Free Web NovelChapter 23: City H
"Your name from here on is..." A memory flickered in Aidan’s eyes, bringing forth a small burst of anger triggered by the despair in his memory, which he quickly suppressed. "Solenne. Your name is Solenne. It means sunlight and rebirth."
"Sunlight and rebirth...."
Solenne nodded. "I am Solenne."
"Let’s go get you a new apartment in the city."
...
The cocoon stayed where it hung, neon patterns turning slow across its surface.
’Take your time, buddy.’ Aidan glanced up at it once before they left. ’Come find me when you’re done cooking.’
Arthur couldn’t answer from inside the evolution, but a faint warm pulse rolled through the bond, like a sleeping animal shifting at the sound of a familiar voice.
Aidan tucked the Dread Light Mask’s disguise over his own face, shifting his white hair dark and his honey eyes plain brown, and stepped out of the sealed warehouse with a stranger walking beside him who used to be a dead girl.
H City sat a hundred and twenty kilometers east of City G, close enough to reach fast, far enough that nobody from Blazing Wings would think to look there for a face that didn’t exist anymore.
It was bigger than City G. Louder. The skyline climbed higher, glass and steel and glowing guild sigils stacked on top of each other, flying cars threading between the towers in neat humming lanes. Two enormous trade houses anchored the city’s commercial heart, the kind of places where Hunters came to turn what they’d killed into what they wanted.
Aidan took them to the larger of the two.
The Aurum Exchange.
It rose out of the city center like a blunt golden tooth, forty floors of trading halls, appraisal counters, and private vaults, its lowest levels open to any Hunter with goods to sell and its highest sealed behind guild contracts and Epic-rank security. A river of people flowed through its ground-floor doors, hauling storage rings, dragging anti-grav crates, carrying the spoils of a hundred different dimensions.
"Stay close," Aidan murmured. "New face or not, keep your head down out of habit. It’s a good habit."
Solenne nodded and pulled the hood of the plain coat he’d woven her up over the ash-grey hair.
Inside, the noise hit like a wall. Appraisers called numbers. Hunters argued prices. Somewhere a deal closed and a man whooped loud enough to turn heads.
Aidan steered them toward the high-value counters at the back, where the crowd thinned and the staff wore better coats.
To buy an apartment in a city like this, you needed money, and Aidan had money. He just hadn’t turned it into the spendable kind yet.
Back in his run through the Tier-10 Terrorized Dimension, while Arthur ate his way through the wildlife and Aidan stockpiled a thousand tons of food, he’d also been quietly collecting something far more valuable than meat.
Monster Cores.
Every Tier-10 monster they’d put down had left one behind, a dense crystallized knot of its power, and Aidan had hundreds of them sitting in his inventory, along with bones, hides, fangs, and a dozen other materials that didn’t rot. He’d grabbed them on instinct, figuring they’d be worth something.
He’d undersold it.
They were worth a fortune.
[Spirit Stones are the standard high-value currency across most developed regions of this world, Player Aidan. They are condensed universal energy in stable crystalline form. Beyond their use as money, they can be refined directly to increase one’s stats by tempering the body and soul.]
’Refined into stats?’ Aidan raised a brow. ’So it’s money you can also eat for power.’
[Correct. Though the gains from raw Spirit Stones are slow compared to energy-rich treasures or refined pills made from them. Most Hunters spend them as currency and pursue power through richer resources. But for someone patient, or someone with no shortage of them, Spirit Stones are a steady road to strength.]
’Slow but steady, and everyone wants them anyway.’ Aidan nodded slowly. ’Useful either way.’
[They are ranked the same as everything else. Tier-1 to Tier-10, then Epic, Legendary, and Divine. A single higher-tier Spirit Stone is worth an enormous quantity of lower ones.]
’And I’m about to dump a few hundred Tier-10 Monster Cores on a counter.’ Aidan’s lips twitched under the mask. ’Let’s see what that does to their day.’
He reached the high-value counter and stopped in front of an appraiser, a sharp-eyed woman in her forties with a monocle-shaped scanning artifact resting against one eye and the unbothered patience of someone who’d seen every kind of Hunter walk through that door. freewebnσvel.cѳm
"Selling," Aidan said.
"Storage ring or crate?" she asked, not looking up.
"Something like that."
He opened his inventory and let the first batch spill out onto the reinforced counter.
Monster Cores. Dozens of them. Fist-sized, glowing faintly, each one humming with dense Tier-10 energy, clattering across the surface in a small glittering avalanche.
The appraiser’s monocle artifact flared.
Her unbothered patience did not survive contact.
"These are..." She leaned in, the scanner spinning fast. Her voice dropped. "These are all Tier-10. Every single one. Pristine. No degradation."
"There’s more," Aidan said mildly. "A lot more. And the bones and hides too, if you take those."
Slowly, the appraiser looked up from the cores, past the plain brown eyes and forgettable face of the young man in front of her, and Aidan watched her do the math behind her expression, the math of a person realizing the most important sale of their week had just walked up wearing nothing memorable at all.
"...I think," she said carefully, "I should get my manager."
Beside Aidan, hidden under her hood, Solenne stared at the pile of softly glowing cores, then up at the stranger who’d given her a new face, a new name, and apparently a small fortune, all in the span of an afternoon.
For the second time that day, the still water in her moved.
