"I want my item back."
O’Shea turned. His eyes moved from the circlet in Jas’s hand to Jas’s face, and then to the worn jacket and the scuffed boots and the age, and whatever conclusion he’d already drawn about this room ca apart visibly — his mouth opened and closed once and his hand ca up off the table.
Jas held the circlet and waited.
"Wait." O’Shea’s voice lost its smoothness for exactly that one word, and then he pulled it back. He took his glasses off the chain around his neck and put them on and looked at Jas properly and said: "I apologise. I walked past you without — that was wrong of ." He pulled out the chair directly across from Jas himself and sat down. "My na is Ciarán O’Shea. I’m the Director of this Bureau."
Jas sat down and set the circlet on the table in front of him with his hand resting beside it.
The Director. Not a floor manager, not a senior appraiser. Seán had pressed one button on that phone and the Director of the entire TRB had co down personally. Jas turned that over once and kept his face still.
O’Shea folded his hands. "Jas. I’m going to offer you one hundred million dollars for that item."
The number sat in the room. Jas looked at O’Shea’s face and not at the circlet, because O’Shea had said it without a buildup — no qualification, no explanation, just a figure delivered flat and clean, and a man watching to see what the person across from him did with it.
He said it too calmly. You don’t open with a hundred million dollars that calmly unless a hundred million is not the number you’re worried about.
"You said Singapore sold for eight hundred and twenty million," Jas said. "And these stats are better than that one." He looked at O’Shea. "So why would I sell for a hundred?"
O’Shea didn’t flinch. "Because Singapore sold to a private guild and that item hasn’t been seen in eleven years. Nobody knows where it is or whether it’s being used." He held Jas’s gaze. "I’m not offering you a worse deal. I’m offering you a smarter one."
O’Shea’s hand moved toward his glasses and stopped. "Jas—"
"I’ll take it to Marcus Hale." Jas stood. "Erald Spire will make an offer."
Niamh looked up from her notepad. O’Shea stood at the sa ti Jas did and the composure that had co back after the apology showed a crack along the edge — not gone, but visible, the way a wall looks before sothing shifts behind it.
"That item," O’Shea said, and his voice ca out slower and more deliberate than it had been, "is not simply a high-value equip."
He set both hands flat on the table. "The Purify aura it carries neutralises Abyssal Miasma. Floor 45 has killed every raid team that has entered it for forty years. Not the enemies. The air itself. Every Challenger who gets within range without a Purify source active dies in under ninety seconds regardless of HP."
He leaned forward. "The Singapore circlet had a Purify aura too, but the output was capped at twenty-two percent and the range was four tres. We acquired access to it for three attempts on Floor 45. Three teams. All dead within the first minute because the aura wasn’t strong enough to cover the full party and the Miasma got through the edges."
He looked at the circlet. "Yours carries forty percent output and the party aura radius is significantly wider. That is not a marginal improvent. That is the difference between a tool that fails and one that might actually work."
He sat back. "Ireland is stuck at Floor 45. The US, Japan, South Korea — their top teams are already past it. We’ve asked what they used to clear it and they won’t share. National advantage. They keep it close and move ahead while everyone else stays behind."
"The working theory is that they found sothing that handles the Miasma. Sothing we haven’t been able to replicate." He paused. "Right now the entire world is pushing against Floor 60 and nobody is through it yet. If we clear Floor 45 with this, Ireland doesn’t just catch up — we’re in the sa race as everyone else trying to break Floor 60."
He spread his hands. "If a private guild controls it, only their teams benefit. If the Bureau manages it, every approved attempt team in Ireland gets access — and if we crack Floor 45, we find out what’s on the other side before the rest of the world does."
Jas stood with his hand on the back of the chair and let him finish.
Then he sat back down.
O’Shea sat. He took his glasses off and set them on the table — the first ti he’d done it deliberately rather than from being caught off-guard — and he looked at Jas without them. "I’m not asking to buy it. I’m proposing a Resource Sharing Agreent. The Bureau manages the item and contracts it to approved Floor 45 attempt teams on a usage basis." He put both hands flat on the table. "You receive a royalty paynt every two weeks. A hundred thousand dollars."
$100,000. Every two weeks. Whether he cleared a floor or not, whether he was injured or between floors or grinding — the paynt arrived every fourteen days.
"Terms," Jas said.
"Legal contract, governnt-enforced. The item cannot be transferred, used, or sold without your written authorisation. Every usage is logged — which team, which attempt, how long. You receive a full report with each paynt." O’Shea glanced at Niamh, then back. "If the Bureau violates any term of the agreent, the contract nullifies imdiately and full ownership reverts to you." He paused. "We also strongly recomnd an anonymity clause. Your identity as the holder is sealed from public registry and the paynt routes through a protected account." He stopped.
Niamh finished it. Her voice was even and her pen hadn’t moved. "If your na gets attached to this item publicly, every major guild in Ireland will have soone outside your door before the day is over."
"I’ll take the anonymity clause," Jas said.
O’Shea nodded once. "Niamh."
She closed her notepad, stood, and looked at Jas. "Sit and wait." Then she walked out without looking back.
O’Shea turned to Seán, still standing by the door. "The wolf hides — go back to appraisal and reprocess them at the highest premium rate we have. The receipt he’s holding gets voided and reissued."
Seán nodded and left.
O’Shea turned back to Jas and for the first ti since he’d walked into this room, nobody else was in it. He asked if Jas wanted anything while they waited.
Jas looked at the Tower through the window. The black spire rose out of the city and disappeared into the sky the sa way it always had, visible from everywhere, answerable to nothing.
"Water," he said.
Niamh was in another room writing a contract that would put a hundred thousand dollars into a protected account every two weeks in exchange for an item Jas had carried out of a forest in his System inventory after a single afternoon on Floor 1. O’Shea sat across from him and kept his glasses on the table and said nothing else, because he was a man who had learned not to fill his own silences, and Jas was eighteen years old and sitting in a chair that probably cost more than his mother made in a month and he was not going to fill it either.
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