Chapter 258: Forty-Two Thousand or Nothing
The first run paid 1,140 Coins.
Jin stared at the reward, subtracted it from the thirty-thousand-Coin deficit, and discovered that progress could make a number feel larger.
The route was still the best one he had. It was also long, repetitive, and full of enemies that stopped being interesting after the third time Glitch killed them. Running it exactly as designed would have eaten far too much of the five weeks remaining before the ranking cutoff.
So Jin stopped running it as designed.
He cut two low-yield branches, marked every encounter that could be bypassed, and started timing the distance between the worthwhile deposits. Glitch handled the fights that could not be avoided. Flicker’s avatar slipped through the narrower collection paths and died often enough during the first three days that Jin stopped reacting to it beyond checking the respawn timer.
By the fourth day, the two avatars were no longer completing one route together. They were breaking it apart and harvesting whichever sections paid best.
Jin ran the game during meals, between lessons, and while pretending to listen to an instructor explain a formation he had already submitted homework on. At night, he left the safest sections moving automatically and woke whenever a timer ended or an avatar died somewhere inconvenient.
[Coins: 18,760]
[Coins: 27,430]
[Coins: 35,905]
The real Glitch spent those same days doing almost the opposite.
He walked. He did slope work. He progressed to light bracing and then controlled contact while Jin watched for swelling around the old puncture sites. Doyen checked his throat under load twice during the first week and found nothing returning. When the restriction on Acid Breath expired, Jin still kept him away from full power. There was no prize for proving a doctor right by injuring him again.
On the tenth day, Glitch completed a hard supervised session. The following morning, he got up without stiffness, ate everything in front of him, and went to the door asking for more.
Doyen recorded the result and cleared him for ordinary training.
Faultline Rush remained inside the avatar.
The skill improved during the grind—longer bursts, cleaner footing, fewer ugly landings—but Jin never opened the Sync panel. Glitch had only just recovered, and the fruit would change his body in ways Jin could not predict. Teaching the current body a committed charge immediately before replacing half its proportions made no sense.
Sequence mattered. Fruit first. Faultline Rush afterward, once Jin knew what kind of legs would be receiving it.
The grind ended on the thirteenth night.
[Route complete.]
[Coins earned: 1,140]
[Coins: 42,000]
Jin let the number sit there for several seconds. Celebrating would have implied that he had enjoyed earning it, and he refused to lie to himself that badly.
But it was done. He closed the route and opened the Inventory.
The fruit had been sitting in there since the quarry, tagged and untouched, and now that nothing was trying to bury his avatars under a collapsing gallery he could finally look at it properly.
The reduced digital option still glowed beside it. Jin ignored it. He had spent thirteen days earning the difference between something and the complete result. He was not reopening the argument now that the expensive answer had finally become available.
[Physical Manifestation: 42,000 Coins]
He hit manifest.
[Coins: 42,000 → 0]
[Manifestation complete.]
The weight arrived in his hands before the light did, which was disorienting.
It was heavier than it looked, and it hadn’t looked light. Roughly the size of both his fists together, dark grey shading to something almost oily near the base, with a rind that had the grain of split stone rather than skin. It was warm. Not fever-warm — the low, steady warmth of a rock that had spent the whole day in the sun.
Jin turned it over and found a seam in the rind where something dense and darker showed through, and the ambient energy around his hands went strange enough that the hair on his forearms lifted.
His Data Appraisal caught the edges of it and told him what it could.
Evolution-related. Strongly earth-aligned. Something in it keyed to dormant bloodline structures, which was a phrase his talent had never produced before in his life. Compatibility with Glitch: high, high enough that the reading practically leaned toward the door.
And underneath, in the flat little way his talent had of ruining a moment: consumption may cause violent physical restructuring. Full outcome not calculable.
The Engine had nothing to add. It had never had anything to add.
Great. So it’s a mystery box that might turn my lizard inside out.
He sat there with it for a while.
The obvious plan was the quiet one. Take Glitch out to the training yard at some hour when nobody was around, hand him the fruit, and deal with whatever came next in private, where no scanner would ever record it and no medical file would ever ask where a Grey Rock Lizard had obtained a rare evolution resource.
It was the plan that protected his secret perfectly.
He thought about the Sync that had put Flicker’s temperature up one point one degrees under full monitoring with a specialist ten feet away, and about how he’d sat in a corner chair for two days afterward waiting for something to go wrong.
That had been a limited transfer into a bird lying in a regulated cradle.
This was an unidentified resource going into a hundred-and-forty-kilogram animal and rebuilding whatever parts of him it considered inadequate.
No.
He wrapped the fruit in a spare shirt, which felt undignified for something that had emptied his entire Coin balance and cost far more avatar deaths than he wanted to count, and went to find Doyen in the morning.
She unwrapped it on the examination bench, looked at it for three seconds, and put it back down.
"Where," she said.
"A private transaction."
"Jin."
"I’m not naming the seller."
Doyen straightened up. She did not look suspicious, which would have been easier to handle. She looked like a professional who had just been handed a problem.
"Do you understand what you’re holding? Not morally. Practically."
"I understand it’s concentrated."
"You understand nothing." She pulled the containment hood down over the bench and sealed it, and only then went for her scanner. "Undocumented evolution resources kill more beasts than wild encounters do at your level. Not because they’re fake. Because they’re real, and the owner has no idea what dose their animal can survive, and nobody’s monitoring when it goes wrong."
The scanner ran. Jin watched her face rather than the readout, because her face was faster.
It changed twice.
"It’s genuine," she said at last. "Which is the bad news."
"That’s normally the good news."
"Not at this density." She turned the display so he could see a saturation curve climbing well past where the reference line sat. "This is not feed. This isn’t a growth supplement or a conditioning agent. This is a compressed evolutionary trigger, and whoever prepared it did not dilute it for a Rank-1 beast."
"It came out of the ground like that."
Doyen’s eyes came up.
Jin kept his face exactly where it was.
"Of course it did," she said flatly, and let it go, which told him she’d already decided it was gray-market and that pushing would cost her a patient. "If you had brought me this thirteen days ago, my answer would have been no."
"And now?"
Doyen pulled up Glitch’s recovery log. Walking, slopes, bracing, controlled contact, hard session, quiet morning. The entire progression sat there with her approval attached to every stage.
"Now his injuries are closed, his throat is stable under load, and his recovery has held for nearly two weeks." She peeled off one glove. "That means I am willing to supervise this. It does not mean I think feeding it to him is sensible."
"I’ll take willing."
"Of course you will." She logged the fruit into secure medical storage under a code rather than a name and placed a hold flag on it. "Fresh baseline tomorrow morning. No food after midnight. If a single reading moves in the wrong direction, we stop."
"And if everything is stable?"
"Evolution suite three. I’ll staff it myself with two monitors I trust." She glanced up. "Nobody else needs to know what’s in that room. Not your instructors, not your classmates, and not whoever sold you this."
"Agreed."
"Good." She sealed the storage log and turned to face him properly, her voice dropping out of scheduling and into something plainer. "Understand what I’ve just agreed to. Whatever the intent behind that thing, in practice you’ve handed me a sealed biological weapon and asked me to hope it likes your lizard."
Jin thought about the quarry, and the queen who had never once needed to stand up, and what she had been guarding.
"It’ll like him," he said.