Chapter 53: Crashing Economy (4)

"Welcome to the Iron Coin," the merchant said, his voice lacking any real enthusiasm. "Buying or selling?"

"Selling," Mira said, stepping up to the table.

She opened her inventory and materialized her hard-earned loot onto the table. Ten intact wolf pelts, five sets of harpy talons, and the crown jewels of her morning grind: the two Level 13 Razor-Claw Scythes and the Corrupted Beast Core.

The merchant barely glanced at the pelts. He picked up one of the bone scythes, turning it over in his hands with a practiced, utterly bored expression.

"Level 13 biologicals," the merchant noted, setting it back down. "The core is decently preserved. The pelts are standard."

"What’s the payout?" Mira asked, crossing her arms.

The merchant tapped his glowing ledger. "For the entirety of the lot, the Iron Coin can offer you one hundred and twenty Eternal Coins."

Mira froze. Her silver eyes narrowed to dangerous slits.

"Excuse me?" she asked, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous register. "One hundred and twenty coins? The scythes alone are worth four hundred each. The core is worth at least three hundred. I didn’t come here to get scammed."

The two player guards standing behind the merchant instantly tensed, their hands dropping to the hilts of their swords.

The merchant didn’t flinch. He just sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Miss, I’m not scamming you. That is the exact, system-verified market value as of this morning. Look at the board yourself."

He gestured to a small crystal slate resting on the edge of the table.

Mira leaned forward, her eyes scanning the glowing text.

[Current Market Baseline: Adept-Tier (Level 40-50)]

[Level 10-15 Biologicals: Classified as Low-Yield Starter Materials.]

[Value Depreciation: -92%]

Mira stared at the slate, the blood slowly draining from her face. Ninety-two percent.

"I don’t understand," Mira breathed, shaking her head. "How? How is the baseline Adept-tier? No one in this sector is Adept. The highest-leveled guild masters are maybe Level 18 right now. Where are Adept materials coming from?"

The merchant let out a hollow laugh. "Where have you been for the last week and a half? The Eastern Checkpoint has been turned upside down. The Gilded Anchor’s premium vaults are overflowing with Level 40 and Level 50 Elite drops. Void-Tainted Gargoyles. Abyssal Vanguard knights. Things that don’t even exist in the mapped regions of Sector 4."

Mira felt a cold knot form in the pit of her stomach.

"The Anomaly," the merchant continued, his voice tinged with a mixture of awe and absolute resentment. "The anonymous player who killed the Zone Boss on Day 10. Whoever he is, he walked into the highest-tier NPC merchant guild in the checkpoint and liquidated a god-tier stockpile of endgame loot. The system algorithm reacted instantly. It flooded the regional market with high-tier data, which completely destroyed the value of anything below Level 30."

The merchant pushed the 120 Eternal Coins across the table in a small leather pouch.

"Nobody wants your Level 13 scythes, miss. Not when major guilds are pooling all their liquid capital to buy Level 45 Abyssal Cores to power level their leaders. The progression economy for normal players is dead. We’re all just scraping the bottom of the barrel now."

Mira stared at the small pouch of coins.

She had risked her life. She had bled. She had fought two Level 13 beasts simultaneously, burning her stamina and nearly getting her throat torn out, all for a handful of coins that wouldn’t even cover the cost of a decent meal and a healing potion.

And she knew exactly whose fault it was.

Leon.

The image of him lounging in the steaming waters of the Imperial Suite, casually warning her about his ’dragon’, flashed through her mind. She had left him there, assuming he was just going to enjoy a few days of luxury while the rest of the world caught up.

She hadn’t realized that the moment she walked out the door, he was going to empty his pockets and casually nuke the entire sector’s economy just because he wanted some walking around money.

"That idiot," Mira hissed under her breath, her fists clenching so hard her leather gloves creaked.

She snatched the pouch of coins off the table and stormed out of the tent.

The sheer absurdity of it made her want to scream. She had spent ten days trying to rationalize how a Support class had managed to kill a Level 30 Boss. She had convinced herself it was a fluke, a hidden system mechanic, or some bizarre combination of consumable items.

But this wasn’t a fluke. To dump commercial quantities of Level 40 and 50 materials meant he had gone back out into the wild. It meant that while the entire sector was frantically hunting for him, he was casually farming the most dangerous, unexplored regions of Eternal Heaven like it was a morning stroll.

Mira stopped in the middle of the muddy path, looking up at the grey, overcast sky.

"What in the world are you, Leon?" she whispered to the clouds.

Two hundred miles away, deep in the uncharted, extreme northern borders of Sector 4, the ground was currently shaking violently.

This region didn’t have a name on any player map. It was a jagged, mountainous wasteland of shattered tectonic plates and glowing fissures of raw, unrefined mana. It was the physical boundary of the sector, a place where the system’s environmental coding began to break down, resulting in chaotic, hyper-lethal anomalies.

Leon Wes stood at the edge of a massive, glowing fissure, his Platinum-Rank Sovereign’s Mantle snapping wildly in the gale-force winds.

For the past ten days, while the Eastern Checkpoint tore itself apart trying to find him, Leon had been doing exactly one thing: mapping the borders.

The 100-day elimination cycle was a blunt instrument, but the existence of open dungeons and wandering Zone Bosses suggested that Sector 4 had hidden mechanics that could trigger catastrophic events if left unchecked. Before he made the decision to cross the border into Sector 3 or beyond, he needed absolute certainty that he wasn’t leaving a ticking time bomb behind that could wipe out the beginner zone—and by extension, the few people in it he actually found tolerable.