SSS-Awakening: I Have Infinite Talents

"The truth doesn’t need a defense. It just needs someone willing to taste it." — Ancient Appraiser’s Proverb.

– – –

The General Manager stepped forward, and the temperature on the third floor dropped by about ten degrees. Not literally. But the way she moved, the way her eyes swept across the scene, made everyone in the vicinity feel like they’d been caught misbehaving in class.

She was tall, mid-thirties, with sharp features and dark hair pulled back in a tight bun that looked like it could double as a weapon. Her suit was tailored to perfection, black with silver threading along the collar, and the Syndicate’s crest sat on her chest like a badge of authority that said, I own this building and everything in it.

Her name was Chloe. General Manager Chloe, to be precise. And right now, she looked like she wanted to set fire to the entire third floor with her eyes.

She looked at Greg first.

"Explain," she said. One word. No follow-up. No context. Just a single verb that carried the weight of a termination letter.

Greg’s face had gone from red to white in the span of about three seconds. The smug confidence he’d been wearing moments ago had evaporated completely, replaced by the kind of raw, animal panic that a dog shows when it knocks over a vase and hears its owner coming through the door.

He bowed. Actually bowed, his upper half folding forward like a hinge had given out in his spine.

"General Manager, I— this individual approached the counter with a suspected counterfeit substance," Greg stammered. His words came out in a rush, tumbling over each other like they were trying to escape his mouth before the next one pushed them aside. "The liquid is the wrong color, wrong viscosity, no certification, no trader’s license, no organizational backing. Standard protocol for suspected fraud is confiscation and detention. I was simply following—"

"You hit the panic button before you tested the substance," Chloe said.

Greg’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again.

"I— the color was clearly—"

"Did you run it through the spectrometer?"

"I... no, but—"

"Did you perform a molecular scan?"

"The standard procedure for—"

"Did you. Perform. A molecular scan."

Greg swallowed so hard his entire throat moved. "No, General Manager."

Chloe looked at him for a long, uncomfortable moment. The kind of silence that made the people watching from the crowd instinctively take a step back, as if the sheer weight of her disappointment had a physical radius.

Then she turned to Micah.

Her dark eyes studied him carefully, starting with the mask, then moving to the clothes, then settling on his posture. Micah could see the calculations happening behind her irises. She was reading him the way a poker player reads a table, looking for tells, looking for cracks, looking for the frantic energy that scammers carried like a stench.

She didn’t find any.

Micah stood perfectly still, his breathing even, his shoulders relaxed, his hand holding the pouch at his side without trembling. He wasn’t acting calm. He was calm. He’d stared down a Stone-Ape and punched a dragon in the jaw. A corporate manager in a nice suit didn’t even register on his threat scale anymore.

Chloe’s eyes narrowed slightly. She had noticed the same thing. The masked stranger wasn’t scared. Wasn’t nervous. Wasn’t even mildly concerned. That was unusual. Scammers panicked when authority arrived. Thieves ran. Con artists talked fast and smiled wide.

This one just stood there.

"Show me the item," she said.

Before Micah could move, the elderly man behind her stepped forward.

The Master Appraiser had been silent since arriving on the third floor. He’d stood behind Chloe like a shadow, his deep-set eyes moving across the scene with the kind of slow, methodical attention that came from decades of evaluating things that other people overlooked.

But now his eyes were locked onto the pouch in Micah’s hand. His gaze hadn’t wavered from it since the moment he’d stepped off the escalator. There was something in his expression that Micah recognized, because he’d seen it in his own reflection back on Earth whenever a new Chapter of a really good NovelPhoenix dropped. It was hunger. Pure, uncontrollable, professional hunger.

The old man had sensed something through the glass.

"Give it to me," the Master Appraiser said. His voice was deep and aged, like gravel rolling across wood. But there was a tremor underneath it, a faint vibration that had nothing to do with his age and everything to do with what he was feeling.

He reached out with both hands. They were steady, but the tendons in his wrists were taut, the kind of tension that came from actively restraining yourself from grabbing.

Micah looked at Chloe. She gave a single, short nod.

He opened the pouch and tipped the vial into the Master Appraiser’s waiting hands.

The old man caught it gently, cradling it between his palms like it was a newborn. He held it up to the overhead light, and the sapphire liquid inside caught the glow and threw blue reflections across his weathered face.

His eyes widened.

Not a little. A lot. The kind of widening that happened when a man who had spent forty years appraising rare items saw something that broke every rule he thought he understood.

He brought the vial to his nose, removed the stopper with trembling fingers, and inhaled deeply. His nostrils flared, and his pupils dilated so fast that his irises nearly disappeared.

Then his hands started shaking.

"That’s impossible," he whispered.

Greg, still standing behind the counter with his face the color of old milk, leaned forward. "What? What’s impossible?"

The Master Appraiser ignored him completely. He raised one hand toward Greg without looking, palm out, the universal gesture for shut up.

He tilted the vial back. Just slightly. Just enough for a single drop of the sapphire liquid to touch his lip.

Then he swallowed.

The crowd went dead silent. Every single person on the third floor had stopped what they were doing. Phones were still recording, but the people holding them had forgotten to breathe.

The Master Appraiser closed his eyes.

For five seconds, nothing happened. He stood perfectly still, the vial cradled against his chest, his face serene. He looked like a man who had just taken a sip of the finest wine in the world and was letting it settle.

Then his eyes snapped open.

A wave of pure Flux Energy exploded from his body.

It wasn’t violent. It wasn’t destructive. But it was undeniable. The air around him distorted, shimmering like pavement on a hot day. The energy radiated outward in a perfect sphere, and when it hit the two guards standing nearest to him, they both staggered backward a full step, their boots scraping against the marble floor.

Greg grabbed the edge of the counter to keep from falling over. His mouth was hanging open so wide that Micah could see his back teeth.

The Master Appraiser’s eyes were blazing. Not metaphorically. They were literally glowing, a soft blue light emanating from his irises, the same sapphire shade as the liquid he’d just consumed.

"This is real," he said.

His voice carried across the entire third floor without effort. Every word was clear, deliberate, and weighted with an authority that made Greg’s earlier pronouncements sound like a child throwing a tantrum.

"This liquid is not counterfeit. It is not stolen. It is not defective. It is, in fact, the single purest Flux condenser I have encountered in forty-three years of professional appraisal."

He held the vial up to the light again, rotating it slowly.

"The standard military-issue Flux condenser available on the market today operates at roughly twenty-five percent absorption efficiency. The best corporate-grade products reach thirty-five, perhaps forty percent on a good day."

He turned to face the crowd.

"This condenser operates at a confirmed fourfold absorption rate. Four times the maximum industry standard. That means a single vial of this liquid does the work of four premium condensers combined."

The crowd didn’t react. They were too stunned to react. People stood with their mouths open, their phones frozen mid-recording, their brains struggling to process what they were hearing.

The Master Appraiser continued.

"The purity is what truly sets this apart. Standard condensers contain trace impurities, molecular debris from the refinement process, that limit how much energy the body can actually absorb. The rest passes through unused."

He tapped the glass vial with his fingernail.

"This liquid has no impurities. None. Zero. The refinement process that produced this is beyond anything I have seen, read about, or heard rumored. At this purity level, the condenser doesn’t just restore Flux. It actively repairs damaged meridians and permanently expands the user’s cellular capacity."

He paused, letting the weight of his next words settle before speaking them.

"This means that a seasoned soldier who has been stuck at the same Flux level for years, someone whose genetic limits have plateaued, could consume this liquid and break through that barrier. The cellular expansion effect is permanent and cumulative."

The crowd exploded.

Not into laughter this time. Into gasps. A synchronized, collective intake of breath that hit the ceiling and echoed back down like a physical wave. People grabbed each other’s arms. A man near the front of the crowd sat down on the floor because his legs apparently decided they were done holding him up.

The implications were staggering. Every soldier, every mercenary, every noble in the city had someone in their family who had hit a wall in their cultivation. A genetic ceiling that no amount of training or meditation could push past. A vial of this liquid could shatter that ceiling.

The whispered conversations started immediately. People leaning into each other’s ears, their eyes wide, their hands gesturing frantically. Micah caught fragments as the noise built.

"How much is it worth?"

"Who is this guy?"

"Four times the standard? That’s impossible."

"That’s a Master Appraiser. He doesn’t say things he can’t back up."

Chloe’s face had gone completely white.

Not the kind of white that comes from fear. The kind that comes from horrific realization. The kind that hits you when you understand that your employee has just done something catastrophically stupid on a historic scale.

She looked at Greg.

Greg was still clinging to the counter. His face had passed through white and was now entering a shade of grey that Micah had previously only seen on dead hounds in the ruins. His mouth was still open. His eyes were still wide. He looked like a man who had just woken up to find that the grenade he’d been kicking around was live.

Chloe looked at the guards, who were still repositioning themselves after being pushed back by the Master Appraiser’s energy pulse. She looked at the crowd, which was growing by the second as people from the second and first levels flooded up the escalators, drawn by the noise and the energy surge.

Then she looked at Micah.

He stood exactly where he had been standing for the past fifteen minutes. Same spot. Same posture. Same calm. The only difference was that now, behind his mask, he was wearing a grin so wide it hurt his face.

’So. Still want to throw it in the trash?’

He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t need to. The expression on Chloe’s face said she could hear it anyway.

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