Chapter 116: Breakfast Before Glory
She came over, read his note, gave him a long, unreadable look, and ran the batch properly herself—top sample, bottom sample, on real equipment. Jin watched her face as the numbers came up.
"Huh," she said, for the third time that afternoon, and this one had more in it.
She logged the quarantine. "Settled in transport. Average reads clean." Then she glanced at him. "Most people run one sample and call it. You ran three."
"One sample of a settled bag tells you about one sample," Jin said. "Not the bag."
"No," Yarrow agreed. "It doesn’t."
He wasn’t the only assistant on trial, and the others weren’t fools. A girl two stations down worked steadily and caught the moisture-damaged batch same as he had, while a quiet boy flagged the mislabeled supplement correctly. Nobody embarrassed themselves.
Jin stood out in smaller, less dramatic ways. He was patient, and he cross-checked the records instead of trusting the label. He understood, in his bones, how a tiny nutritional difference landed on a fast-growing body, because he had one in his room he’d been agonizing over for weeks.
More importantly, he refused to guess. Every sample went cleanly into fine, unsuitable, or test it, and he was right about which pile things belonged in.
It was good work for a student with a C-Rank support talent. Yarrow treated it exactly that way: a careful kid who knew feed, doing careful work with feed.
Which was exactly what the job wanted.
"You pass," Yarrow said when the trial was done. She said it the way she said everything, flat and without ceremony. "It’s not a career. It’s a campus assignment—two, maybe three short shifts a week, paid in Credits."
"That’s fine."
"And access to surplus." She held up a hand before he could get ideas. "Approved surplus, all of it recorded and cleared. Bags with the outer packaging damaged but the inner seal intact. Safe leftovers from opened test batches. Overordered standard grade. Formulas coming up on their use-by but still well inside it. That kind of thing."
Her eyes sharpened. "Surplus does not mean spoiled. It doesn’t mean whatever you can carry. Rare formulas and medical feed are never included, and everything that leaves gets logged with your name on it. Clear?"
"Clear."
"Then, since I’m short-handed and you’re standing here, you can work a short shift now and take your pay in feed. We’ve got cleared surplus that needs to move."
Jin worked the shift, and it was exactly as boring as advertised. He did not mind a single minute of it.
At the end, his compensation came off the approved surplus rack: standard Iron-grade formulation from a shipment with crushed outer packaging and perfectly intact inner seals, officially recorded, cleared, and logged under Astor, J.
He ran his own Appraisal over it before he accepted it, because job or no job, he was not about to feed Glitch anything he hadn’t checked himself.
It came back clean.
Proper Iron-grade feed, sound, complete, real.
There was enough for several days. Not more than that, and certainly not enough to keep pace with a growing 3-Star body’s accelerating appetite over the long haul. It was nowhere near enough to support a major Sync or bankroll a leap to 4-Star.
It didn’t solve everything, but it took tomorrow off the table, and tomorrow had been the whole shape of his anxiety since the night he’d realized how little remained in the bin.
He had a partial income now. Not freedom—a reliable trickle of food and Credits in exchange for boring, honest, unglamorous work, the kind nobody in a combat program wanted, done by the one kid who needed groceries more than glory.
Walking back with a recorded bag of feed under his arm, Jin finally understood the shape of it.
Two economies, and neither one could do the other’s job.
Reality paid in feed and Credits. It gave him a legal reason for a student to possess ordinary supplies, experience using his public talent, and a supervisor who now knew his name. Slow, steady, unimpressive, and load-bearing.
The Engine paid in combat experience, Sovereign Coins, skills, growth, rare materials and—now—things he could pull into the real world. It was extraordinary and dangerous, capable of making Glitch impossibly strong, but breakfast still had to come from a currency reality would accept.
His boring warehouse shift looked like nothing next to a combat merit assignment. It was also the thing quietly keeping the whole impossible machine running.
Ever since awakening it, he’d thought his public talent was a joke.
It had just bought his beast several days of meals.
Glitch recognized what Jin was carrying from across the room, and every grievance he’d been nursing about the waiting bay vanished on sight. The outrage evaporated. The betrayal was forgiven. Jin had returned bearing food—recorded, cleared, real, a whole bag of it—and judging by the immediate change in Glitch’s posture, Jin had at last fulfilled the absolute minimum duties expected of a competent Tamer.
Which was a compliment of the highest order Glitch was capable of giving.
Jin measured out a proper meal—a full one, not a rationed one, for the first time in longer than he wanted to think about—and set it down. Glitch fell on it with the reverence of a beast who had personally endured great hardship and been, finally, vindicated.
"Yeah, yeah. I’m a hero. Eat your dinner."
He topped it, because he wasn’t a monster, with the last small fragment of the Beginner Herb.
Glitch received this as the correct and proper tribute.
Afterward, Jin checked the supply and did the honest math on it. The honest math still said several days.
The emergency was delayed, not gone. It would come back because a growing body kept growing, and a warehouse shift was a trickle, not a well. But he’d pushed it far enough down the road that, for the first time, he could plan past the end of the week.
That left the other thing.
Jin pulled out his phone. The seven signals were still sitting at the top, patient as they’d been since the arrival terminal and untouched.
[Compatible Dungeon Signals Detected: 7]
[Downloaded: 0]
[Active Avatar Deployment: None]
Since arriving at Meridian, the assessment had consumed nearly all his attention, leaving the seven signals alone. More recently, the feed shortage had made choosing one harder—not because entering a dungeon required food, but because any growth worth Syncing into Glitch’s real body eventually would.
For the moment, that pressure had eased. Not forever, only for a few days, but a few days was enough to choose with his head instead of his stomach. He could weigh the seven against each other on value instead of grabbing the nearest one out of panic.
He opened the signal list.
Glitch had breakfast for the next several days.
Which meant Jin could finally decide where his other body was going to die first.