Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

He manifested three.

That was deliberate. Three was enough to test the process and small enough that if the result was garbage, he had lost thirty-six coins and an evening.

[Manifestation Complete — 36 coins]

[Coin Balance: 878]

The herbs appeared on his desk. There was no light, no sound, and no sense of occasion whatsoever. One moment the desk was empty and then there were three stems of a common cultivated herb lying on it, slightly damp, smelling faintly green.

Jin picked one up and ran Data Appraisal on it, then did what Orsill had taught him and ran it three more times.

[Beginner Herb]

[Condition: excellent]

[Potency: 94% baseline]

[Contamination: none]

[Structural integrity: intact]

Then he did the part that mattered, which was the part he would not have thought to do a month earlier. He cut one, examined the cut end, checked the moisture in the stem, looked for storage bruising, and compared it against the grading card he had been carrying around in his jacket for three weeks.

It graded B-Two. Fresh-cut, good potency, no handling damage.

It’s real. It’s genuinely real material and it’s genuinely good.

Which produced the second problem immediately.

The Engine gave him a herb. It did not give him a farm, a supplier tag, a harvest date, a batch number, or any story whatsoever about where three fresh-cut herbs had come from at 2200 in a dormitory room.

He worked through the uses on paper.

Keeping it preserved the herb for later, did nothing for him now, and still left the material to degrade.

Feeding it to the avatar preserved fifty percent of the benefit with no risk and spent no manifestation coins. For anything unknown or dangerous, that remained the correct answer and always would.

Manifesting and selling converted twelve coins into some number of Credits, and Credits became protein.

The third one only made sense if the number was good, and he had no idea what the number was.

He found out over the following week, in small pieces, in a commercial row two districts out from the academy gate.

He did not build a false persona. He did not use a false name, because using a false name was the single fastest way to turn a boring transaction into an interesting one. He simply wore ordinary clothes without an academy marker, carried three herbs in a cloth, and did not volunteer anything.

The first buyer offered him eleven Credits each.

Jin knew what they were worth by then. Eleven was a price for a boy who did not know that fresh-cut B-Two went for four times that, and the man’s entire manner was built around finding out whether Jin was that boy.

"That’s a C-Four price," Jin said.

"That’s what I’ve got."

"They’re B-Two. The cut ends are clean and there’s no bruising."

The man’s face changed slightly. He went to fifteen. Jin left.

The second buyer was pleasant, tested the herbs properly, offered a reasonable forty, and then asked where they came from. Then asked again. Then asked which supplier, and whether Jin had more, and whether the source was regular, and whether he could meet the grower.

None of the questions were hostile. Every one of them was a question Jin could not answer, and answering badly three times in a row would be more memorable than declining once.

He declined once and left.

The third was a man behind a curtain in a back room who did not test anything, offered thirty-five with no questions at all, and made Jin’s skin crawl in a way he could not immediately justify.

He thought about it on the walk out and got there eventually.

He didn’t test them. He doesn’t care what they are. Which means what he’s actually buying is the fact that I didn’t want to be asked, and that’s the thing he’ll sell later.

The fourth was a licensed dealer named Merris Vann, whose shop had a posted licence number, a grading bench, and a queue.

She took the three herbs, put them under a lamp, ran a moisture probe, cut a stem herself, checked the end, and weighed them.

"B-Two," she said. "Cut in the last day or so. Where’d you—"

She stopped, looked at him properly for about two seconds, and did not finish the question.

Jin said nothing.

"Fifty-two each," said Vann. "That’s my board price for B-Two on a small lot. I’ll show you the board."

She showed him the board. It was on the wall. Fifty-two was what it said.

"Why not lowball me?"

"Because I can resell these legally at seventy-one and I’d rather you come back," Vann said. "The man three doors down would give you fifteen and then never see you again, and he thinks that’s business."

She counted out the Credits.

"You’re a student," she added, while counting. "Meridian, probably, given the distance and the fact that you’re doing this at half past six on a weekday."

Jin’s hand did not move.

"That’s not a threat," Vann said. "It’s about a fifth of my small-lot trade. Students sell personal finds, independents sell surplus, half of them don’t want their instructor or their neighbours knowing they need the money. I test what’s in front of me, I record the lot the way the licence requires, and I don’t ask people about their household finances."

"And if the lot’s a problem?"

"Then I don’t buy it, and I say why." She pushed the Credits across. "Three herbs isn’t a problem. Three herbs is Tuesday."

[Credits Received: 156]

Fifty-two each. Twelve coins each to manifest.

Jin did the arithmetic on the walk back and found it modest and workable. One hundred fifty-six Credits was a little under two days of Glitch’s current intake. Thirty-six coins was less than half of one good quarry run.

Not wealth. A supplement that came from somewhere other than his own hours.

Vann had given him a contact chit on the way out, with no speech attached to it.

"No quota," she said. "No exclusivity, I don’t care who else you sell to. No guaranteed price, because the board moves. Every batch gets tested and priced on its own. If you show up with forty of something rare I’ll have to ask questions I don’t want to ask, so don’t."

"Understood."

"Small and boring," said Vann. "That’s the trade that lasts."

Jin put the chit in his jacket.

Small and boring, he thought. I can be small and boring. I’ve built an entire personality out of it.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!