Chapter 111: Reality Had a Transaction Fee
The petition was approved, Glitch was asleep, and the feed bag had maybe a day and a half left in it.
Two of those three facts refused to let Jin enjoy the first one.
He sat on the floor with his back against the bed, listening to Glitch breathe—deep and slow, the good sleep of a beast who’d worked hard and eaten and had a fresh cold wrap drying stiff around a six-day-old bruise. The shoulder was healing at exactly the pace a Grey Rock Lizard’s shoulder healed, which was to say slowly, which was to say the most reassuring thing about it.
He should have been asleep too. Instead, he kept doing the arithmetic that didn’t have an answer, running the same feed calculations until the numbers circled back to where they’d started. Around the third loop, he stopped and made himself do something useful instead.
Before I go looking for more feed, I should find out what I actually have.
Because the honest truth was he didn’t know. He’d spent weeks as the most relentless hoarder in the history of a game only he could see, grabbing every drop, every scute, every coin, and shoving it all into an inventory he then almost never opened. He grinded like his life depended on it and audited like the tab didn’t exist.
Time to open the tab.
He pulled out his phone. To anyone glancing over, it was a bored kid poking a puzzle app; the perception filter saw to that. What Jin saw was the Engine, and he went into the inventory with the grim focus of a man about to discover exactly how disorganized he’d been.
Glitch, without fully waking, cracked one eye. Something in the bond stirred with proprietary interest. Inventory was a word Glitch understood to mean a list of things belonging to Glitch.
"Go back to sleep. It’s spreadsheets."
The eye closed. The interest did not entirely leave.
Jin started with coins, because coins were simple, or should have been. He reconstructed the record from memory, line by line, and the Engine confirmed each one as he went.
[Mossy Hollow Coins: 274]
[Rustwater Drain Coins Before Area Boss: 436]
[Rotmist Salamander First-Clear Reward: 275]
[Rotmist Salamander Repeat-Clear Rewards — 3 Clears: 100]
[Current Coin Balance: 1,085]
Jin looked at the last number for a while.
One thousand and eighty-five.
He’d crossed a thousand coins and not even noticed. Running back through the timing made it stupidly understandable: the final Salamander clear had come in right before he left Shelter 7, in the middle of packing, goodbyes, and his family struggling with his departure. After that came the armored transport, then seven straight days of Meridian trying to break him, while the number sat in a tab he never opened and quietly grew larger than he’d have guessed.
He hadn’t spent a single one of them. There’d never been anything to spend them on. The Shop, whatever the Shop was, had stayed locked since the day the Engine woke up, and coins with nowhere to go were just a number that went up.
A thousand and eighty-five. He filed it away, mildly annoyed at himself, and moved on to the loot.
The inventory was, frankly, an embarrassment. It wasn’t empty; that would at least have been easy. Instead it was full and sorted by nothing, a magpie’s nest of everything two dungeons had ever coughed up.
[Engine Inventory]
[Beginner Herbs ×?]
[Tiny Monster Cores ×?]
[Moss-Crowned Slime Core ×3]
[Corrosive Materials / Glands ×?]
[Rustjaw Scutes ×?]
[Rustjaw Caiman Core ×1]
[Rotmist Venom Sac ×3]
[Rotmist Salamander Core ×3]
[Combat Records: Archived]
[Stored Growth: None]
[Pending Skill Fragments: None]
He scrolled through it twice.
The Caiman Core surprised him for a second, until the memory caught up—the Rustwater gate had only scanned its energy signature on the way out of range. It hadn’t consumed anything. The whole 4-Star elite core was still sitting there, logged and inert among everything else he’d dumped into storage.
Stored Growth: None. Pending Skill Fragments: None. Both were correct, and both were a little sad to see written out. He’d combined every fragment, watched the avatar learn each skill, and Synced them across one careful night when the food math finally allowed it. The fragments were gone because they’d become skills.
The real Glitch, asleep on the bed with a bruised shoulder, carried the results in a body nobody was allowed to know about. Lesser Regeneration, Corrosion Resistance, Acid Breath—all three sat quietly beneath a public record that said Harden and nothing else.
Jin was so used to the loot being abstract—numbers behind glass, ammunition for a machine only he could operate—that it took him a moment to register the tab sitting under half the items.
Use.
He frowned and tapped one of the Beginner Herbs.
[Beginner Herb]
[Compatible: Digital Avatar]
[Effect: Minor avatar recovery]
[Consume for avatar use?]
He read that, then read it again. By the second pass, a slow, aggrieved understanding had settled over him.
The avatar could use things.
Compatible items—healing, energy restoration, antidotes, temporary buffs—the digital Glitch could consume them mid-run to patch health, top up energy, or clear a status. Growth resources could stack onto the avatar’s unsynced state, waiting for a later Sync to reach the real body. It didn’t cost coins, and it didn’t touch reality. It was just a consumables system sitting right there, perhaps the most basic feature a game could possibly have.
Jin stared at the herb entry while several weeks of farming routes quietly rearranged themselves in his head. He’d built long, cautious recovery cycles around damage, waiting it out between attempts while Beginner Herbs sat in his inventory because it had never occurred to him that the loot he was so carefully collecting might have a button on it that said use me.
They would not have saved him from every death. They certainly would not have turned a venom sac into an antidote. But some of those waiting periods could have been shorter, and some damaged runs might have gone farther before he had to stop.
"Unbelievable," he muttered.
Glitch’s eye reopened at the tone.
"Not you. Me." Jin dragged a hand down his face. "I spent weeks collecting recovery items and never used one. Half those waiting periods could’ve been shorter."
Glitch conveyed, without lifting his head, that this tracked completely with his general assessment of Jin’s judgment, and went back to sleep.
Jin did not use anything. There was no run happening, nothing to patch, and he was not about to feed the avatar a rare core out of curiosity to see what it did. He simply sat there with the quiet, humbling knowledge that he’d been playing the world’s most punishing game with half the menu closed.
Then he noticed the notification he’d never opened.