Charlie looked down at his bucket of green beans that had cost him 20,000 KarmaCoin, and then at the 50 individual green bean pods that had cost 2,000 each, his mouth puckered in distain, his eyes furrowed and his face flushed red with anger.

"Happy now?" he spat. Then muttering, "I hate green beans."

You and me both, asswipe.

Behind him, the other soldiers stared at their buckets of green beans with queasiness and glazed eyes. They'd yet to recover from Logan slamming their heads against the ground.

Logan grinned and held back a chuckle. He'd taken them for all they were worth! Charlie and the soldiers had managed to clear out the food and nonaonalic juice, leaving only the weapons, clothing, spatial storage bracelets, whale and human corpses.

Pulling up his Build an Empire quest status, Logan held his breath as anticipation thrummed through his belly.

[Build an Empire! Craft ten lodestone access points and sell 100 items within 48 hours.]

[Quest Progress: 65% complete. 20.5 hours remaining.]

Yes! Logan fist pumped the air and bounced on his feet. Although it didn't tell him that he'd satisfied the 100-item requirement, there was only one way his quest progress had jumped from 8% to 65% in half an hour. He was well on his way.

Hell, technically, he could craft the remaining lodestone access points here and he'd satisfy the quest, but that wasn't a winning strategy. It would be short sighted, since although he'd satisfy the quest, it wouldn't help him build an empire and raise KarmaCoin.

Feeling his mouth grow dry, Logan pulled up his stat sheet and examined his KarmaCoin.

Name: Logan Hart [Hidden Name: Idiot]

Rank: 2 out of 5,981,912,952

Level: 162

Class: [Epic] Fabled Creation

Grade: E6

Species: Human

Skills:

Idiot's Paradox Lv. 29

Idiot's Inspect Lv. 10 (capped)

Deepwater Explorer Lv. 3

Regenerate Lv. 16

Mimicry Armour Lv. 3

Undead Stamina

Foresight

Lodestone Creationist Lv. 1

Liche Devourer Lv. 1

Life Fabricator Lv. 3

Threshold Shift

Titles: Eager Beaver; Mass Murderer; Audacious Corpse; Run Until You Drop; Malicious Meat Sack; Forerunner

XP Progress: 300,000/324,000

Karma: 3,600/3,600

Intelligence: 600

Constitution: 75

Strength: 365

Agility: 381

Dexterity: 302

Endurance: 683

Perception: 141

Wisdom: 587

Luck: 105

Free Attribute Points: 5

KarmaCoin: 812,600

Holy shit! Holy shit! His KarmaCoin total had jumped to over 800,000! He was rich! Rich!

And holy crap, even as he studied his stat sheet, as he watched, the total changed! The KarmaCoin was inching up!

[KarmaCoin: 812,600]

[KarmaCoin: 815,300]

Someone back in the Okanagan must have bought an item. Beaming from ear to ear, Logan dissolved his facemask, his eyes faraway as he thought of the possibilities. Now that he'd eliminated the risk of the food kill penalty, he could rove around the world, throwing everything but the kitchen sink into his spatial collar, and then add it to his market. Hell, why limit himself? Another person's trash could be someone else's treasure.

Not to mention that although the Build an Empire Quest required him to craft ten lodestone access points, it didn't mean that he had to stop there. He could use [Threshold Shift] to portal all over the place, fixing a lodestone in every major city.

But…

Logan scrubbed his fingers over his stubble. He couldn't get ahead of himself, going so crazy with greed that he forgot the bigger picture. Building an empire was well and good, but not if Lara and the kids ended up dead in less than a year. The threat of the purge was ever present, and if he failed his Save Humanity Quest billions would die.

The Save Humanity Quest was a priority.

On top of that, although he was getting closer to wrapping up his dueling priorities, by finishing the Build an Empire Quest, he hadn't forgotten that in less than six days, the System would send him off to a shitty knight's 'Integration Tournament.' Despite Pied telling him that the System warped time there (a week in the tournament was one day here), being forced to divert his attention to a tournament that he viewed as irrelevant was beyond annoying.

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And yet, he had all that crap to deal with, but excitement continued to thrum through his belly. There was no wiping away his satisfaction when he stared at that increasing KarmaCoin tally. Finally, finally, he'd triumphed financially. Logan was well on his way to becoming a financial powerhouse.

And there was such a thing as too much misery and having a pessimistic view of life. He'd been dealt a shitty hand. All of humanity had. The Integration had been nothing but heartache, killing, and pain up until now. Didn't he deserve to bask in positivity? He knew he had a tendency to be too serious, too focused on external factors and to rage at the world. His girlfriend had given him an earful about it the last time they'd talked.

For once, Logan could give himself allowances. If he received pleasure from seeing himself grow rich, then so be it.

But there was one thing he could do to increase that profit margin.

"Voss," he said, giving the man a look. "Keep an eye on them for me, will you?"

Voss had been peering up at the tree, his eyes wide, but at Logan's words, his gaze snapped to Logan. He nodded. The soldiers were so injured that they wouldn't give Voss any trouble, but Charlie was a threat. Even injured, Voss was no match for him.

Logan approached his lodestone, climbing over the immense tree roots exploding through the asphalt, the scent of sap and earth wafting past his nose.

The canopy at the top was no normal canopy. Logan had created a monster, carbon sucking tree, which meant that it blocked the sun and cast him in shadow. Even better, he was convinced that the air felt cleaner: filtered, healthy. It was as if he'd stepped into an old growth forest that created its own weather. Step away from the forest and move away from the towering trees, and you'd find the weather five degrees hotter, the mist gone, the air crisp.

He rested his hand against the lodestone, the metal feeling cool to the touch.

[Private market owner recognized! Would you like to add items to your private market?]

Logan toggled through the options until he navigated to the lending details. Pulling up the loan percentages, Logan reverted them back into interest that accumulated daily, switching it to 5% for regular items like clothes and 10% for the rarer weapons. If someone was desperate for a shirt, he didn't need to charge them an arm and a leg, but weapons were a different story. For all he knew, the people who ended up buying them might turn into enemies.

Logan didn't know these people, and once he left, there would be no controlling who bought items. Better to raise the price as much as he could—a high price, but not a price that was unreasonable. With the loan, it might look hefty, but if he attracted people who wanted to get into the one percent, he had to assume that they'd earn KarmaCoin eventually. That meant they could pay off the loan quicker.

As long as he crafted his lodestone access points in high traffic, high populated areas, he had the opportunity to raise a massive fortune.

Scratching his stubble, Logan examined the items inside of the market one more time and then hesitated over the last option.

Auction buying.

He hadn't bothered setting it up yet, but unless something unforeseen happened, he'd craft the remaining lodestones in the next few hours. That gave him a unique opportunity. He had to assume a ton of people would check out the market en masse. He could create scarcity, which created desirability. By now, he'd learned that there was no way to remove an item once he'd already added it to the market, so his twenty spatial storage devices he'd grabbed from Pied's Kingdom would remain.

And yet…

With a grin, Logan jacked up the price of each to 1,000,000 KarmCoin, and then took the lowest quality version, an F grade bracelet, and toggled on the auction buying option.

Logan selected a time limit of 1 week with a reserve price of 10,000 KarmaCoin. He doubted that many people would have anywhere close to 1,000,000 KarmaCoin, so it would make the spatial storage device appear priceless. Instead of putting an arbitrary price like 50,000 KarmaCoin on each spatial storage device, an auction would create excitement, letting him sell them at the highest price possible. Better yet, it gave him the option to auction the other higher quality spatial storage devices at a later date.

Logan dropped his hand from the lodestone and then turned around before climbing off the massive protruding roots and back to the ground.

Charlie had kicked over his bucket of green beans. They'd scattered on the ground and were filthy with dirt. Asshole. Logan hated green beans too, but that didn't mean he'd treat a viable food source like it was mud on the bottom of his shoes. Logan hissed out a breath. Looking at Charlie was bringing his mood down, and his stomach sloshed as he glanced from him to the soldiers.

He needed to take care of these soldiers. But now, looking them dead in the face, slaughtering them defenceless left a bad taste in his mouth. And yet there was no way around it. If he left them here, Damsel would return, and the cycle would start all over again.

Logan glanced at the crowd.

Many of them were still hiding, the children nowhere to be found, but others had started to trickle back into the area. Logan had already poisoned them against him enough. It was through no fault of his own, but he knew the optics of him bursting into the area and killing Damsel's loyalists and soldiers wasn't a good look.

That meant they might avoid his lodestone and refuse to buy items just on principle.

Fuck, there had to be a way around it.

Voss cleared his throat. "What are you going to do with these men?"

Logan glanced from the soldiers' faces to the crowd, torn. They were watching him. If he killed them now, would he be viewed as a mass murderer, as yet another XP harvester? Hell, Logan would leave, and Damsel would return, spinning propaganda that the big bad 'Idiot' rank number 2 in the world user had tried to kill her and sabotage the complex.

"If I may…?" Voss' voice was tentative.

"I'm all ears."

"Although these soldiers and Charlie killed many users in their draft expeditions, they left behind the relatives of those who were fallen. A death in an expedition is an automatic green light for the surviving family to join the complex. Many of them are here, living amongst everyone else. If they were to learn that their family member was murdered? That might change how they view Damsel. And perhaps, you as well."

Logan smiled. "Voss, you're a genius."

A public roasting of Charlie, Damsel and the soldiers. Turn popular opinion around, create a movement. Give them a fighting chance to put together something they could be proud of, a sense of community. If he could do that, Damsel could return all she wanted, but if they didn't want her, what could she do?

Thinking about Damsel brought his attention to the stinging pain in his leg. He'd pulled out the shard of metal and thrown it inside of his spatial collar, but it had done damage, damage that was slow to heal even with [Regenerate]. If he didn't want to constantly walk around at the same time as sticking himself with shards of metal, he needed to shore up his constitution attribute so that he could reduce his vulnerability to mind attacks.

Making a snap decision, Logan allocated his free attribute points:

[Constitution: 72]

[Constitution: 73+]

[Constitution: 76]

His [Forerunner] title gave him a 5% static boost to all his attributes. 76 multiplied by 5 percent gave him 4 extra attributes, which meant that his constitution attribute ended up at 80. So far, the 5% boost hadn't been too advantageous, but he could see it helping as he continued to raise the stat.

Such a minor change didn't change his worldview or open his eyes like upgrading his wisdom or intelligence attributes, but he could already feel a slight lessening in the persistent ache in his thigh. That, together with [Regenerate], should clear it up in no time.

More people were starting to trickle into the area, their eyes wary, movements tentative. Nervous. But their gazes were on Charlie and the soldiers, expressions protective. They gaped at the tree, paling, while a smattering glared at Logan and adjusted their weapons. If Logan could pull this off, that protection would turn to distrust and then outrage.

"Voss," said Logan. "How do you propose we do this?"

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