Chương 28: Apparently, Ten Years Costs Eighty-Eight Billion Dollars

The morning sun cast a faint, dusty light through the window of Trailer C-87. Matt sat at his fold-down table, a mug of perfectly warm coffee in hand, looking at his laptop screen. He wasn't geared up. His Rare Foundry Longsword rested against the wall. The heavy iron bulk of the Backwater Wall sat beside it. On his desk, the Fortune's Harness lay in a neat coil, kept safely segregated from his actual Combat Belt. He didn't have any immediate plans to enter a Gate today.

His calendar app was open, highlighting a single reminder he had set five days ago. > TODAY > > THE EBBING OF TIME — WDA ARTIFACT AUCTION > > @RookDelves — LIVE COMMENTARY Matt checked the time. The stream was scheduled to start in about twenty minutes.

"Five days," Matt murmured, looking at the calendar.

"That went fast." For the past five days, Matt had lived in the Cinderfall Basin. Not literally. Mostly. He still slept in C-87, cooked in C-87, crafted in C-87, and occasionally remembered that the campground possessed other facilities. But every working day had settled into a remarkably consistent rhythm. Wake up. Coffee. Craft. Check listings. Gear up. Enter Cinderfall. Farm. Return. Sort. Sell. Update spreadsheets. Repeat. It was disturbingly familiar. Matt had quit logistics.

Apparently logistics had followed him into another dimension. Before the auction began, he decided to tally his progress. He opened his financial spreadsheet. He hadn't bothered writing narrative notes for every single run anymore. The first time an Ember Hound had Ignited him, the event had warranted several paragraphs, emergency research, a Portal retreat, and an overpriced shield. Now? Ember Hound. Kill. Mana Stone. Ash Stalker. Kill. Crafting Currency. Cinder Spitter. Move first. Kill second. Loot. Routine.

He just looked at the raw numbers. > CINDERFALL BASIN — FIVE DAY SUMMARY > > Day 1 — Estimated Net Loot Value: $2, 180 > > Day 2 — Estimated Net Loot Value: $2, 430 > > Day 3 — Estimated Net Loot Value: $1, 960 > > Day 4 — Estimated Net Loot Value: $2, 760 > > Day 5 — Estimated Net Loot Value: $2, 410 > > Five-Day Total: $11, 740 > > Average: $2, 348 / day > > Unique Items: 0 Matt leaned back. E-rank was explicitly more lucrative than F-rank. Not absurdly so.

He wasn't tripping over ten thousand dollars every morning, and he certainly wasn't finding a twenty-thousand-dollar Unique every time he killed a Boss. But two thousand dollars or more in net daily loot value from routine farming was remarkably consistent. Mana Stones formed the dependable floor. Crafting materials added another layer. Magic equipment sold or became useful stock. Rare items were inconsistent, but even mediocre Rares had value to somebody.

And unlike party farming, every piece that dropped during Matt's solo clears belonged to him. He scrolled down. The five daily totals were close enough to look boring. Matt smiled.

"Boring is profitable." Then he looked at the final line. > Unique Items: 0 His eyes shifted toward Fortune's Harness. Five days ago, he had swapped it onto his waist before finishing the Caldera Warden. The Boss had produced four Magic items and three Rares. Before that, the first day Matt had worn Fortune's Harness during safe Ironvale farming, an ordinary Rivet Drone had dropped a Unique Relay Wand. That had been enough to infect Ethan with permanent religious faith in a leather belt.

Matt had spent the last five days giving the item more opportunities. Safe farming routes. Easy packs. Occasional finishing swaps. Boss finishes when the arena was controlled. No dangerous experiments. No standing in fire because maybe the next monster contained a jackpot. Five days. No Unique. Matt looked at the belt.

"Good." He paused.

"… Probably." It was actually a healthy realization. Fortune's Harness was not an automatic jackpot button. It didn't know Matt had paid twenty thousand dollars for it. It didn't owe him a Unique. It raised Item Rarity by fifty percent. That was all. A statistical advantage. Not divine favoritism. Not a promise. Not a contractual obligation. He checked his Fortune's Harness Test Log. It had grown. Not much. Enough to become slightly less embarrassing.

The summary at the bottom still read: > SAMPLE SIZE: STILL BAD"Scientific," Matt noted dryly. He had Magic counts. Rare counts. Boss kills. Safe farming windows. No remotely responsible conclusion yet. That was fine. He had time. The direct loot wasn't his only revenue stream anyway. In fact, it had become the smaller half of his operation. Matt switched tabs. Cinderfall dropped noticeably better crafting inputs than Ironvale or Ashfield. Not because every Crafting Currency item was enormously valuable.

Most weren't. The important part was volume and relevance. Over five days, Matt had accumulated a deep enough stockpile of the Currency he regularly consumed with Vital Imprint and Elemental Ward that he hadn't needed to buy replacements from the National Market. The same was increasingly true of clean Bases. E-rank monsters dropped equipment frequently enough that once Matt stopped thinking of every white item as junk, his storage problem had become much more interesting.

Clean helmets, gloves, boots, belts, weapons, rings, and armor. Some weren't worth crafting. Some had poor implicit values. Some had the wrong requirements. Others were exactly the kind of boring, statistically useful Bases beginner and early intermediate Delvers bought by the thousands every day. Matt checked his input tracker. > CRAFTING INPUT STATUS > > Clean Bases — Sufficient > > Life/Resistance Currency — Sufficient > > Weapon Crafting Currency — Sufficient > > External Purchases — $0 for 5 days Matt smiled.

"…Self-sustaining." His logistics brain caught up a second later.

"Cash-flow self-sustaining," he corrected himself.

"Not free." That distinction mattered. The Currency he picked up in Cinderfall possessed market value. The Bases possessed market value. If he chose not to craft with them, he could sell them. Using a five-dollar-equivalent crafting material he'd found himself did not make the material free. It still meant consuming five dollars of value. Opportunity cost existed even in magical economies. Unfortunately. But operationally? The change was significant.

Matt was no longer dependent on the National Market for his basic morning production inputs. He entered a Dungeon. Gathered raw materials. Brought them home. Processed them with copied professional Crafting Skills. Turned them into finished equipment. Listed the finished goods directly into a national market. Matt stared at the flow.

"… I have accidentally vertically integrated myself." He took a drink of coffee. That was a sentence he hadn't expected to say while unemployed. His reliable Life-and-Resistance crafting line remained stable. > ESTABLISHED CRAFTING BASELINE > > Average Daily Economic Gain: approximately $4, 000 Five days. Approximately twenty thousand dollars in economic gain. Weighted Edge and Quickened Temper were creating additional value as well, but Matt still refused to put a clean daily expectation beside them.

Weapon Crafting remained unreliable. Sometimes a sequence produced something excellent. Sometimes it produced something technically sellable. Sometimes it produced an educational object whose main function was reminding Matt that partial deterministic Crafting was not the same thing as omnipotence. So he left the weapon line out of the baseline. Dungeon loot: $11, 740. Reliable Crafting gain: Approximately $20, 000. Experimental Weapon Crafting: Additional value, not formally counted.

Matt looked at the combined number.

"…Thirty thousand dollars." Five days. He stared at it. A few weeks ago, thirty thousand dollars had been a serious chunk of his entire road-trip budget. Now it was a strong working week.

"Okay." He looked at the spreadsheet again.

"That is still ridiculous." He closed the financial ledger before his brain could normalize it any further. Then he opened his Status. Money was great. Progression was better. > MATTHEW HAYES > > Level: 15"Fifteen." Level One felt considerably farther away than it actually was. Not long ago, he had been poking Cave Rats with a Beginner Longsword and congratulating himself for making fifty dollars. Now he was reliably farming a volcanic E-rank Dungeon. Matt looked at the next line.

> Passive Points: 6 Three points had already been sitting unused when he cleared the Caldera Warden. Levels Thirteen, Fourteen, and Fifteen had added three more. Six total. For once, Matt had not delayed indefinitely. He had spent several evenings reading the next section of Rook's physical Warrior progression guide. Not because the guide told him exactly what build to make forever, but because the next cluster fit what Matt already knew he liked. Cleave. Multistrike. Groups of enemies.

Make the sword hit more things. Simple. The goal was a larger node called: > MELEE AREA OF EFFECT Unfortunately, the Passive Tree did not care that Matt could see the node from where he currently was. He still had to get there.

"Pathing tax." Matt opened the constellation of available nodes. He selected the first one. > STRENGTH +10 > > Passive Points: 6 → 5 Easy. Physical Warrior. Strength was never going to be wasted. Next. > INTELLIGENCE +10 > > Passive Points: 5 → 4 Matt hesitated.

"…Intelligence." He looked at himself. Sword. Shield. Armor. Very little about the overall presentation suggested academic excellence was the missing component. Still, Intelligence wasn't useless. Mana. Energy Shield interactions. Equipment requirements. Backwater Wall itself needed a small amount of INT. More importantly, the node existed between him and something he actually wanted.

"Fine." He accepted it. Then the path became much more agreeable. > STRENGTH +10 > > Passive Points: 4 → 3 > > STRENGTH +10 > > Passive Points: 3 → 2 > > STRENGTH +10 > > Passive Points: 2 → 1 Matt sat still for a second while the combined stat increase settled through his body. The change was subtle in appearance and not subtle at all in sensation. His shoulders felt denser. His grip firmer. His posture more naturally stable.

The Foundry Longsword leaning against the wall looked slightly less substantial than it had ten seconds ago. Matt flexed one hand.

"That is a lot of Strength to reach one circle." He wasn't complaining. Finally, the larger node. > MELEE AREA OF EFFECT > > Area of Effect of Melee Skills increased by 10% Matt selected it. > Passive Points: 1 → 0 The tree updated. He opened Cleave. > CLEAVE > > Effective Area: 2. 1 m"… Two point one." Ten percent didn't sound explosive. No dramatic new Skill. No giant damage multiplier. No golden SSS notification. But Cleave was an area Skill. Multistrike meant three rapid attacks from a single activation.

A slightly wider arc mattered every time a monster stood near the edge of that attack. One extra Ember Hound. One Ash Stalker slightly farther to the side. A Cinder Spitter Matt didn't have to reposition toward. Repeated thousands of times, small geometric improvements became clear-speed improvements.

"Yeah." Matt nodded.

"That'll matter." He closed the Passive Tree. Then he looked over his equipment. The last five days had done more than raise his Level. Most of Matt's armor had changed. Some pieces had come directly from Cinderfall. Some had started as clean E-rank Bases. Some had been upgraded in C-87 using his own copied Crafting Skills. He had been increasingly ruthless about replacing pieces. If an old item was good, it stayed. If a new item was better, sentimentality lost. He was a Delver. Not an equipment museum.

Helmet, body armor, gloves. All updated. Boots and accessories had been adjusted around the new resistance totals and higher-level Bases. His Combat Belt had been improved. Fortune's Harness remained Fortune's Harness. Two major combat pieces, however, had survived the purge. The Rare Foundry Longsword still rested against the wall. Matt had accumulated several higher-level weapon Bases. He had crafted some of them.

None had produced a final result that clearly beat the old sword's combination of strong Physical Damage scaling and Attack Speed. The original Ironvale craft was still winning. Matt looked at it.

"Good enough." Then the shield. Backwater Wall. Matt looked at the heavy iron kite shield.

"Level Seven." A beat.

"Still here." Its 24% Block Chance, elemental resistance, Freeze protection, and 42 Life regenerated per second were still solving exactly the problems Matt wanted solved. And if his Life ever dropped below half? Another one hundred Life per second. That Low Life regeneration had already prevented a bad Cinderfall fight from becoming a catastrophic one. Matt had no reason to replace a functioning solution. He opened his final consolidated Status.

> MATTHEW HAYES > > Level: 15 > > Maximum Life: 653 > > Maximum Mana: 136 > > Energy Shield: 14 > > Life Regeneration: 48. 5 / sec > > Mana Regeneration: 2. 4 / sec > > Evasion Chance: 43% > > Physical Damage Reduction: 69% > > Block Chance: 24% > > Fire Resistance: 75% (+9% Over Cap) If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. > > Cold Resistance: 66% > > Lightning Resistance: 51% > > Passive Points: 0 Matt smiled. Six hundred fifty-three Life.

Backwater Wall plus Master of the Arena put his normal Life regeneration at 48. 5 per second. Low Life pushed that to 148. 5. Mana had more than doubled from his early Warrior days. His Elemental Resistances were no longer a desperate attempt to survive one local damage type. Fire was capped with nine percent in reserve. Cold was sixty-six. Lightning fifty-one. Not perfect. Not finished. Stable. When Matt had first entered Cinderfall, one Ignite had turned his afternoon into an emergency research session.

Now he deliberately farmed the same monsters while wearing a Magic Find belt when conditions allowed. Progress. A notification chimed from the laptop. Matt looked at the time.

"Oh." Twenty minutes had disappeared. The auction stream was starting.

"Right." He topped off his coffee, triggered Perfect Temperature out of pure habit, and maximized the browser window. The title graphic filled the screen. > @ROOKDELVES LIVE > > THE EBBING OF TIME > > WHO BUYS TEN YEARS THIS MONTH? The viewer count climbed so quickly Matt initially assumed the display was bugged. It wasn't. Hundreds of thousands became millions. The normal Rook video Matt watched about beginner Physical Warrior pathing might pull a respectable audience over days or weeks. This was different.

Artifact auctions were global events. Finance news watched them. Guild channels watched them. Delvers watched them. Governments watched them. People who would never enter a Dungeon watched them. Anyone old enough to imagine wanting ten years back watched them. Rook's tired, familiar face appeared. Same graying beard. Same scars. Same look of a man who expected the universe to behave irrationally and preferred being proven right. Today, though, he looked noticeably more entertained.

"Alright," Rook said.

"It's that time again." The live chat beside him moved too quickly to read.

"The monthly festival where the richest people on Earth discover they are, in fact, capable of wanting something more than money." The chat accelerated. Rook raised one finger.

"One bottle." Another beat.

"Ten years." He looked directly into the camera.

"Everybody calm down." Nobody calmed down. Matt laughed. Rook leaned back.

"For anyone who somehow clicked this stream without knowing what we're selling tonight, congratulations on your extremely unusual media diet." A graphic appeared. > THE EBBING OF TIME > > POTION OF REJUVENATION > > Mythic-tier Artifact / Elixir"Full dose. Physical body rewinds exactly ten years. Memories stay. Personality stays. Learned skills stay. System progression stays." Rook pointed at the camera.

"And before chat asks for the ten-thousandth time—no. We cannot manufacture it. No, nobody has reverse-engineered it. No, drinking half does not responsibly give you five years. No, you cannot pour it into a swimming pool and make everyone twenty." The chat became a wall of laughter.

"The average global drop rate works out to roughly one bottle a month," Rook continued.

"That does not mean the System has a subscription service. Sometimes we get none. Sometimes the world gets lucky." He smiled faintly.

"So." A list of participating organizations appeared.

"Who gets it this month?" Rook scanned the names.

"Oh, good." He leaned closer.

"China and Russia have already taken three between them this year. Can we let somebody else have one this time?" The chat exploded. Matt blinked. Rook held up both hands.

"I'm kidding." A beat.

"Mostly." Matt shook his head.

"… That's apparently a sentence people say now." The joke carried something heavier underneath it. This wasn't merely luxury medicine. A head of industry becoming ten years physically younger mattered. A legendary scientist mattered. A veteran Delver mattered. A political figure mattered. A strategic planner mattered. An eighty-year-old billionaire getting another decade of healthy mobility wasn't just rich-person vanity when that billionaire controlled companies operating across entire economies.

Potion allocation had become geopolitics. Of course it had. Rook glanced toward another monitor.

"And yes, before we get into tonight's bidders, last year's two-month dry spell was real." Matt looked up. Rook grinned.

"You remember that?" Apparently chat did.

"Two months. No Ebbing." The live comments accelerated.

"Prices on every longevity-adjacent Artifact went insane. Three different funds announced emergency acquisition programs. One Guild tried to sell priority access to a Boss route it did not actually control." Rook shook his head.

"Good times." Matt stared. He had somehow missed all of that. Then again, two months ago Matt had been moving freight and wondering whether his company would survive the next quarter. The world could apparently have a magical anti-aging supply crisis without affecting his Tuesday schedule. That was mildly unsettling. The broadcast transitioned. The WDA Artifact Auction Hall appeared. Matt had expected expensive. He hadn't expected this.

The interior looked like someone had combined a securities exchange, a diplomatic summit, and an extremely restrained luxury hotel. No chandeliers. No gold-plated nonsense. Everything was understated. Which probably meant everything cost more. Representatives sat in secure bidding sections. Corporate executives. Guild officials. Private family offices. Sovereign wealth funds. Legal teams. Security officers. WDA personnel lined the walls.

"…That is a lot of expensive suits." Rook's commentary continued over the WDA feed.

"Some of those suits cost more than your first dungeon build."

"…Probably." The camera panned across the audience. It stopped on a man who appeared to be somewhere around forty. He was smiling. Relaxed. Chatting casually with an elderly executive beside him. A lower-third identifier appeared. > LUCIAN CROSS > > Chronological Age: 80 Matt leaned closer.

"…What?" Rook immediately laughed.

"Oh, Cross is here." The camera remained on him.

"Four confirmed bottles." Matt stared.

"Eighty years old. Biologically around forty." The man on screen genuinely looked forty. Not an unusually healthy eighty. Not Hollywood eighty. Forty. Rook saw the chat reaction.

"Relax. He isn't bidding." Matt frowned.

"Then why is he there?" Rook started laughing again.

"Because Cross is weird." Apparently several hundred thousand viewers had asked the same question.

"He comes to these auctions to watch old billionaires bid on the thing he already used four times." Rook paused.

"Also because he enjoys being photographed next to them." The chat became unreadable. FOUR BOTTLES FLEX HE'S HERE TO BE YOUNG AT PEOPLE MENACE Rook pointed at the second comment.

"Exactly." Cross noticed the live camera. He smiled directly into it. Then waved. Rook closed his eyes.

"See?" Cross gave the camera a cheerful thumbs-up.

"Menace." Matt laughed. It was ridiculous. It also established something important. Multiple doses worked. Four bottles. Forty biological years erased from the outside. Cross had somehow spent enough money to physically become his own midlife crisis. The camera moved to the stage. A heavily reinforced transparent containment cylinder stood at the center. Inside sat a glass vial. Small. Simple. Pale gold liquid shimmered inside. Eighty billion dollars did not look like much from a distance.

Beside the display stood a woman in high-tier combat armor. Not decorative ceremonial gear. Real armor. Used armor. Matt recognized the posture immediately. Delver. The graphic appeared. > S-RANK DELVER > > MARA VOSS > > Drop Source: Classified S-rank Dungeon Expedition Rook's tone changed. Less joking.

"And before everyone forgets why this exists." The camera focused on the bottle.

"One Delver went into an S-rank Dungeon and actually got this thing out." Matt looked at Mara Voss. She did not look like the people who were about to bid. No tailored suit. No entourage of financial advisers. She looked like somebody who had worked a dangerous job and survived. Matt sat slightly straighter. Rook continued.

"The exact Dungeon and expedition details are classified for obvious reasons. What matters tonight is that the WDA authenticated the drop, ownership is verified, sale authority is verified, and Ms. Voss is the registered seller." Matt looked at the bottle again. Somebody had killed something. Somewhere. And it had dropped that. That fact remained stranger than the money. The camera shifted to the bidder sections. Rook rubbed his hands together.

"Alright. Let's meet the people who think eighty billion dollars might be cheap." First graphic. > CHINESE SOVEREIGN LONGEVITY FUND"Serious bidder. Prior purchases. Massive state-backed resources." Second. > RUSSIAN STRATEGIC HEALTH CONSORTIUM"Also serious. Also bought before." Rook looked into the camera.

"Neither needs me to explain what eighty billion dollars is." Matt nodded.

"Helpful." The camera moved to a much younger-looking group of executives. Several wore conservative suits. One appeared to be reviewing multiple real-time models on a tablet. > NORTH AMERICAN COMPUTE CONSORTIUM Matt frowned.

"…Tech companies?"

"Yes, tech companies," Rook said immediately, clearly reading the same reaction from chat. He sighed.

"And before someone types 'didn't magic kill Silicon Valley?'—no." A graphic appeared behind him. Old headlines from fifteen years earlier. THE END OF THE DIGITAL AGE? MANA TECHNOLOGY THREATENS LEGACY COMPUTING WILL MAGIC REPLACE SILICON? Rook pointed at them.

"People said some extremely stupid things during the first two years." Matt smiled. That, at least, had survived the Dungeon era unchanged.

"Magic didn't replace computing," Rook continued.

"Magic made computing cheaper." New images appeared. Industrial superconducting lines. Mana-assisted substations. High-density storage systems. Massive server halls.

"Room-temperature superconductors changed transmission losses and hardware architecture. Dungeon-derived thermal materials changed heat management. Mana-assisted energy storage changed peak load economics." Rook changed the slide. A data center appeared. Then another. The second one looked less like a building and more like a fortified industrial city.

"Modern AI compute is hungry." Rook held up fingers.

"Power." Second.

"Cooling." Third.

"Water." Fourth.

"Space." He lowered his hand.

"The Dungeon economy attacked all four." Matt leaned forward. Rook explained. High-output Mana Grid systems did not make electricity free. Nothing was free. But they changed what was economically possible. Industrial facilities no longer needed to sit beside exactly the same traditional generation infrastructure they had fifteen years earlier. Superconducting transmission systems allowed much more efficient movement of absurd power loads. Dungeon-derived cooling materials increased thermal transfer.

Then the water problem.

"And yes," Rook said, apparently anticipating chat.

"Some data centers literally generate their cooling water with Mana Stones." Matt stopped.

"…They make the water?" Rook switched to an image of an industrial plant.

"Industrial Water Generation Arrays." Pipes. Containment chambers. Mana-fed conversion units. Reservoirs.

"Not free," Rook emphasized.

"Not infinite. Not environmentally consequence-free just because a magic rock is involved." Another screen showed operating costs.

"But very cheap compared to shutting down a multi-billion-dollar compute cluster because your region is in drought restrictions." Matt stared.

"…That feels like cheating." Rook smiled.

"Welcome to the last fifteen years." The AI side had followed. More power. More efficient transmission. Better cooling. Better materials. Larger practical compute clusters. Spatial Expansion was used in some high-end facilities, though Rook immediately emphasized that putting expanded-space technology around delicate server infrastructure was so expensive that only the largest organizations bothered. Still. The ceiling had moved. AI training systems had grown with it.

"The Mana Boom didn't pop the tech bubble," Rook said.

"It gave it another floor." Matt watched a graph climb. He understood maybe sixty percent of the technical details. He understood the money part.

"…So they're rich rich." Rook glanced at the camera.

"Very." The Consortium's target appeared. An eighty-year-old foundational architect behind several of the largest compute and AI systems of the post-Dungeon era. The participating companies had contractual access to his expertise. Returning his body to seventy could mean years of additional direct work at the highest level. Matt considered it.

"That is an extremely expensive employee retention program." Rook pointed at the target's biography.

"Founder." A pause.

"Different tax bracket." Matt laughed. The camera moved. A new group. > GULF DEVELOPMENT CONSORTIUM Matt's brain immediately supplied the category. Oil money. Rook looked into the camera.

"And if you're thinking 'oil money'—" Matt stopped.

"Update your mental file."

"…Okay." Rook changed the graphic. A satellite image of the Arabian Peninsula appeared. Then colored infrastructure zones.

"Oil mattered." Rook didn't pretend otherwise.

"It mattered a lot. More importantly, oil left several states with enormous sovereign wealth funds, energy-sector expertise, experience building infrastructure at scales most countries considered unreasonable, and enough capital to buy into the Mana economy early." Mana refining. Grid projects. Dungeon concessions. Technology investments. Global Guild financing. Then the slide changed. Water.

"The early investors understood something fast." A desert agricultural complex filled the screen. Long geometric fields. Reservoirs. Greenhouse arrays. Irrigation infrastructure stretching across dry land.

"If water gets cheaper, desert land changes value." Matt frowned. Rook continued. Mana-assisted desalination. Industrial Water Generation. Climate-controlled greenhouse systems. Dungeon-derived soil treatments. Mana irrigation. Agricultural enchantment materials. Not miracles. Infrastructure. Very, very expensive infrastructure. But the Gulf had money. And land. And an enormous incentive to stop importing such a large percentage of its food.

"Turns out deserts become significantly less inconvenient when water is an industrial product." Matt stared at the images.

"…They export food now?" Rook nodded as if Matt had personally asked him.

"Yes." He held up a hand.

"Not everywhere. Not magically. Nobody turned the entire Arabian Peninsula into Iowa." Another map appeared. Agricultural corridors. Greenhouse zones. Specialized high-value crops. Feed production. Port facilities.

"But enough that if your mental image of the Gulf is 'oil wells and imported food,' you are about fifteen years behind." Matt sat back.

"…Huh." He genuinely hadn't known. That bothered him a little. His picture of the region had been inherited from before the Gates. Oil-rich states. Huge sovereign funds. Desert. Food imports. Luxury development. Apparently the last fifteen years had taken that picture, fed it Mana Stones, and thrown half of it away. Rook wasn't finished.

"The big players now make money from oil, Mana infrastructure, water systems, agricultural exports, food processing, Grid investments, Dungeon finance, and international development." An image showed massive greenhouse complexes beside Mana Water infrastructure. Another showed cargo ships loading processed food exports. Another showed Gulf capital invested in African and Asian Dungeon agriculture projects. Rook shrugged.

"Calling all of that oil money is like calling Mercer a trucking company." Matt's head snapped toward the screen.

"…Mercer?" Rook moved on before explaining. Next bidder. > TAKAMORI GROUP / GUILD ALLIANCE > > Representative: Kenjiro Takamori > > Age: 86 Matt recognized the general category from his recent Guild research. Japan. Large industrial network. Major Guild connections. Rook sighed.

"People online call them a zaibatsu because apparently nobody likes using six words when one historically inaccurate word will do." Matt smiled. The Takamori organization predated the Gates. Heavy industry. Trading. Finance. Logistics. Manufacturing. Then the Dungeon era arrived. Instead of collapsing under the change, the group expanded through it. Mana processing. Equipment manufacturing. Guild expedition support. Artifact transport. Crafting supply chains. Dungeon medicine. International expedition financing.

Internal Gear markets. Rook displayed a network diagram. It was enormous.

"America and Japan had organized infrastructure ready early," Rook explained.

"Not perfect infrastructure. Not magical foresight. Just enough government coordination, industry, logistics, and Delver organization to start building systems while everyone was still figuring out what a Mana Stone was." Matt remembered the WDA history he'd read. America and Japan had effectively supplied some of the world's earliest organized fire extinguishers for Dungeon crises. Rook changed slides.

"And then somebody handed those industrial networks magic." Matt nodded.

"…Right." The Takamori Group was not simply old money. It had spent fifteen years compounding old infrastructure through new technology. That distinction was becoming a theme. Almost nobody still looked like what they had been before the Gates. The final major bidder appeared. > WALTER MERCER > > Age: 83 > > Founder — Mercer Spatial Logistics > > United States Matt immediately leaned forward.

"Oh." Then louder:"I know that company." Of course he knew the company. He had worked in logistics for eight years. Mercer Spatial Logistics was not a mysterious billionaire holding company that only appeared in financial newspapers. Matt had used their systems. Not personally in the sense of driving one of their trucks. Professionally. Routing. High-value freight. Emergency shipments. Spatial transfer schedules. Temperature-sensitive industrial cargo.

He'd seen the Mercer name in software integrations, rate sheets, contracts, contingency plans, and angry emails about expedited pricing. Rook nodded at the camera.

"If you worked in American logistics at any point in the last decade, you probably used Mercer somewhere whether you knew it or not."

"Correct."

"They own pieces of everything."

"Also correct." Rook brought up a company history. Mercer's original logistics empire predated the Gates. Large. Profitable. Conventional. Then Dungeon materials began moving. Mana Stones needed certified transport. Dungeon loot needed secure handling. Artifacts required insurance structures that hadn't existed. Guild expeditions needed food, medicine, ammunition equivalents, Gear, Currency, field infrastructure, and emergency replacement parts moved across states and eventually across countries.

Then Spatial Expansion became commercially viable.

"Mercer wasn't the first company to use Spatial Freight," Rook said.

"They were one of the first to realize it would eventually be stupid not to." Matt nodded immediately.

"Yeah." That absolutely sounded like them. Rook showed early facilities. Conventional warehouses beside experimental expanded-space freight depots. Then modern ones. Cargo entering a building whose usable interior volume vastly exceeded the external footprint. Secure Artifact vaults. Mana cold-chain storage. International Gate logistics terminals.

"They bought early, built early, standardized early, and charged everyone for the privilege." Matt laughed.

"Their expedited rates were robbery."

"Mercer is expensive," Rook said. Matt pointed at the screen.

"Yes." Rook continued.

"Mercer also gets your cargo there."

"… Also yes." Matt remembered one emergency industrial shipment years ago. A supplier failure. Critical component. Customer threatening penalties. His team had stared at three options. Cheap. Uncertain. Mercer. They had picked Mercer. The bill had been horrifying. The cargo had arrived. Matt had complained for fifteen straight minutes while approving the invoice. He looked at Walter Mercer now. Eighty-three. Worth more money than Matt could comfortably conceptualize.

Some microscopic, invisible fraction of the man's fortune had probably come from freight invoices Matt had personally cursed. Matt considered that.

"…I helped." The auctioneer stepped forward. The room quieted. Authentication complete. Legal verification complete. WDA custody verified. Seller verified. Bidders verified. The pale golden bottle sat inside its containment unit. The auctioneer raised a hand.

"Opening bid." Matt already knew it would be absurd. He was not prepared anyway.

"Fifty billion dollars." Matt stared.

"…Fifty billion is the opening bid." Twenty thousand dollars. Fortune's Harness. Five mornings of Crafting. Matt briefly remembered agonizing over the purchase. That version of himself suddenly seemed financially adorable. The bidding terminals lit. Immediately. > $52, 000, 000, 000 > > Chinese Sovereign Longevity Fund Another. > $54, 000, 000, 000 > > Russian Strategic Health Consortium Rook nodded.

"Of course." A few seconds. > $58, 000, 000, 000 > > North American Compute Consortium Then: > $62, 000, 000, 000 > > Gulf Development Consortium Matt stopped trying to convert the numbers into anything physical. Then Japan. > $65, 000, 000, 000 > > Takamori Group / Guild Alliance The room barely reacted. Apparently sixty-five billion dollars was still warm-up money. Walter Mercer moved one hand. A soft chime. > $67, 000, 000, 000 Matt stared.

"…Oh." Rook smiled.

"And logistics has entered the chat." The bidding accelerated. Sixty-eight. Sixty-nine. Seventy. Matt watched the number roll over. > $70, 000, 000, 000 He thought about his spreadsheet.

"I made thirty thousand dollars this week." The screen continued glowing. Seventy billion. Matt nodded slowly.

"…Never mind." Rook apparently saw the same sentiment from chat.

"For perspective, stop trying." Matt laughed.

"Correct." Rook continued.

"You can convert seventy billion into houses, aircraft carriers, hospitals, national budgets, or lifetime salaries. It will not make the number emotionally normal." The Russian consortium pushed again. Seventy-one. Seventy-two. Then stopped. Their timer expired.

"Russia's out." Rook looked impressed.

"Responsible budgeting." The chat mocked him. Next, China held into the mid-seventies. Then their representatives stopped conferring. No new bid.

"And China's out." Rook leaned back.

"See?" He spread his hands.

"Sharing." Chat erupted. Rook frowned at the comments.

"I am an international diplomat." Matt laughed.

"…No, you're not." The field narrowed. Compute. Gulf. Takamori. Mercer. The Compute Consortium submitted: > $76, 000, 000, 000 Rook nodded solemnly.

"The server farms would like their founder back."

"… That sentence is ridiculous." Matt watched the Consortium representatives. They weren't joking. Several executives were discussing something intensely. Financial models. Internal authorization. Corporate governance. Probably a dozen lawyers having cardiac events in real time. The bid moved higher. Seventy-seven. Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. The Consortium submitted what would become its final number. Then the Gulf pushed the auction to eighty. > $80, 000, 000, 000 The room got noticeably quieter.

The Compute Consortium's timer appeared. Representatives talked. One made a call. Another shook his head. Countdown. No bid. Rook whistled.

"There it is." The Consortium dropped out.

"Seventy-nine billion dollars." He paused.

"Apparently even AI companies have a budget." Matt nodded.

"Comforting." The remaining three became obvious. Gulf. Takamori. Mercer. The Gulf Consortium submitted eighty-one. Takamori answered eighty-two. Mercer answered without visible hesitation. The numbers continued. Then: > $83, 000, 000, 000 > > Gulf Development Consortium The Gulf representatives waited. Takamori raised. > $84, 000, 000, 000 Mercer answered. > $85, 000, 000, 000 Matt leaned forward. No one else moved. The Gulf timer appeared. Their representatives held a brief discussion.

One elderly man looked toward the bottle. Another toward their internal display. No bid. Countdown expired.

"And the Gulf is out at eighty-three," Rook confirmed. Matt looked at the number.

"They lost an auction at eighty-three billion dollars." Rook nodded.

"Correct." There were only two left. The WDA feed changed layout. Kenjiro Takamori on one side. Walter Mercer on the other. Eighty-six years old. Eighty-three. Both men had built power before the Dungeon era. Both had adapted after it. One backed by a Japanese industrial and Guild network. One sitting at the top of a logistics empire that had turned Spatial Freight into ordinary infrastructure. Rook leaned toward his camera.

"Alright." His voice dropped slightly.

"Now this is fun." Takamori spoke quietly to one aide. The aide nodded. His terminal lit. > $86, 000, 000, 000 A low murmur spread through the Auction Hall. For the first time, even the people accustomed to these events looked impressed. Matt whispered the number.

"…Eighty-six." Walter Mercer looked at the display. No visible surprise. No consultation. No dramatic speech. He reached toward the terminal. Pressed once. The new bid appeared. > $88, 000, 000, 000 Rook stopped.

"Oh." The live chat went completely insane. Matt stared.

"…He skipped eighty-seven." Rook looked almost delighted.

"Yes." A pause.

"That's called sending a message." The camera cut to Takamori. Then Mercer. Then the bottle. The Auctioneer began the final countdown.

"Ten." Takamori's advisers leaned in.

"Nine." Matt found himself sitting straighter.

"Eight." Rook said nothing.

"Seven." One aide whispered something to Takamori.

"Six." Takamori looked at the bid display.

"Five." His hand remained on the table.

"Four." No movement.

"Three." Mercer remained completely still.

"Two." Matt realized he was holding his coffee without drinking it.

"One." Silence.

"Sold." The screen changed. > THE EBBING OF TIME > > WINNING BID > > WALTER MERCER > > $88, 000, 000, 000 The hall erupted into applause. Controlled. Professional. Still somehow loud. Matt sat completely frozen.

"…Eighty-eight billion dollars." His eyes drifted toward the calculator icon. He opened it. Eighty-eight billion divided by four thousand. His fingers hovered. He imagined the resulting number of crafting mornings. Then he closed the calculator.

"No." Some numbers did not need to be domesticated. The WDA feed shifted. Walter Mercer stood. Matt assumed that would be it. Legal transfer. Secure transport. News interviews later. Instead Mercer began walking toward the stage. Rook noticed.

"Oh." He leaned forward.

"He's doing it here." Matt blinked.

"What?" Rook laughed.

"Of course he is." Apparently Mercer had already filed the documentation to consume the Artifact on-site. That eliminated an entire additional chain of secure transport, insurance, custody transfer, and risk. Matt considered the logistics. Then remembered who the buyer was.

"…Of course he is." Walter Mercer reached the stage. Before approaching the containment cylinder, he turned. Toward Mara Voss. The S-rank Delver who had brought the potion out of the Dungeon.

"Before I do anything else," Mercer said. The hall microphones carried his voice.

"Ms. Voss." Mara looked at him. Mercer inclined his head.

"Thank you for bringing it back." The room quieted.

"Money bought the bottle." Mercer looked toward the pale-gold liquid.

"It did not make the bottle exist." Applause broke out. This time louder. Matt stared at the old logistics king. That was— good. Really good. The eighty-eight-billion-dollar buyer understood something Matt suspected plenty of people forgot. Without the Delver, there was no auction. No Artifact. No technology. No Mana Boom. No billion-dollar bid. Somebody had to walk into the Dungeon first. Mara Voss gave Mercer a brief nod.

"Enjoy it." That was all. No speech. No false humility. She had done her job. The WDA officials stepped forward. Identity verification. Artifact authentication. Dose verification. Medical staff standing by. A final scan ran across the vial. Everything green. The containment cylinder unlocked. Walter Mercer picked up the bottle. Matt stared.

"…That's a very expensive drink." Rook nodded.

"Understatement of the month." Mercer uncorked it. No hesitation. He drank the entire dose. The room went silent. For a second— nothing. Then pale gold light spread across his body. Not an explosion. Not a dramatic transformation sequence. Smooth. Almost gentle. Matt watched the man's posture first. The curve in Mercer's shoulders lessened. His spine straightened. The skin around his hands tightened subtly. Deep age lines softened. The silver-white hair at his temples darkened toward iron gray.

His face changed enough to notice but not enough to become another person. He did not become young. He became ten years less old. Eighty-three. To roughly seventy-three. Exactly as advertised. The light faded. WDA medical staff immediately approached. A scanner passed over Mercer. One physician checked a display. Another took a blood sample from his finger. The results populated. Rook read the public confirmation.

"Biological regression confirmed." More numbers. Multiple aging markers. Tissue condition. Cardiovascular indicators. Musculoskeletal state. All consistent with the Artifact effect. Mercer flexed his fingers. Then rolled one shoulder. He looked down at himself. The crowd waited. Rook stared at the screen.

"…Yep." A beat.

"Still looks like Walter Mercer." The hall broke. Laughter. Not polite applause this time. Actual laughter. Mercer himself smiled. Matt laughed too.

"…He does." The camera found Lucian Cross. The eighty-year-old man with a forty-year-old body was laughing harder than anyone. He applauded enthusiastically. Mercer looked toward him. Cross raised four fingers. Mercer shook his head. That somehow made the room laugh again. Then Mercer tested his eyesight. A WDA official held out a document. Mercer took it. Paused. Removed the reading glasses hanging from his jacket. Looked at the text again. His eyebrows rose.

"Well." He folded the glasses. Put them into his pocket.

"I feel considerably better." Another laugh. Mercer looked toward the audience.

"Apparently I still need another one." The hall erupted. Rook leaned back.

"There it is." Mercer wasn't finished.

"Two more, at least." He said it with the casual tone of someone discussing future vehicle purchases.

"And I still need to secure one for my wife." The audience laughed even louder. Cross stood up and applauded. Rook pointed at him.

"Do not encourage him." Cross continued applauding.

"There's next month's problem." Matt stared.

"…He just spent eighty-eight billion dollars." Mercer was already joking about buying another.

"And immediately started planning the next purchase." Matt's eyes drifted toward the corner of the trailer. Fortune's Harness. Twenty thousand dollars. His Rare gear. His truck. His trailer. Then his future vehicle goal. A Spatial Expansion Pickup. Roughly three hundred thousand dollars. For several seconds, three hundred thousand dollars felt almost reasonable. Matt caught himself.

"No." He pointed at nothing.

"Three hundred thousand dollars is still a lot of money." Important. He was not allowing an eighty-eight-billion-dollar anti-aging auction to destroy ordinary arithmetic. Rook returned to full-screen commentary.

"So." He looked exhausted again.

"Walter Mercer gets ten years." A graphic appeared.

"Mara Voss gets the sale of a lifetime." Another.

"Takamori gets second place." Rook smiled.

"And the rest of us get to argue about whether eighty-eight billion dollars is reasonable until next month." The chat became a wall of economic arguments. Rook watched it.

"It isn't." A beat.

"Unless you have eighty-eight billion dollars." Matt nodded. Fair. The stream's ending graphics began. Then Rook raised one hand.

"One last thing." The graphic stopped. Rook's expression shifted. Not serious exactly. Grounded.

"Everybody spends all night talking about the buyer." The camera briefly replayed Mercer taking the bottle.

"The money." Takamori. The Gulf consortium. The Compute consortium.

"Eighty-eight billion dollars." Then the image changed. Mara Voss. Armor. Standing beside the Artifact. Rook pointed at her.

"Remember." Matt stopped.

"Everything you just watched started because somebody cleared an S-rank Dungeon and got lucky." The stream went quiet for half a second.

"Good night." Black screen. The trailer became silent. Matt remained in his chair with his coffee, laptop, Foundry Longsword, Backwater Wall, Fortune's Harness, new E-rank armor, and Level Fifteen Status around him. A few minutes earlier, thirty thousand dollars in five days had seemed absurd. It still was. Just— locally absurd. Matt looked at the dark screen.

"… That was an auction." He sat there. Thinking. Until today, S-rank had been abstract. News. Famous Delvers. Guild operations. WDA emergency responses. Dungeon disasters large enough to become international headlines. A Rank so far above Cinderfall that it might as well belong to somebody else's profession. Matt was Level Fifteen. E-rank. S-rank was not next. Or next after that. Or remotely close. But the thing that stuck in his head wasn't Walter Mercer. It wasn't the eighty-eight billion dollars.

It wasn't the four-times-rejuvenated billionaire sitting in the audience. It was Mara Voss. A Delver. She had entered a Dungeon. Killed monsters. Looted something. Walked back out. The object happened to be worth eighty-eight billion dollars. That was the same loop. Distorted beyond recognition by Rank. But the same loop. Fight. Loot. Sell. Upgrade. Go back. Matt looked at the auction page. > THE EBBING OF TIME > > FINAL SALE: $88, 000, 000, 000"… I want to find one." The words sat strangely in the quiet trailer.

Matt considered them. Then corrected himself.

"Not buy one." He smiled.

"Find one." That felt right. He opened his planner. Most of the document was short-term logistics. Cinderfall. Crafting. Level targets. Market listings. Gear. Fortune's Harness testing. Travel. The next Dungeon would eventually replace Cinderfall. Then another. Another state. Another Camp. Another Rank. Matt scrolled to the bottom. Created a new header. > LONG-TERM > > Reach S-rank Dungeon. > > Find something ridiculous. He stared.

"… Accurate." But vague. He deleted the second line. Typed again. > LONG-TERM > > Reach S-rank. > > Drop an Artifact. Matt leaned back. That was an absurd goal. Good. Long-term goals were allowed to be absurd. His Copy UI appeared in the corner of his vision. > COPY — SSS > > Maximum Copyable Rank: C > > Active Copy Slots: 3 > > Stored Copies: Unlimited Currently capped at C. Three active slots. But it had already changed once. At Level Ten, Copy had gained another active slot. He had no idea what happened later.

Level Twenty. Fifty. Eighty. Rank ceiling. More slots. Different functions. Nothing. Everything. Unknown. Matt looked at the three letters.

"SSS." A pause.

"That has to be good for something." He wasn't fantasizing about eighty-eight billion dollars. Not really. Money was useful. Extremely useful. He enjoyed money. He enjoyed spreadsheets about money. He enjoyed equipment bought with money. But the thing making him grin was the loot. The possibility that somewhere, in some Dungeon far beyond his current capability, something as ridiculous as The Ebbing of Time could simply— drop. A monster could die. Light could appear. And suddenly the ground contained a miracle.

Matt loved that. Probably more than was financially healthy. He checked his Status again. > Level: 15"E-rank." S-rank remained very far away. There would be D-rank, C-rank, B-rank, A-rank, along with Gear failures, build mistakes, expensive upgrades, travel, and probably a great deal of being set on fire by things significantly worse than Ember Hounds. Matt smiled.

"Okay." Plenty to do. He updated the top of the planner. > LEVEL 15 > > NEXT: KEEP FARMING CINDERFALL Then the bottom. > LONG-TERM > > S-RANK > > DROP AN ARTIFACT Matt looked between the two. One was tomorrow. One might be years away. Both were progression.

"I have an SSS-rank Unique Skill." The trailer did not respond.

"It's not impossible." Matt waited. Then added the obvious qualifier.

"Probably." He closed the laptop. The auction was over. His day off had lasted long enough. Matt stood. Picked up the Rare Foundry Longsword. Then Backwater Wall. The old Level Seven shield settled onto his arm with familiar weight. He looked once toward the closed laptop. Eighty-eight billion dollars. S-rank. Artifact. Then toward the door.

"Alright." Matt smiled.

"Let's get there."