Chapter 89

Finishing my second read of this particular economic newspaper, my [Focus] momentarily shifted to yet another of the many stray thoughts that resulted from the reason I was here, reading this economic newspaper in the first place.

The Creed Of Nonexistence had found three individuals willing to consider my custom request.

The Fate Conclave had found two.

All five possessed either the [Worthy] or [Fate] Aspects, supposedly possessed enough [Mastery] over them to meaningfully narrow down my search for prospective Chosen, and, according to the short descriptions accompanying their offers, had experience doing something at least vaguely similar before.

Their prices, however, were as absurd as their ability to help me locate potential [Worthy] Chosen.

The cheapest requested just over twenty thousand credits for one week of assistance, excluding travel and whatever expenses their search incurred.

The most expensive wanted more than thrice that.

For a week.

Not even for results.

For trying.

I had enough credits to accept one of those offers if I truly wanted to.

Nonetheless, that wasn't the problem.

The problem was that doing so once would only begin solving what could become a permanent requirement of my future [Faith].

If my finding of my first few Chosen worked as I intended, I would need more.

Then those Chosen might eventually seek others.

My future [Faith] might spread.

Its [Foundation] would expand.

And while I still had no intention of designing institutions for a religion that barely existed conceptually, I possessed enough [Comprehension] to recognize that repeatedly spending a substantial fraction of everything I owned merely to identify people worth investigating was a terrible long-term solution.

Which brought me back to the newspaper.

Economics.

Money.

I had encountered both of these concepts long ago, and my practical relationship with them had remained relatively unchanged ever since.

Money existed.

People wanted it.

I occasionally needed it.

Generally didn't.

Therefore, I acquired enough to avoid being inconvenienced by its absence.

That had sufficed.

Until it didn't.

I leaned back against the edge of the oversized archive table I had appropriated and reconsidered the matter from the beginning.

Money was, in the simplest useful abstraction I had encountered, purchasing [Power].

Not universal [Power].

Not literal ability to buy anything from anyone regardless of circumstances.

But close enough for the abstraction to remain useful.

Credits could purchase food.

Housing.

Equipment.

Transportation.

[Knowledge].

Labor.

Expertise.

Access.

Someone's time.

Someone else's risk.

The right to use property.

The right to profit from property.

The right to demand repayment.

In some circumstances, even influence over decisions that had ostensibly nothing to do with money.

That made economic might an extremely versatile tool.

And tools acquired value according to what they enabled.

I still couldn't imagine ever becoming obsessed with credits for their own sake, nor did I see any reason why acquiring millions of credits would become intrinsically spiritually satisfying merely because the number representing my holdings grew larger.

If all my credits were converted into paper and placed before me, I could set them on fire myself without feeling anything beyond irritation if I subsequently discovered that I needed them.

They were external.

Just like my needle swords.

My combat weave.

My notebooks.

The Pulse.

My relationships.

All tremendously useful under the right circumstances, and all fundamentally distinct from my Path itself.

One day, if my Path developed far enough, I wanted none of them to be necessary for me to continue fulfilling it.

Until then...

Refusing useful tools because I ultimately intended to transcend the need for them was idiotic.

And money had just proven useful enough that continuing to treat it as something I merely accumulated incidentally no longer appeared optimal.

Especially when the alternative could eventually become forming something like the [Worthy] Aspect solely because it made furthering the [Foundation] of my [Faith]—itself a tool to further my Path—easier.

I still hadn't dismissed forming that Aspect.

Its possible applications, after yet further research, extended well beyond finding [Worthy] Chosen.

Yet those applications had so far failed to make it worth permanently adding it to my Path.

Credits, meanwhile, could purchase access to people who already possessed it.

Or the [Fate] Aspect.

Or possibly something better I had yet to learn existed.

That alone justified investigating how to acquire significantly more of them.

So...

For the first time in my life, I deliberately added economic might to the list of things I intended to pursue.

Not as a Path direction.

As leverage.

And the obvious route for me to take to grow it easily required almost no investigation on my part.

The Pulse paid me a weekly salary.

Assignments paid more.

Certain difficult or undesirable assignments paid significantly more.

Additional duties, participation in research, specialized procedures, contributions to internal projects, and dozens of other opportunities could all increase my income.

If all I wanted was enough money to hire one [Worthy] Aspect practitioner for a week, I could probably just continue accumulating credits through the Pulse until the expense stopped looking significant.

That solution, however, failed the moment I looked beyond the first expenditure.

My time didn't scale.

One assignment required hours of my life regardless of whether I had ten thousand credits or ten million.

The same applied to nearly every other direct way I knew to earn money.

Healing.

Research assistance.

Administrative work.

Teaching.

Writing.

Investigation.

All were trades between something I did and something someone paid me for doing.

Useful.

Potentially lucrative.

Still finite.

What I wanted was for my credits to grow without requiring an equivalent increase in my involvement.

Unfortunately, arriving at that deceptively simple objective first required me to eliminate several things I was actually good at.

Logistics came first.

I had spent enough time around the Faith, the Order, the Fairy House, the Pulse, expeditions, assignments, procurement systems, patient distributions, travel planning, and administrative networks to possess an appreciable [Comprehension] of how resources could be moved from where they existed to where someone needed them.

Establishing a logistical system?

I could probably help.

Auditing one?

Even better.

[Guided] could make relevant irregularities stand out.

My memory allowed me to retain absurd quantities of details.

And my [Comprehension] Aspect was exceptionally useful whenever thousands of superficially unrelated processes needed to be understood as one functioning structure.

For a short while, that appeared promising.

Then I started learning what people were actually paid for doing it.

And promptly collided with the harshness of reality.

Auditing the ordinary operations of a large organization could be valuable, certainly, but the "value" of finding that one warehouse ordered slightly too much of one material or that one transportation route wasted seven percent more expenditure than another didn't magically become mine because I found it.

I would be paid for the service.

Maybe rewarded for exceptional savings.

Potentially offered more work.

All prospective rewards that required further active involvement on my part.

The truly ridiculous profits appeared only when someone uncovered something equally ridiculous.

Systematic theft.

Procurement fraud.

Falsified shipments.

Entire chains of intermediaries extracting credits for services they never provided.

An organization like the Pulse losing enough money that returning a fraction of it could justify paying the investigator a fortune.

I had the confidence to pull off something like that given enough time.

Except... entities already specialized in finding exactly those sorts of things already existed.

Some possessed Aspects dedicated to [Accounting], [Trade], [Contract], [Truth], [Investigation], [Fraud], or concepts whose economic applications I barely understood.

Others belonged to organizations with access to information I couldn't remotely hope to obtain.

Even with [Guided], entering that field and expecting to outperform specialists whose Paths had been built around it would have required a disproportionate amount of effort for an uncertain and inherently occasional reward.

Possible.

Not optimal.

Contracts followed.

That possibility lasted somewhat longer.

My participation in the Order and Fairy House negotiations had taught me enough to know I could contribute to writing and reviewing complex agreements, particularly where the actual challenge involved through [Comprehension] of how interests might diverge in the future rather than memorizing ornate legal language.

My [Clarity] Aspect would help me distinguish what a clause actually said from what someone wanted it to say.

My [Comprehension] Aspect would help me follow the relationships between obligations.

My newly advanced [Mastery] Aspect would undoubtedly prove useful after enough practice.

And [Guided] could compensate for a considerable amount of missing procedural [Knowledge].

Apparently, people valued all of that.

Quite highly, in some fields.

But once again...

I would be selling my time.

The same problem appeared if I considered specialized healing, consulting, administrative optimization, translating complex [Knowledge] into practical procedures, or nearly every other field where someone looking at my capabilities might conclude I possessed unusual earning potential.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting NovelPhoenix for this novel and more.

Those could all produce money.

But they didn't produce what I wanted.

I wanted money to come to me while I was doing something else.

Preferably while sleeping.

Or studying the academics of [Flow].

Or refining my [Foundation].

Or spending two months somewhere asking people questions unrelated to economics.

That narrowed the possibilities drastically.

Businesses could produce income without their owners personally carrying out every task, but starting and operating one looked like exactly the sort of enormous involvement I wanted to avoid.

Employees.

Suppliers.

Customers.

Regulations.

Competition.

Contracts.

Facilities.

Mistakes.

Fraud.

Strategy.

Management.

Even merely reading about everything involved in establishing a moderately sized Everwell business convinced me I had no desire to spend years becoming competent enough at doing so.

Perhaps one day.

Not now.

If I wasn't going to become an internal participant in the machinery generating money, though...

Then I could only remain outside it.

An external actor.

Investor.

Creditor.

Speculator.

Owner of some claim upon whatever someone else built.

Different terminology.

Different risk.

Different methods.

But stripped to the conceptual core, all of them relied upon the same thing to acquire an advantage over another external actor looking at the exact same opportunities.

[Knowledge].

That...

I had.

And whatever I lacked...

I could acquire.

Which was why I now sat inside a public archive whose economic records alone occupied more space than the entirety of the Prime Temple's Seeker sanctuary.

Newspapers represented only one category.

Millions had been preserved.

District newspapers.

Sector-wide publications.

Industrial reports.

Trade journals.

Price circulars.

Investment reviews.

Institutional disclosures.

Records of bankruptcies.

Acquisitions.

Expansions.

Shortages.

Transportation interruptions.

Construction.

Employment.

Major [Contract]s.

New technologies.

Failed technologies.

Companies whose names disappeared after three weeks.

Others whose names had appeared in newspapers for centuries.

Most of it was irrelevant.

Which was precisely why I was interested.

Finding relevance within overwhelming quantities of [Knowledge] was something I and [Guided] had spent my entire existence doing.

I set aside the newspaper.

Then pulled another from my latest to-read pile taller than I was.

A publication from six years ago.

Then one from twelve years ago.

Then another from the same district three months after the first.

No objective yet.

Not really.

I needed enough raw [Knowledge] before objectives more sophisticated than "make money" could become meaningful.

So I read.

◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇

Between pursuing my [Cultivation] routine and filling my idle time in the wake of particularly intense and exuberant [Cultivation] sessions where I pushed my [Ambition] a little too far, it took surprisingly little time for the first patterns to emerge on the side of my economical [Knowledge] [Comprehension] pursuit.

A transportation disruption increased the price of imported medical compounds in three peripheral districts.

Straightforward.

The route reopened.

Prices fell.

Also straightforward.

Except one supplier's valuation had started rising before the reopening became public.

Someone knew.

Or had expected it.

Or had enough [Comprehension] of the repair work, local politics, transportation network, and organizations involved to predict it before everyone else.

Maybe all three.

I stored the example, then left my mind to wander to another.

A residential district announced a large infrastructure renovation.

Nearby property values increased.

Predictable.

Except the largest rise didn't occur around the infrastructure itself.

It occurred around two transportation stations expected to receive substantially increased traffic once the renovation displaced local residents and businesses.

A secondary consequence.

Then tertiary ones.

Food establishments expanded around those stations.

Storage companies acquired nearby space.

One medical facility relocated.

A previously insignificant transport provider grew large enough to appear in Sector-wide economic reporting within four years.

None of those developments existed independently.

Money [Flow]ed toward anticipated utility.

Then anticipated utility altered other interests.

Those interests redirected more money.

A feedback cycle.

I searched backward.

What information had been available before the first price increase?

Population data.

Construction tenders.

Transportation capacity.

Rental prices.

Employment density.

Local complaints.

Maintenance reports.

All public.

Some more than others.

Individually uninteresting.

Together...

Something.

My [Comprehension] deepened by a minute amount.

I kept reading.

An industrial organization secured a gigantic Pulse supply [Contract].

Its valuation rose.

No mystery.

But several organizations supplying its raw materials had risen beforehand.

That was significantly more interesting.

One of those suppliers had also purchased additional storage capacity months before the [Contract] announcement.

More interesting still.

Could the purchase have been ordinary expansion?

Yes.

Could someone have inferred that it was preparing for a major increase in demand without knowing why?

Also yes.

Would that have been enough [Knowledge] to make money?

Potentially.

The hazy picture I had sought began acquiring edges.

I didn't need to know secrets.

Not necessarily.

Sometimes I only needed to comprehend public [Knowledge] better than whoever had assigned the current price to something.

That was a substantially more attractive contest.

I could map the [Flow] of credits through one peripheral district.

Not every individual transaction.

That would be absurd.

But the large currents?

Rent.

Salaries.

Institutional procurement.

Transportation.

Food.

Medical services.

Construction.

Loans.

Insurance.

Trade.

Where did credits enter?

Where did they accumulate?

Where did they leave?

Which organizations acted as junctions between multiple [Flow]s?

Which depended upon one customer no newspaper bothered identifying because the relationship was supposedly private?

Which supplier's sudden expansion revealed that someone downstream expected demand to rise?

Which apparently independent organizations repeatedly changed behavior together?

If five companies always acquired property shortly before one obscure investment organization publicly entered a district...

Perhaps that investment organization wasn't the actor pulling the thread.

Perhaps someone else was.

And if I mapped enough of those relationships...

I could learn about economic entities no one intended someone from my station to notice at all.

That sounded considerably more interesting than memorizing prices.

Another possibility emerged from the same [Comprehension].

I didn't even need to invest directly into whatever I discovered.

Suppose I identified a district where medical demand would rise because an industrial expansion was attracting species poorly adapted to local atmospheric conditions...

I could acquire a passive stake in an existing treatment provider.

Or in the supplier providing whatever those species predictably required.

Or in the property beside where another treatment facility would eventually become profitable.

Same underlying [Knowledge].

Different exposure.

Different risk.

Then another possibility naturally came to my mind

Long-duration supply [Contract]s.

If one resource presently appeared abundant but transportation, construction, population growth, and institutional procurement indicated future scarcity, an external actor could acquire rights to future supply before the price shifted.

No warehouse.

No employees.

No need to personally transport anything.

Merely a [Contract] whose value changed because reality changed.

That was almost offensively simple once understood.

Risky.

But simple.

Then came the concept of lending.

I had assumed lending money primarily rewarded whoever already possessed a lot of it.

Mostly true.

But lenders still needed to judge who would repay.

If I could parse the [Foundation] of an organization better than whatever standardized assessment ordinary lenders relied upon, I could potentially identify people and organizations whose actual risk was lower than the market treated it as being.

Provide capital.

Receive more later.

Do almost nothing in between.

That sounded suspiciously close to what I wanted.

Except my present capital was laughable relative to the scales involved.

Still, I noted the possibility down for later mulling.

Another avenue depended much less upon capital.

Information itself possessed value.

Not selling reports one by one.

That returned to active work.

But if I developed a sufficiently accurate model of some recurring economic [Flow]—medical procurement, inter-district transportation demand, property movement around Pulse facilities, whatever field my existing [Knowledge] gave me an abnormal advantage in—I could potentially license the model, trade access to its outputs, or entrust its execution to an intermediary who received part of the returns.

I provided the [Comprehension].

Someone else operated the time-consuming machinery.

Whether such arrangements actually existed in the forms I imagined remained to be investigated.

But if it didn't, then something was probably going on that I wasn't aware of.

Civilization had already invented far stranger ways of separating work from profit.

I noted that too.

Then another.

Price discrepancies between districts.

The same material occasionally appeared at substantially different prices despite transportation between the locations being cheap enough that the difference should have collapsed.

Why?

Delay.

Information.

Local restrictions.

Temporary shortages.

Established [Contract]s.

Or an opportunity being exploited so rapidly that the newspapers only recorded what remained after specialists had already harvested most of it.

Could I compete there?

Possibly.

Did I want to spend every day buying one thing in one district and selling it in another?

No.

Could standing instructions, hired intermediaries, or existing financial institutions execute predetermined decisions once my [Comprehension] identified the relevant conditions?

That was a much more interesting line of thought.

Another page.

Another year.

Another district.

My workspace gradually became surrounded by economic publications I had no intention of physically reading again, but whose relationships [Guided] kept drawing my attention back toward whenever some later piece of [Knowledge] transformed an old article into something new.

A failed manufacturer.

Why had it failed?

The contemporary newspapers blamed competition.

Its suppliers told another story.

One had begun demanding shorter payment terms.

Another reduced its exposure.

A local lender stopped extending additional credit.

Three separate actors had apparently recognized deterioration before the manufacturer itself publicly admitted any problem.

Could I have?

I reconstructed everything available at the time.

Revenue.

Expansion plans.

Input prices.

Debt.

A delayed facility.

Management changes.

Customer concentration.

Not enough.

Then [Guided] drew my attention toward a small article concerning the construction delay.

The delay itself wasn't unusual.

The contractor responsible for it was.

That same contractor appeared in two other failed expansions.

Interesting.

I searched.

Four more.

A pattern.

Not necessarily fraud.

Perhaps incompetence.

Perhaps the contractor specialized in projects already likely to encounter problems.

Perhaps both.

But if I had noticed that relationship at the time, I would have known something economically relevant that the broader market appeared slow to incorporate.

Mass data.

[Comprehension].

Relationships.

That could work.

Not every time.

Probably not even often.

But I didn't need to be right about everything.

I merely needed to become sufficiently right, at sufficient scale, that money stopped being something I had to consider whenever I wanted another Entity's expertise.

And for once...

My circumstances were unusually well suited to learning how.

I possessed almost two years of practical exposure to the Pulse Of Eternity.

Medical supply chains.

Assignments.

Research.

Staffing.

Patients.

District-level institutions.

Relationships with suppliers.

The indirect effects of large treatment centers upon everything surrounding them.

I understood portions of that world well enough to know what information actually mattered.

That gave me somewhere to begin.

Not economics as a whole.

That would have been the same mistake as attempting to understand Civilization as one indivisible concept.

I needed to start narrow yet general.

Medical economics.

Pulse-adjacent districts.

Organizations and services I already possessed enough [Knowledge] to contextualize.

Map the credits.

Map the interests.

Then expand wherever [Guided] indicated that the [Knowledge] I accumulated could support another step.

After finishing my latest pile of documents and books, I took off towards the dry and silent depths of the archive building.

This time, instead of searching for another year of general newspapers, I narrowed the search.

Peripheral district medical procurement.

Ten years.

Then transportation.

Property.

Employment.

Institutional expansion.

Commercial failures.

Lending.

Categories that covered thousands of gigantic shelves and an even more absurd quantity of material.

Good.

For the first time since I had begun this economic diversion, I stopped seeing it merely as a way to acquire credits.

It fit too neatly into everything else.

Every article added economic [Knowledge].

Every relationship I extracted from that [Knowledge] deepened my [Comprehension] of Civilization.

Every time I learned to distinguish a useful signal from meaningless correlation, I pursued [Mastery] over how that [Comprehension] could actually be applied.

And altogether...

It all became part of my ever-deepening and broadening [Foundation].

Why did one organization survive?

What structural relationships allowed another to fail?

What interests remained stable when individuals changed?

What did every functioning economic system ultimately need to continue functioning?

The concept appeared everywhere once I [Focus]ed on it.

So did [Flow].

Credits [Flow]ed.

Resources [Flow]ed.

Labor [Flow]ed.

Information [Flow]ed.

Demand shifted them.

Scarcity redirected them.

Authority obstructed them.

Opportunity accelerated them.

And every one of those [Flow]s intertwined with the vast web of interests I had been slowly learning to perceive since the Red Sand Sector first taught me that Civilization couldn't be separated from the interests composing it.

Now I was simply looking at that same web through another medium.

Money.

A medium so universally useful that countless interests expressed themselves through its movement, whether the entities involved cared about money itself or merely what it could acquire for them.

Which meant that if I learned to follow credits deeply enough...

I wouldn't only learn how to make more of them.

I would learn where interests were moving before their consequences became obvious.

That was worth considerably more than twenty thousand credits.

So I continued to read, fitting yet another fragment of reality into my Path.