Chapter 112: Something Real on the Desk
It was tucked at the top of the function list, marked unread, and it had clearly been sitting there a while.
[Milestone Requirement Fulfilled]
[Accumulate 1,000 Coins]
[New Engine Function Unlocked]
[Reality Manifestation]
Jin went very still.
He’d unlocked something the moment he crossed a thousand coins, which meant it had triggered right before he left Shelter 7. That had also been the exact stretch of chaos that let him ignore the coin count in the first place, and afterward he’d walked onto a transport, gone straight into an assessment, and never looked at the function tab because he’d had nothing new to do with the Engine and no privacy to do it in.
The threshold hadn’t cost him the coins. Reaching a thousand was the requirement; the balance had stayed untouched. He still had all one thousand and eighty-five.
He opened it.
[Reality Manifestation]
[Compatible stored items may be reconstructed in physical reality.]
[Requirements:]
[- One compatible stored item]
[- Sufficient Coins]
[- Stable physical destination]
[The stored item will be consumed.]
[Manifestation costs are determined by physical mass, rarity, and contained energy.]
[Manifestation is irreversible.]
Jin read it three times, and his pulse did something it hadn’t done since the day Glitch hatched black instead of grey.
Items. Out of the Engine. Into the world.
He kept reading. The restrictions mattered as much as the promise, so he slowed down and took those in too.
Living dungeon creatures could not be manifested. Neither could contracted beast avatars, so there was no shortcut to a second Glitch. Stored growth couldn’t be manifested, nor could experience or combat records, and skills already learned couldn’t be pulled back out as objects. The original item was consumed. The coins were consumed. Powerful cores and large materials cost substantially more; the interface was blunt about that.
And then there was the line Jin made himself sit with: the Engine did not create registration documents or a believable history for anything it produced.
That mattered more than the rest combined. A thing could be completely real and still become a serious problem if it was real and had no explanation for existing.
But it was real. His brain kept circling back to that part.
Since the Engine awakened, it had been a way to make Glitch stronger inside a screen and then quietly transfer that strength into the world through a soul-link nobody could see. It had never once put an object in Jin’s hand.
He looked at Glitch, asleep and bruised and ordinary-looking on the bed, then at the thinning feed bag nearby. The contrast sat there in front of him: a hidden function promising physical matter, and the very ordinary problem of having to keep a growing beast fed.
So he did the sensible thing and chose something that couldn’t hurt him if the function went wrong.
He was not going to manifest a monster core. He wasn’t going to manifest anything with meaningful mass, rarity, or contained energy when he had exactly one balance of coins and no idea what Reality Manifestation actually charged.
He picked a Beginner Herb, the cheapest and most harmless thing in the whole inventory. A weed, essentially. The dungeon equivalent of a dandelion.
[Manifest Beginner Herb ×1?]
[Manifestation Cost: 12 Coins]
[Current Balance: 1,085]
[Confirm] [Cancel]
Twelve coins for a weed.
Jin filed the number immediately. It was data, the first real data point he had for what this function charged, and that alone made the test useful. Then he cleared a space on the desk, leaving a flat, empty patch of surface as the stable physical destination the interface had asked for.
His thumb hovered over Confirm.
Then he pressed it, because sitting there staring at the button wasn’t going to teach him anything. He’d spent a whole week learning that lesson on a series of fields.
It wasn’t a spectacle. He’d half-expected light, a beam, something loud enough to make the whole experiment immediately inconvenient. Instead, the air over the desk went faintly grainy, pale particles gathering softly like dust deciding to become something, and then a small sprig of green settled onto the surface with the tiny, unmistakable weight of a real object touching a real desk.
[Beginner Herb ×1 Consumed from Engine Inventory]
[Coins Consumed: 12]
[Remaining Balance: 1,073]
For a second, Jin didn’t move.
Then he reached out and picked it up.
It was a herb. Completely, stubbornly, entirely a herb: cool and slightly damp between his fingers, carrying a faint green smell when he turned it over. The leaves gave under light pressure exactly the way plant leaves should. He rolled the stem between his fingers, pressed a leaf, then held it toward the light and saw the fine veins running through it.
Something a digital avatar had picked up off the floor of Mossy Hollow weeks ago, inside a dungeon accessible only through the Engine, was now sitting in his hand in a dorm room in Meridian, real enough to plant.
It hit him harder than he’d expected. Since awakening, the Engine had functioned like a one-way mirror. Beast data and combat records went in; nothing came out except indirectly through Glitch’s body.
This came out as something he could hold.
Glitch, of course, woke fully the instant food-adjacent matter entered the room.
He raised his head and edged across the bed with his nose extended, still favoring the bruised shoulder but radiating absolute conviction that the green thing was obviously his and had been manifested specifically for his consumption.
"No. Wait." Jin held it out of range. "I check it first. You don’t eat mystery plants I pulled out of a magic phone until I’ve looked at it."
Glitch made it clear this was an unreasonable delay in an obvious process.
Jin ran Data Appraisal on the herb—his public C-Rank talent, the thing everyone assumed was for calculating diets at a desk, doing precisely the job it was actually good at.
[Beginner Herb — Physical Sample]
[Moisture Content: High]
[Mana Concentration: Low — Usable]
[Fibrous Composition: Soft]
[Contamination: None Detected]
[Nutritional Content: Minor — Trace Minerals, Light Recovery Support]
[Assessment: Possibly suitable as a minor supplement for a compatible beast in small quantity.]
[Note: Not nutritionally complete. Not a substitute for formulated feed.]
The readout was ordinary.
The fact that he had created its subject was not.