Chapter 113: The Cheapest Thing Was Still Expensive
He read it and felt two things at once.
The first was relief. Nothing his Appraisal could detect appeared spoiled or dangerous, and the herb held a little usable mana along with some minor recovery-supporting nutrients. In a tiny quantity, it was probably safe for Glitch.
The second was the note at the bottom, which he’d more or less known would be there. Not nutritionally complete. Not a substitute for formulated feed. Appraisal didn’t do miracles and didn’t pretend to; this was a supplement, a snack, a vitamin rather than a meal.
He broke off a small piece—genuinely small, just a taste—and let Glitch have it.
Glitch inhaled it, considered it with the gravity of a connoisseur, and rendered a verdict somewhere between acceptable and why is there not more of this. He immediately became possessive over the remaining sprig in Jin’s hand.
The bruise on his shoulder did not close. His rank did not tick upward. Nothing dramatic happened at all; Glitch ate a little green thing, liked it, wanted more, and remained a 3-Star Grey Rock Lizard with a six-day-old bruise.
Which was exactly right. It was a weed, and Jin had needed it to behave like one, and it had.
"That’s it," he said, holding the rest away from a beast now lobbying hard for it. "That’s a bite. It’s not dinner."
Glitch disagreed on principle.
For about thirty seconds, Jin let himself get excited.
Manifested dungeon plants. Potentially a whole inventory of them—herbs from every hollow and drain, pulled into reality one at a time, a private garden of beast supplements. Feed problem, maybe, solved—
Then he actually did the math, because getting excited and then doing the math was apparently the entire shape of his week.
His supply of Beginner Herbs was limited. Not infinite—a stack, a real number, and every manifestation removed one permanently. Each manifestation also cost coins, twelve even for the cheapest possible thing.
More importantly, a growing 3-Star body didn’t run on trace minerals and light recovery support. Glitch needed protein, real minerals, mana in quantity, species-appropriate nutrition—the balanced profile formulated Iron-grade feed existed to provide, and which a handful of magic weeds emphatically did not.
Jin ran the rough numbers, and they were ugly. Meaningfully supplementing Glitch with manifested herbs would burn through his herb stock in days and take a serious chunk of his coins with it, the same coins he’d want later for something that actually justified the cost. Medicine in an emergency. A rare material he couldn’t get any other way.
Manifesting weeds to feed a combat beast was setting money on fire to avoid buying groceries.
Even if the herbs and coins weren’t a problem, producing a steady stream of unusual dungeon plants with no registered source would create another one. The Engine did not create registration documents or a believable history, and a student with a support talent generating exotic fodder out of nowhere was a question waiting to be asked. Even common material, produced in volume from a source that didn’t exist, would draw eyes he could not afford.
Out of pure curiosity, he checked one more thing before closing the interface. He tapped the Rotmist Salamander Core.
[Manifest Rotmist Salamander Core ×1?]
[Manifestation Cost: 860 Coins]
He cancelled immediately.
Eight hundred and sixty coins.
A boss core would eat most of his balance in a single manifestation. Mass, rarity, contained energy—the interface had told him plainly, and the cost proved it. Whatever the cores were for, manifesting one wasn’t a casual decision, and it wasn’t happening now.
He set the phone down.
Reality Manifestation was extraordinary, one of the most extraordinary things the Engine had ever handed him, because it was the first function that reached all the way out. It could bridge dungeon and world. In an emergency, it could put medicine in his hand, or give him a rare material he’d otherwise never obtain, or something else carefully chosen and worth its cost.
It was a bridge. It was not a printer.
And a bridge did not solve the problem that his beast needed to eat sustainably, every day, in a currency the Engine didn’t make and coins couldn’t become.
Jin looked at what was actually in front of him: the feed bag, a day and a half from empty; one thousand and seventy-three coins that could not become Meridian Credits and could not sensibly become groceries; and one small physical Beginner Herb, real and cool and faintly green, currently being guarded by a possessive lizard who considered it a family heirloom.
At the top of his phone sat seven dungeon signals, untouched and patient, offering resources he could begin collecting as soon as Glitch’s avatar entered. What Jin couldn’t afford was transferring every bit of the resulting growth into Glitch’s real body. Syncing meant supporting that growth with food, and food was exactly what he didn’t have.
The Engine had, tonight, finally learned how to give him treasure he could hold.
It had not learned how to give him breakfast.
He opened Meridian’s student portal instead and started searching.
Paid campus assignments. Merit-credit work. Feed allowances. Beast-care support. Material sorting, inspection—anything that paid in Credits or fed a beast or both. He scrolled past tutoring gigs he wasn’t qualified for, equipment-hauling jobs that would wreck him, and training-facility slots that cost money instead of making it.
Then a listing caught his attention, and his thumb stopped.
[Campus Support Assignment — Incoming Supply Division]
[Role: Feed Inspection & Nutritional Assessment Assistant]
[Duties: Assess incoming beast-feed shipments for quality, contamination, and nutritional grade.]
[Compensation: Meridian Credits + access to inspected surplus feed]
[Requirement: Demonstrated appraisal or beast-nutrition aptitude. Trial assessment required.]
Jin read it twice.
Assess incoming beast-feed shipments for quality, contamination, and nutritional grade. Requirement: appraisal aptitude. Compensation included access to inspected surplus feed.
It was, almost insultingly, the exact shape of the talent people had dismissed as fit only for a desk ever since his public awakening. Calculating what beasts should eat. Reading feed for quality and contamination. C-Rank Data Appraisal and Device Link, applied to a warehouse of food, in exchange for Credits and the food itself.
He didn’t apply yet. There was a trial assessment attached, which meant showing up and proving he could do it, and that was tomorrow’s problem. He could walk into that properly instead of half-asleep with a stiff-shouldered lizard hoarding a weed beside him.
But he flagged the listing, and for the first time since he’d looked at the feed bag, the arithmetic didn’t feel like a wall.
Glitch had finally stopped lobbying for the herb and gone back to dozing. The green sprig appeared to have been conceded to Jin’s custody under protest, though one gold eye occasionally opened to confirm it had not moved.
Jin looked from the phone and its flagged listing to the impossible little plant sitting on his desk, made real by a game inside a combat school he’d fought seven days to stay in.
The Engine could bring treasure into reality.
Unfortunately, reality still expected him to pay for breakfast.