line the opponent had just locked themselves into, and the match ended.
Jin sat with that for a while, because it was funny in a way he did not enjoy.
He had spent four days and forty-seven attempts teaching Glitch a skill whose entire identity was cannot be corrected after commitment. And the next opponent on his list made a living punishing exactly that.
Of course he does.
He watched the fourth match again anyway, and then a fifth, this time with the sound off and his eyes on Anvil’s feet instead of its head.
The feints varied on top. The horns went different directions, the shoulder rolled different ways, the approach angles changed.
Underneath, the feet were doing the same thing every time. A short false step landed light — weight never fully transferred, always recoverable. The real one landed heavy, and it landed a beat before the horns moved.
Once, in the third match, Anvil had done it on a stone surface, and Jin had a very good idea of what that beat would feel like through a hundred meters of connected floor to something that could read the ground.
He did not file the challenge.
Glitch had been cleared for walking that morning. Faultline Rush lived in an avatar. The fruit was in Inventory with a price on it he could not pay.
Instead he pinned the Varro recordings to one side of his display and, beside them, the highest-yield Coin route he had found — a long, repeatable, deeply boring circuit that paid well and would take weeks.
One of them bought the fruit.
The other one was going to have to be solved a beat before the horns moved.
Jin propped the phone against his knee, put the route on auto, and started the first run.