"Then what did you want the assessnt for?"
"Docuntation," Lin Yi said. "A registered assessnt from a certified desk gives verified grade records. I’ll take those records to the bulk exchange floor."
The assessor printed the grade docuntation. Lin Yi paid the assessnt fee, which was not small, and which he paid from the copper coins he had carried into the city from previous sales without accessing what was in the storage space at all. He took the docuntation and walked to the bulk exchange floor.
The bulk exchange floor was the section of the hunter market where large-volu transactions happened, where guild procurent teams and academy supply departnts and independent large traders operated. Counters along both sides of a wide hall, each one displaying the current purchase rates for registered grades of wilderness materials. The rates were posted publicly, but they were also negotiable for volus above a threshold that most individual hunters never reached.
Lin Yi was above that threshold by an amount that would not be politely described.
He chose the counter that handled beast cores and high-grade materials as its primary inventory and set the assessnt docuntation on the surface. The buyer, a sharp-faced woman in her thirties with the air of soone who spent her days making fast decisions about large numbers, looked at the docuntation. She looked at the volu numbers. She looked at the grade certifications from the assessnt desk. Then she looked at Lin Yi, who was visibly a student, visibly young, and standing in front of her with docuntation showing a materials haul that represented weeks of work from a full guild team.
"Where did you get this?" she said.
"Mountain Range," Lin Yi said. "Today’s expedition window."
She looked at the docuntation again. "Today."
"Yes."
She was quiet for a mont. "Six hours?"
"Yes."
She set the docuntation down carefully. "I can purchase all of this at posted grade rate plus seven percent. Given the volu I’m adjusting for the bulk premium." She t his gaze. "That’s a fair offer."
"Grade rate plus twelve percent," Lin Yi said. "The high-grade beast cores in the sixty-plus level bracket are premium tier this week based on the Celestial City weekly index. The posted rate already reflects last week’s index."
She looked at him for a long mont. Then she pulled up the current week’s index on her system. She looked at it. She looked at the docuntation. "Plus ten," she said. "I can do ten."
"Eleven," Lin Yi said. "And I co back here first for any future sales."
She considered this. A seller who ca back regularly with volu at this level was worth sothing structurally, not just in this transaction. She calculated it visibly and arrived at the conclusion quickly. "Eleven percent and first right of sale," she said. "Done."
The transaction was processed through the registered market system. Both parties’ hunter IDs verified, the docuntation transferred to the buyer’s account, the materials in the Spatial Storage Token linked to the transaction record for handover processing. The paynt was made through the digital transfer system that linked to each hunter’s registered bank account.
Lin Yi’s phone notification appeared as he was walking toward the exit.
He looked at it.
345,565,006 Copper coins
Below the notification, his bank account balance had updated. He looked at the number. The base paynt from the materials, before the eleven percent premium, had been significant. With the premium applied and the bulk volu calculation, the final figure was sothing that required him to count the digits twice.
He counted them twice.
The copper coin total that appeared in his account represented more than what the entire 1st Level A class combined would earn from a full sester of academic assessnt bonuses, expedition scoring rewards, and the standard monthly resource stipend the academy provided to enrolled students.
Generated in six hours. In a single expedition. From drops that his system had multiplied a thousand tis from what they would have been worth at base rate.
He put his phone in his pocket and walked out of the market district.
The evening air in Celestial City was cooler than Jianghe’s, the city large enough to generate its own weather patterns in small ways. He walked back through the comrcial district toward the academy, the streets still busy with the city’s evening movent.
He thought about the number in his account without sentint. It was a resource. Resources enabled things. What it enabled most imdiately was the freedom to operate without the constraints that most students navigated around, equipnt costs, material costs, the opportunity cost of choosing score-generating activities over leveling activities. Those constraints had shaped the decisions of every student he had observed in the academy so far, including the ones in the top sect of the previous session, including Han Yue, including Xie Yanran.
They didn’t shape his decisions because they didn’t apply to his situation. That was worth understanding clearly.
He arrived back at the academy residential block and went up to his room. The dormitory corridor was quiet. Most students were either in the dining hall or already in their rooms. He passed Wang Hao’s door, which had light coming under it and the faint sound of soone reviewing sothing on a datapad, which ant Wang Hao was studying despite having spent six hours in Grade 6 wilderness, which was exactly what he expected.
He knocked once.
"Co in," Wang Hao said.
Lin Yi opened the door. Wang Hao was at his desk, "How was the market?"
"Productive," Lin Yi said.
"How productive?"
Lin Yi showed him the bank account notification on his phone.
Wang Hao looked at the number. He looked at it for several seconds. Then he put his datapad face-down on the desk and stared at the ceiling for a mont. "In one day," he said.
"Six hours of expedition and an hour at the market," Lin Yi said.
"One day." Wang Hao looked back at the ceiling. "That’s more than my family earns in a year."
"Tis a thousand!"
"Yes."
Wang Hao was quiet for a mont. "Does it feel like anything?" he asked. "Having that much?"
Lin Yi thought about it honestly. "It ans I don’t have to think about resources," he said. "That’s useful."
Wang Hao laughed, a short and genuine sound. "That’s the most Lin Yi answer possible." He picked his datapad back up. "Go sleep. You look annoyingly rested but you’ve had a long day anyway." He looked at the datapad screen. "I need to finish this formation theory review before tomorrow."
After that, Lin Yi left.
The practical assessnts were starting. The expedition scoring would be posted in the morning, which ant the ranking would update. His individual score from today’s solo expedition would be calculated against his monster clearance data from the academy tracking system. What that number looked like, he didn’t know yet. But he knew what he had done in six hours, and he knew what that represented in terms of the tracking system’s trics.
He closed the schedule and looked at the bank account notification one more ti. Then he put the phone down.
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