Chapter 107: Marketplace

The panel did not wait for permission.

Kai was still on the bed in cell nine, boots off, the side-shelf fight and Aminah’s span-glance and the thin-board week stacked behind his eyes, when the System unfolded across his vision like it had been leaning on the lock all term.

[Desire Points: 2000]

[Spend Lock: Released]

[DP Marketplace: Unlocked]

For a second he only stared.

Two thousand.

The number he had been feeding with fear, lust, stairs, mouths, night heat, and one humiliating supply bay. The door the early plot had promised and then buried under Crucible blood and academy ink.

Finally. Finally the menu. Don’t cry. You’re a man with two women and borderline Iron. Men with two women do not cry at shop interfaces. They evaluate.

He evaluated.

The Marketplace did not look like the clean fantasy stores from the light novels he used to rot his life away to. No cheerful attendant. No starter pack ribbon. Just ranked columns in cold light, costs listed without pity, and his bank sitting at the top like a dare.

[DP MARKETPLACE]

Balance: 2000

--- ℯℯ𝑙.

STATS

Physique (Rank C) → Rank C+

Cost: 400 DP

Physique C+ → Rank B-

Cost: 900 DP

Reflex Edge (minor)

Cost: 250 DP

Recovery Density (minor)

Cost: 300 DP

Channel Sensitivity (host)

Cost: 500 DP

Note: Does not grant affinity. Improves structure detection only.

Kai read the stat block twice.

Four hundred points to nudge Physique half a letter. Nine hundred more to almost touch B-tier body. Five hundred just to make Corves’s brass slightly less spiritually rejecting.

A little. They want a little for a fortune. In the novels you buy "Strength +10" for pocket change and punch a dragon. Here I spend a fifth of my life’s degeneracy savings to go from C to C-plus. C-plus. That is not a flex. That is a participation sticker.

He scrolled.

The costs did not get kinder.

---

ITEMS

Stabilizing Tonic (low)

Cost: 40 DP

Minor fatigue offset. Taste: punitive.

Board-Sight Charm (junk)

Cost: 25 DP

Displays last public board snapshot. Already available on walls.

Iron-Thread Wrap

Cost: 120 DP

Slight grip aid. Breaks under Steel-tier force.

Crisis Vial (single)

Cost: 350 DP

Emergency clot / shock buffer. One use.

Night-Step Soles (worn)

Cost: 280 DP

Soften foot noise. Do not stop blades.

Claim Anchor Talisman (blank)

Cost: 600 DP

Requires active claim partner resonance to bind.

Kai’s mouth twisted.

Forty points for punishment tea. Twenty-five for a charm that does what a landing board does for free. Six hundred for a talisman that still needs my women to function. The useful stuff is priced like a robbery. The junk is priced like a tutorial insult.

He could almost hear Bram’s voice: buy the free wall, you absolute maniac.

He did not buy the free wall.

---

SKILLS

[Form Retention — Linear Bind (Partial)]

Cost: 450 DP

Keep a fraction of analyzed Linear Bind without active threshold.

[Recovery Theft — Basic]

Cost: 550 DP

Improved late-line steal under pressure.

[Desire Channel Bridge (Seed)]

Cost: 800 DP

Stabilizes Desire-to-structure leakage. Unranked channel may tick more reliably.

[Crisis Continuance]

Cost: 700 DP

Once per day: stay conscious through a fatal-grade shock window. Short.

[Name-Cut Sense]

Cost: 300 DP

Sharper read on hostile intent in close range. Not precognition.

[Dual Claim Pulse]

Cost: 650 DP

Brief resonance boost with claimed partners in combat range.

Skills were where the shop stopped pretending to be friendly.

Eight hundred for a seed that might make the brass plate stop being a dead relative. Seven hundred to maybe not black out when someone important tried to erase him. Four hundred fifty just to hold a piece of a form he had already bled to glimpse mid-fight for free when the threshold felt generous.

So the emergency garbage was always the discount aisle. Threshold mid-swing. White-room leftovers. Now that I can choose, choice is expensive. Of course it is. This System was designed by the pale bastard’s accounting department.

He scrolled further and found the joke aisle mixed into the useful one — skills with names that sounded mighty and notes that read like scams. Crowd Ease (Cosmetic) for 150. Steward Notice Dampener (Unreliable) for 200. Affinity Rumor (False) for 50, with a warning that it did nothing except make the host feel special.

Kai snorted under his breath.

I will need to masturbate more. That is the tragic conclusion. Fuck Lira more. Fuck Sera more. Bathroom breaks. Stair incidents. Accidental noble beauty in corridors. The grind path to power is gooning with extra steps. Past-life me would be proud and also dead of dehydration.

He rubbed both hands over his face.

Two thousand looked smaller the longer he stared at the tags.

A serious stat path could eat the bank before he touched a skill. A serious skill path left him poor and still borderline Iron in public. Items were either trash or priced like ransom.

And then, separate from the columns, framed like a door that had been waiting under the whole interface:

---

[SPECIAL ACCESS]

Enter Supreme Realm

Cost: 2000 DP

Requirement: First Marketplace unlock achieved.

Warning: Host body will lose consciousness. Destination not described.

Warning: Balance will reset to 0 upon entry.

---

Kai went still.

Two thousand.

The entire bank.

For a name that meant nothing in any lecture Deneil or Corves had given, nothing on any high-court bracket, nothing Halrik had growled over the Ash Court hearth.

Supreme Realm. Cool. Love undefined portals that cost my life savings. Very trustworthy. Extremely normal System behavior.

His first coherent fear arrived on schedule.

If I spend all of it, do I lock myself out again? Do I grind back to two thousand just to see the shop? Because if this is a one-time window and the shelves go dark—

A second line wrote itself under the warning as if the System had been sitting in his skull taking notes.

[Clarification]

Marketplace visibility remains unlocked after first access.

Skill / item / stat lists persist.

Only purchase balance is consumed.

Re-entry to Supreme Realm requires 2000 DP each attempt.

Kai stared at the clarification until the letters stopped feeling like a trick.

Shop stays.

Lists stay.

Money goes.

Okay. So I am not bricking the menu. I am just going broke on purpose for a mystery door. That is so much better. Thank you. Very comforting.

He flicked back through stats and skills out of stubbornness, doing the math he already hated.

400 for C+.

800 for channel bridge seed.

550 for recovery theft.

Safe. Incremental. The honest long path the academy already demanded in five-year units.

Or everything.

Into a realm with no description.

His mind jumped, uninvited, to the last white room — chains, pale smile, want to change, the yes that had thrown him into this world with a cock-driven System and a mountain that erased people by number.

I still don’t know what you are, he told the special access line. Gold tier? Crown? A pocket dimension? A gacha? If I wake up as a chicken I am finding a way to sue God.

The panel did not joke back.

Cell nine was quiet. Bram’s empty bed. The slit window’s one distant terrace light. Somewhere past the painted post, Lira and Sera slept in the girls’ branch with claim marks he could still feel as residual warmth if he paid attention. Ash Court’s lower band still sat too close to process. Highcourt still owned better air. Aminah Theodore still existed as weather he was not supposed to want.

Kai’s thumb hovered over the only option that felt like a break in the pattern instead of another semester of ladders.

[Enter Supreme Realm — 2000 DP]

This is stupid

This is how protagonists die in the Chapters between arcs.

This is also the first time since the yard that the System offered a door instead of a leash.

He thought of five years per tier. Of Corves’s dead plates. Of Highcourt juniors making brass sing. Of Cassian’s dual affinity and Aminah’s water-weighted blade and his own borderline Iron looking like a joke under festival light.

He thought of 2000 points earned the filthy way and the shop’s honest robbery prices.

"...Fuck it," he whispered.

He selected it.

[Confirm: Enter Supreme Realm]

[Cost: 2000 DP]

[Y / N]

Y.

The bank dropped to zero in a clean, brutal subtraction.

[Desire Points: 0]

[Supreme Realm access: Granted]

[Host consciousness: Severing]

There was no rising power fantasy glow.

No choir.

Just a hard tilt, as if the bed had been pulled out from under the world.

Kai’s vision whitened at the edges. His fingers went numb. Cell nine’s stone ceiling stretched away like someone was dragging him backward through milk.

He tried to say Lira’s name.

Or Sera’s.

Or a curse.

Nothing useful came out.

He fainted into the mattress with the Marketplace still burned across the inside of his eyes and zero Desire Points where a full bank had been.

---

His eyes fluttered open.

Light.

Not terrace lamp light. Not Ash Court oil-smoke light. Flat, endless, wrong light with no source and no shadow.

His fingers clutched wood. A chair. The same plain chair. No chains this time — wrists free, ankles free — which somehow made the panic worse, not better.

He looked down.

Soft stomach. Heavy limbs. The old earth body, pale and shut-in thick, the fatass NEET shell he had died out of and sworn he had left behind in another life’s apartment dust.

His breath hitched.

The white room.

Again.

Kai’s eyes widened in raw, rising panic as the recognition landed all at once — the chair, the void, the body, the price he had just paid — and the understanding that the Supreme Realm had not been a skill tree at all.